How IPCC scientists interfere with publication of inconvenient scientific results
By David H. Douglass, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, New York, and John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor, Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama at Huntsville
- In this article, reprinted from The American Thinker, two eminent Professors reveal just one of the many seamy stories that emerge from the Climategate emails. A prejudiced journal editor conspires with senior IPCC scientists to delay and discredit a paper by four distinguished scientists demonstrating that a central part of the IPCC’s scientific argument is erroneous.
The Climategate emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer-review process appear to have been compromised by a Team of “global warming” scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor.
The Team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in that journal by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer. Our paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant “global warming” in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.
We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by us in our paper, (g) withholding data, and more.
The team is a group of a number of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often supports the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For present purposes, leading members of the Team include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others.
Introduction
We submitted our paper to the International Journal of Climate on 31 May 2007. The paper was accepted four and a half months later, on 11 October. The page-proofs were accepted on 1 November. The paper was published online on 5 December. However, we had to wait very nearly a year after online publication, until 15 November 2008, for publication of the print version of the paper.
Ben Santer and 17 members of the Team subsequently published a paper intended to refute ours. It was submitted to the International Journal of Climate on 25 March 2008. It was revised on 18 July, accepted two days later, published online on 10 October, and published in print on 15 November, little more than a month after online publication.
This story uses various of the Climategate emails and our own personal knowledge of events and issues. References will be made to items in an appendix that are arranged chronologically. Each of the emails has an index number which comes from a compilation at http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php
2. The story
Our record of this story begins when Andrew Revkin, a reporter for the New York Times, sent three Team members an email dated 30 Nov 2007, to which he attached the page-proofs of our paper, which we had not sent to him. His email to the Team is dated just one week before the online publication of our paper. The subject of Revkin’s email,
“Sorry to take your time up, but really do need a scrub of Singer/Christy/etc effort”, implies that there had been prior correspondence between Revkin and the Team.
Carl Mears, a Team member, quickly responded with an email dated 4 December 2007 to fellow Team members Jones, Santer, Thorne, Sherwood, Lanzante, Taylor, Seidel, Free and Wentz Santer replies to all of these:
“I’m forwarding this to you in confidence. We all knew that some journal, somewhere, would eventually publish this stuff. Turns out that it was the International Journal of Climatology.”
Santer knew this because he had reviewed and rejected our paper when it had been previously submitted to another journal. Phil Jones, then director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, and now stood down pending an investigation of the Climategate affair, responded to Santer:
“It sure does! Have read briefly – the surface arguments are wrong. I know editors have difficulty finding reviewers, but letting this one pass is awful – and the International Journal of Climatology was improving.”
This exchange provides the first reference to the International Journal of Climatology.
The next day, 5 December 2007, the day on which our paper appeared on-line, Santer sent a email to Peter Thorne with copies to Carl Mears, Leopold Haimberger, Karl Taylor, Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Steve Sherwood, John Lanzante, Dian Seidel, Melissa Free, Frank Wentz, and Steve Klein. Santer says:
“Peter, I think you’ve done a nice job in capturing some of my concerns about the Douglass et al. paper… I don’t think it’s a good strategy to submit a response to the Douglass et al. paper to the International Journal of Climatology. As Phil [Jones] pointed out, the Journal has a large backlog, so it might take some time to get a response published. Furthermore, Douglass et al. probably would be given the final word.”
The most critical point throughout these emails is the goal of preventing us from providing what is considered normal in the peer-reviewed literature: an opportunity to respond to their critique, or as they put it, “be given the final word.” One wonders if there is ever a “final word” in science, as the authors here seem to imply.
The next day, 6 December 2007, Melissa Free responded with a cautious note, evidently because she had presented a paper with Lanzante and Seidel at the American Meteorological Society’s 18th conference on Climate Variability and Change, acknowledging the existence of the discrepancy between observations and models – the basic conclusion of our paper:
“What about the implications of a real model-observation difference for upper-air trends? Is this really so dire?”
Santer responded on 6 December 2007 with his key reason for attacking our paper:
“What is dire is Douglass et al.’s wilful neglect of any observational datasets that do not support their arguments.”
This “wilful neglect” of “observational datasets” refers to the absence of two balloon datasets RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4. We had explained in addendum to our paper that these datasets were faulty.
A further email from Jones, dated 6 Dec 2007, discusses options for beating us into print. Wigley, a former head of the Climatic Research Unit, enters the story on 10 Dec 2007 to accuse us of “fraud”, adding that under “normal circumstances” this would “cause him [Professor David Douglass] to lose his job”.
We remind the reader that our paper went through traditional, anonymous peer-review with several revisions to satisfy the reviewers and without communicating outside proper channels with the editor and reviewers.
Tim Osborn, a colleague of Jones at the Climatic Research Unit and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Climate, then inserted himself into the process, declaring a bias on the issue. He said that Professor Douglass’ previous papers “appear to have serious problems”.
Santer responded on 12 December 2007 with gratitude for the “heads-up”, again making the claim that our paper had ignored certain balloon datasets, when in fact our paper had not used these datasets because they were known to be faulty.
The same day, an unsigned report appeared on the Team’s propaganda website, RealClimate.org, attacking us especially about not using the RAOBCORE 1.4 balloon dataset.
This prompted us to submit a one-page Addendum to the International Journal of Climatology on 3 January 2008 to explain two issues: first, the reason for not using RAOBCORE 1.4 and secondly, the experimental design to show why using the full spread of model results to compare with observations (as Santer i. would do) would lead to wrong conclusions about the relationship between trends in the upper air temperature vs. the surface. A copy of the addendum may be found at http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/.)
Osborn wrote to Santer and Jones on 10 January 2008 to discuss the “downside” of the normal comment-reply process in which we should be given an “opportunity to have a response.” He explained that he has contacted the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor, to “see what he can do”. According to Osborn, McGregor “promises to do everything he can to achieve a quick turn-around.” He also wrote:
“… (and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed to you and Phil only) that he [McGregor] may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e. the print/paper version) appearance of Douglass et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al. comment could appear alongside it. He [McGregor] also intends to “correct the scientific record” and to identify “in advance reviewers who are both suitable and available”, perhaps including “someone on the email list you’ve been using”. Given the bias of Osborn and McGregor as expressed in the emails, one could wonder what it means to be a “suitable” reviewer of the Santer paper.
Santer responded with his conditions, highlighting his intent to have the “last word”:
“1. Our paper should be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al. … 2. If the International Journal of Climatology agrees to 1, then Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side, in the same issue of the Journal. I’d be grateful if you and Phil could provide me with some guidance on 1 and 2, and on whether you think we should submit to the Journal. Feel free to forward my email to Glenn McGregor.”
This Osborn email and the response by Santer essentially lay out the publication strategy apparently agreed to by Santer, Jones, Osborn and editor McGregor. Santer accepts Osborn as a conduit and defines the conditions (having the “last word”). This is exactly what he seeks to deny to us, even though it was we who had published the original paper in this sequence in the Journal, and should, under customary academic procedures, have been entitled to have the last word alongside any rebuttal of our paper that the Journal published.
We were never informed of this process, even though it specifically addressed our paper, nor were we contacted for an explanation on any point raised in these negotiations. Santer’s allegations regarding our paper and his conditions for publication of his response to it were simply accepted by the Journal’s editor. If our results had indeed been so obviously and demonstrably in error, why would anyone have feared a response by us?
The same day, 10 January 2008, Jones told the Team (Wigley, K. Taylor, Lanzante, Mears, Bader, Zwiers, Wentz, Haimberger, Free, MacCracken, Jones, Sherwood, Klein, Solomon, Thorne, Osborn, Schmidt, and Hack) a “secret” he had learned from Osborn: that one of the recipients on the Santer email list was one of the original reviewers of our paper – a reviewer who had not rejected it:
“The problem! The person who said they would leave it to the editor’s discretion is on your email list! I don’t know who it is – Tim does – maybe they have told you? I don’t want to put pressure on Tim. He doesn’t know I’m sending this. It isn’t me by the way – nor Tim! Tim said it was someone who hasn’t contributed to the discussion – which does narrow the possibilities down!”
Does Santer start wondering who the original reviewer is? Does Osborn reveal this part of McGregor’s secret?
Then, on the matter of paying for expensive color plots, Jones adds, “I’m sure I can lean on Glenn [McGregor] to evidently deal with the costs.” Obviously, no such assistance had been offered to us when we had published our original paper.
The final approval of the strategy (Santer’s conditions) to deny us an opportunity to respond in the normal way is acknowledged by Osborn to Santer and Jones on 11 January 2008. Osborn writes that McGregor, as editor is “prepared to treat it as a new submission rather than a comment on Douglass et al.” and “my [McGregor’s] offer of a quick turnaround time etc. still stands.” Osborn also reminds Santer and Jones of the potential impropriety of this situation:
“… the only thing I didn’t want to make more generally known was the suggestion that print publication of Douglass et al. might be delayed… all other aspects of this discussion are unrestricted.”
Santer now informed the Team that the strategy had been agreed to. We were never notified of these machinations, and it is clear that Santer’s story of the situation was never investigated independently. In this long email, the issue of radiosonde errors is discussed, together with the fact that one dataset, RAOBCORE v1.4, is missing from our paper.
To explain briefly, Sakamoto and Christy (accepted in 2008 and published in 2009) looked closely at the ERA-40 Reanlayses on which RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4 were based, and demonstrated that a spurious warming shift occurred in 1991 (a problem with a satellite channel: HIRS 11) which was then assimilated into RAOBCORE, producing spurious positive trends in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
Sakamoto and Christy had been working on this since 2006 when they had first met, and so were aware of the problems at that time. Later, on 27 May 2008, Sherwood – a member of the Team – comments on this evidence during the deliberations on Santer’s publication, so the Team was aware of the problem too. Even though McGregor had sent Santer our Addendum explaining the RAOBCORE problems as early as 10 April 2008, their published paper contains the statement:
“Although DCPS07 had access to all three RAOBCORE versions, they presented results from v1.2 only.”
Another interesting comment here is that Santer does “not” want to “show the most recent radiosonde [balloon] results” from the Hadley Center and Sherwood’s IUK. In short, he was withholding data that did not support his view, probably because these two datasets, extended out in time, provide even stronger evidence in favor of our conclusion. The final version of Santer’s paper cuts off these datasets in 1999.
Professor Douglass became concerned that McGregor had not responded after receiving the Addendum sent on 3 January 2008. The Professor wrote on 1 April 2008 to ask about the status of the Addendum. On 10 April 2008 McGregor responded that he had had “great difficulty locating your Addendum”, and Douglass responded with the International Journal of Climatology’s file number acknowledging receipt of the Addendum on 3 January, and attached the Addendum again. That very day, McGregor sent the Addendum to Santer to “learn your views.” Santer was afforded the opportunity to comment on our Addendum, but we never heard about it from McGregor again.
On 24 April 2008 McGregor informed Santer that he had received one set of comments and, though he “… would normally wait for all comments to come in before providing them to you, I thought in this case I would give you a head start in your preparation of revisions”.
That day, Santer informed the Team of the situation. Ws there ever any possibility that Santer’s paper could have been rejected, given the many favors already extended to this submission? McGregor now knew, because he had the Addendum, what the main point of our response to Santer et al. might be, yet evidently dropped the Addendum from consideration. At this point, we were unaware of any response by Santer to our Addendum, as we were dealing with the RealClimate.org blog on this matter.
Santer was worried about the lack of “urgency” in receiving the remaining reviews and, on 5 May 2008, complained to McGregor. He reminded McGregor that Osborn had agreed to the strategy that the “process would be handled as expeditiously as possible”. McGregor replied that he hoped that the further comments would come within “2 weeks”. The following day, Osborn wrote to McGregor that Santer’s 90-page article was much more than anticipated, implying that Santer was being rather demanding considering how much had been done to aid him. One wonders why it should take 10 months and 90 pages to show that any paper contained a “serious flaw”, and why Santer et al. needed to be protected from a response by us.
A paper by Thorne now appeared in Nature Geosciences which referenced the as-yet-unpublished paper by Santer et al. (including Thorne). On 26 May 2008, Professor Douglass wrote to Thorne asking for a copy and was told the following day that Thorne could not supply the paper because Santer was the lead author author.
Professor Douglass replied that day, repeating his request for a copy of the paper and reminding Thorne of Nature’s publication-ethics policy on the availability of data and materials:
“An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available …”
At the same time Professor Douglass asked Santer for a copy of the paper. Santer responded by saying, “I see no conceivable reason why I should now send you an advance copy of my International Journal of Climatology paper.” From the emails, we now know that the Santer et al. manucsript had not been accepted at this point, even though it had been cited in a Nature Geosciences article. What is very curious is that in the email Santer claims Professor Douglass “… did not have the professional courtesy to provide me with any advance information about your 2007 International Journal of Climate paper …”.
In fact, Santer had been a reviewer of this paper when it had been submitted earlier, so he had in possession of the material (only slightly changed) for at least a year. Additionally, Santer received a copy of the page-proofs of our paper about a week before it even appeared online.
In further email exchanges the following day, 28 May 2008, Santer and his co-authors discussed the uncomfortable situation of having a citation in Nature Geosciences and being unable to provide the paper to the public before “a final decision on the paper has been reached”. Santer stated they should “resubmit our revised manuscript to the Journal as soon as possible”, implying that Professor Douglass’ point about the ethics policies of Nature, which required cited literature to be made available, might put Santer et al. in jeopardy.
On 10 July 2008, Santer wrote to Jones that the two subsequent reviews were in but reviewer 2 was “somewhat crankier”. Santer indicated that McGregor has told him that he will not resend the coming revised manuscript to the “crankier” reviewer. This was another apparent effort by McGregor to accommodate Santer.
Conclusion
On 21 July 2008, Santer heard that his paper had been formally accepted and expressed his sincere gratitude to Osborn for “all your help with the tricky job of brokering the submission of the paper to the International Journal of Climatology”. Osborn responds, “I’m not sure that I did all that much.”
On 10 October 2008, Santer et al’s paper was published on-line. Thirty-six days later Santer et al. appeared in print immediately following our own paper, even though we had waited more than 11 months for our paper to appear in print. The strategy of delaying our paper and not allowing us to have a simultaneous response to Santer et al. published had been achieved.
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Deleting posts that hint at disagreement is standard procedure for Realclimate. They are biased.
Peer review for the AGW group is forever tarnished.
I am just stunned. I should not be, based on all of the material already out in the “climategate” emails. However, this re-construction of events is an amazing show of theunprofessional depths that scientists, on whose “work” trillions of dollars of policy funding is riding, would plunge to make sure their view is the only dominant one.
My hat is off to Dr. Douglass and Dr. Christy for their forthrightness, and carrying the true scientific torch in the abysmal absence of their supposed colleagues.
This whole thing is making me sick. How do these people get away with such blatant criminal activities? Is there a grand conspiracy behind it all or is it just a case of dishonest human beings taking advantage of a corrupt system that lacks proper checks and balances? Mankind is screwed if our most trusted institutions can no longer be trusted. God, I wish there were a vaccine against dishonesty.
One can only hope that, at the end of the day, each member of “The Team” receive their just deserts.
These sorts of detailed, exhaustively referenced descriptions of how the peer review and publishing system has been gamed are fascinating to me.
(also see http://www.scribd.com/doc/18773744/How-to-Publish-a-Scientific-Comment-in-1-2-3-Easy-Steps )
Eventually, I hope they will be used during legal proceedings.
This kind of stonewalling and manipulation tells me either:
a) the noble, idealistic scientist is convinced beyond doubt that their position is correct, and they are trying to keep the record clean and pristine, or
b) they’re completely full of crap, and gaming the system for their personal or ideological gain.
There’s not much middle ground, and I highly doubt (a) is even remotely possible.
Sad, pathetic little people playing sad, pathetic little games.
This behaviour is pretty disgraceful. These kinds of matters should be referred to government committee’s that oversee the funding of these people.
“We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by us in our paper, (g) withholding data, and more.”
Gosh, hard to pick at this point. It would have been a lot easier if they had included: (h) all of the above.
The e-mails on http://www.eastangliaemails.com are not reliable, some txt in e-mails are missing.
We must take it on faith something is going on in the atmosphere! We must take it on faith that peer review will silence infidels who dare challenge our worldview!
“My hat is off to Dr. Douglass and Dr. Christy for their forthrightness”
Professor Douglass and Professor Christy.
Yes, “disgraceful” is the word.
Fire. Them. All.
Isn’t it possible to use some sort of “trick” or “fudge factor” to plug the holes and adjust the data to make them appear reliable??
In ANY other industry, this kind of behavior would force the Fed to invoke RICO and sundry other anti-racketeering statutes and laws.
Imagine if this was how “peer review” worked in the pharmaceutical industry?
Or the Auto Industry? Or Avionics?
The truth of the matter is that these “high priests of DOOM” cannt afford to let the sheeple look at real facts. In the words of a favorite actor:
“The TRUTH? Yu can’t handle the TRUTH!”,(that we are lying though our teeth and cannot really support what we say, but we want yu all to spend a ka-jillion dollars n our say so anyway!)
In Ben Stein’s movie Expelled they were talking about this very same thing, it would seem like this is prevalent in the scientific community.
Of course, missing from this whole discussion is any objective assessment of whether the Douglass et al. paper suffered from such a blatant error that it should have never made it through the peer-review process in the first place. Who is to blame the editors for trying to redeem their journal from the embarrassment of publishing such an erroneous piece of work?
The fact is that the paper’s use of the standard error rather than the standard deviation to characterize the model results is doubly wrong. It is wrong first (as Gavin Schmidt has pointed out) for the simple reason that the climate system corresponds to one realization of running a climate model, not an average over many realizations, which would average out the internal variability in the system. It is exactly as if I ran a model on the computer where I simulated flipping a die 1,000,000 times and arrived at the result that the expected value on the die is 3.500 +- 0.001 and then used this to argue that the result actually obtained by one given role of the die shows that the die must be biased because the role falls outside this expectation (which, of course, it always will since one role will get a value of either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6)!
That problem alone is enough to basically disqualify the paper, but it turns out that even if one asks a different question, namely, whether the standard deviation or the standard error for the models is the more appropriate measure of the uncertainty in only the FORCED COMPONENT of the result, then the answer still turns out to be that the standard error is the wrong thing to use…Or, at least, that the IPCC has implicitly come to this conclusion. To see this, for example, one can simply take the equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS) of the various climate models in the IPCC AR4 report (conveniently given in Table 8.2 in Chapter 8 of the WG-1 AR4 report http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm ) and compute the standard deviation and the standard error and then compare this to the statement that the IPCC makes about the ECS (i.e., that it is likely [66-90%] chance to lie in the range 2.0 to 4.5 C).
What one finds is that if the IPCC really believed the models could be trusted enough that their standard errors would be a measure of the uncertainty in the forced component of the response, then they had no business giving such a large range for the ECS. In fact, even using standard deviation as a measure of uncertainty, one finds that the IPCC statement on the likely range for the ECS is compatible with the standard deviation only if one assumes that the “likely” range really means there is ~90% chance of it falling in this range and not just the 66% chance. (In fact, none of the 19 models for which the IPCC reports an ECS has an ECS outside of the IPCC “likely” range for the ECS!)
I know that technically speaking, the IPCC quoted its likely range of ECS based more on empirical data than on directly what the different climate models give for the ECS. Nonetheless, my basic point still stands, namely that if one believes that the standard error in the model predictions is a good measure of the uncertainty in the forced component of the climate response then one is placing way, way more faith in the models than the IPCC is! So, comparing to the standard error in the models, one is essentially deriving a conclusion that is only true if one trusts the models to a much higher degree than the IPCC does. And, of course, this is all basically irrelevant anyway because the paper by Douglass et al. were not even looking at only the forced component of the climate response since the actual climate system has no way of separating this out from the internal variability component!
The best that can be said about the Douglass et al. paper is that it is so wrong that you can arbitrarily (and without justification) ignore one fatal flaw and it still fails due to another fatal flaw!
REPLY: Oh puuuhhhllleeeezze! And this lack of discussion on the issue of the paper’s analysis is the only thing you see Joel? Catching problems like this are what peer review is all about.
I used to think you had some level of objectivity outside of the AGW mantra you embrace. I’m not amused nor impressed with your complaint. Sour grapes on details that aren’t part of the story. I assume then, from your lack of discussion (to use your complaint, what’s missing from your comment) that you are perfectly OK with the behavior exhibited here?
From your past correspondence on the subject of peer review, publicly available here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/OMB/inforeg/2003iq/33.pdf
Where you say:
“Before the system is fixed, there must be a compelling argument made that the current system is broken and that the current processes of peer review that exist in the different agencies are inadequate and are resulting in regulations with a poor scientific basis.”
Well here you are, peer review failed to catch the error you raise, and instead of interested parties following process properly, they it turned into a bullying, rule bending, and gaming exercise with the NYT involved. Looks pretty darn broken to me there buster.
Like I said, I’m not at all impressed with your complaint when you argue against changing peer review standards in the past.
-A
Bryan says:
One can only hope that, at the end of the day, each member of “The Team” receive their just deserts.
So you are advocating taking them to the Sahara or Mojave and dumping them to experience climate change first hand ? That’s a bit harsh even by my standards. Or would that be some form of Freudian slip ?
The Dilbert cartoon is very appropriate – for those calling for the legal system to be involved, I very much doubt that any laws were actually broken. The actions are highly immoral, unethical, and professionally disgraceful, but the law does not concern itself with what gets published in journals or how it comes to be published.
Nevertheless, that also does not stop us from saying what we now know to be true. I remember that it used to be an open question as to whether Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Phil Johnson and their cohorts were simply scientist who made a mistake, but now we know that they are all blatant charlatans and outright frauds. They are no “scientists”, they are simply slightly educated thugs with the memorized scripts of a used car salesman. From now on, that is the only way they and the organizations they represent deserve to be treated.
Infamita
An outsider’s perspective: McGregor’s behavior is clearly unethical and that of Santer and Osborn is damn close.
Carlo (15:29:25) :
The e-mails on http://www.eastangliaemails.com are not reliable, some txt in e-mails are missing.
Sounds like another in-depth thread is warranted.
(If some investigative research can find hidden declines and fudged data along with damning collusion and defamation, do these bozos think they can really get away with deleting text?? Where do the trial lawyers line up for duty?)
To: “The Team”
You lie!
This is worth working your way through even if you’re a non-scientist like me.
Someone needs to initiate a multi-national class action suit against the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the IPCC. Michael Mann, Phil Jones should, of course, be named as defendants, not to mention the Dean of UEA and whoever was in charge of CRU at the time.
Artifex (15:47:48) :
“Bryan says:
One can only hope that, at the end of the day, each member of “The Team” receive their just deserts.”
So you are advocating taking them to the Sahara or Mojave and dumping them to experience climate change first hand ? That’s a bit harsh even by my standards. Or would that be some form of Freudian slip ?
Ans: Haven’t you heard? The Sahara and the Mojave are greening up. That’s right. Perhaps the best thing that can happen to members of ‘The Team” is a Starbuck’s expedition that actually involves a trip into the Mojave or a honest-to-goodness safari into the Sahara and see what is going on because of “poisonous” CO2.
As CO2 continues to increase (and nothing short of global war will bring it down) the deserts of the world will blossom as the rose, as it has been predicted. More CO2 means *) more plant growth, *) plants need less water, *) more food per acre, and *) more robust habitats and ecosystems. Recent studies of China bear this out.
Rub the faces of “The Team” into it until they look like the Jolly Green Giant.
I think it’s time for attorneys and courts… Where is Matlock?