Ben Santer
From Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Ben Santer is a man with a lot of accolades under his belt: A recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant; an E.O.Lawrence Award; a Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Distinguished Scientist Fellowship; contributor to all four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore; and now an American Geophysical Union fellowship.
But he’d give all the awards up if it meant he could present his research on human-induced climate change to a patient audience — an audience that would listen to all the facts before making judgments about reality of a “discernible human influence” on climate.
Human-induced climate change is likely to be one of the major environmental problems of the 21st century, and effective policies to mitigate human effects on climate will require sound scientific information.
Providing that information is what climate scientist Santer continues doing as the Laboratory’s winner of the AGU fellowship.
Santer, an expert in the climate change research community, has worked in the Laboratory’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for nearly 20 years, and is a frequent contributor to congressional hearings on the science of climate change. He credits his success to the exceptional scientists he collaborated with at LLNL. “The best reward (award) is working together with great colleagues.”
In 1996, his chapter of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report came to the cautious but then-controversial conclusion that the “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
From that point on, it has been an uphill battle for Santer to show that climate models do, in fact, replicate many different observations of climate change, and that models can serve as a valuable tool for understanding the climate changes likely to occur over the 21st century. “Ideally, governments will use the best-available scientific information to make rational decisions on appropriate policy responses to the climate change problem,” Santer said.” My colleagues and I have the job of providing that information. The AGU fellowship gives me encouragement to continue PCMDI’s research into the nature and causes of climate change, and to continue explaining what we do, what we’ve learned and why our work matters.”
Only one in a thousand members is elected to AGU fellowship each year. Santer is one of six LLNL employees who have been elected an AGU fellow. Rick Ryerson, Bill Durham, Al Duba, Joyce Penner and Hugh Heard are the others.
Santer will receive his award at the December 2011 Fall AGU Meeting in San Francisco.
Santer’s achievements include:
- Pioneering use of novel pattern-based statistical techniques, called “fingerprint” methods, to identify the effects of human-caused changes in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol particles in observational surface temperature records.
- Analysis of atmospheric temperatures, water vapor, and the height of the stratosphere-troposphere boundary, showing that accurate model simulations of climate change require inclusion of radiative forcing from human activities.
- Contributions to the Scientific Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
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UPDATE: Steve McIntyre passes on this video link, featuring Dr. Ben Santer, to us in comments. Surely this must have been the work that wowed the AGU?
BTW if you want some real science, rather than “Santer Cartoon Science” regarding the snowpack loss on Kilimanjaro, try these:
Kilimanjaro regaining its snow cap
More proof that Kilimanjaro’s problems are man-made; but not what some think it is
Did you forget the /sarc tag on this post?
As a practicing demi-god, he should be satisfied with virtual accolades from within the virtual worlds that he nurtures.
To quote Monty Python:
@cbone
and you are?
@bernd
may your children weep
And an honorary member of Backslappers Anonymous.
As an aspiring scientist myself, I look to Ben Santer as my anti-role model. Of all the climategate e-mails, his were the worst of the lot.
I’ve been privy to the spectacle of seeing all kinds of accolades being directed to first class jerks. And have sometimes been at the receiving end of “jerk” intelligence and their special kind of superiority. It seems to be a fact of life that those who find being a jerk a rewarding way of life also tend to be at the top of a pile.
What kind of pile it happens to be I leave up to the imagination of the reader.
Erik Anderson says:
“…I look to Ben Santer as my anti-role model. Of all the climategate e-mails, his were the worst of the lot.”
True dat. Santer is a real vermin, one of the most despicable Climategate worms. This is a real indictment of the formerly great AGU, which has sold its soul to Mammon.
The AGU is being hijacked completely by the AGW promoters.
Well…it IS the AGU…they take care of their own.
After reading Santer’s “contributions” to the climategate e-mails, I have absolutely NO respect for the man. He apparently acts like a juvenile punk in front of the colleagues he purports to enjoy working with…
The old saying comes to mind “It’s who you know, not what you know” and at the same time, being well funded makes all the difference, doesn’t it!
Santer remains a blinkered ideologue, concerned not to promote objective scientific inquiry but to make his Green Gang bones preparatory to foisting willfully ruinous damage on coal, oil, nuclear energy economies in Gaia’s name.
Whatever Luddite sociopathology drives climate cultists to sabotage human ease-and-comfort at every opportunity, Santer exhibits it in spades. Like Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. he is complicit in the most massive, savagely destructive fraud in human history. Would-be commissars and gauleiters may cloak themselves with normative personae, but like Saleth Sar aka Pol Pot they are essentially Thanatist fanatics who want you dead.
They are just after money which is why people like Ben Santer gets support and rise to the top. Like lawyers that chase ambulances. Banksters that chase sub-prime loans. AGU is largely headed by academics and the ones at the top are as greedy a bunch as any other.
In the late 70’s and 80’s AGU was all about monitoring the nuclear test ban treaty. I know because I was there. Hundreds of millions in research money went in to it and this kept many academics on the gray train.
…follow the money.
I’m sorry, but I have nothing but utter contempt for Ben Santer. He admitted he went back and re-wrote portions of the IPCC report so that it was consistent with the polemic. His work is in the fantasy-land of computer modeling. On top of that he proffered to “beat the crap” out of Patrick Michaels. Why doesn’t he pick on someone his own age? Might I suggest Joe Bastardi in a cage match to the death? Should be a short bout…
I have good friends that work at Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos National Lab. Both have told me that Lawrence Livermore is where the nut jobs are housed.
Santer was a graduate of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia and figures prominently in the leaked emails of Climategate. Ironically, his doctoral thesis was from CRU, I believe under the supervision of Tom Wigley, on the inability of computer models to recreate the pressure patterns of the North Atlantic. The region was chosen because it had the best and most comprehensive weather records. Despite this it created large pressure patterns that simply don’t exist. This didn’t stop him, with other IPCC members, convincing the world that the IPCC models worked and their output were valid as the basis for globally changing climate and energy policies.
His involvement with the 1995 IPCC Report “Chapter 8” fiasco was an early warning signal of what was going on within the IPCC through members of the CRU. Fred Singer and a few others were vigorously attacked for daring to speak out.
The original Chapter 8 draft submitted by Santer and approved by the group didn’t have specific evidence of a human signal
“Finally we have come to the most difficult question of all: “When will the detection and unambiguous attribution of human-induced climate change occur?” In the light of the very large signal and noise uncertainties discussed in the Chapter, it is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, “We do not know.”
This was changed by Santer to accommodate the SPM to read,
“The body of statistical evidence in Chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points toward a discernible human influence on global climate.”
Here is how Singer and Avery explain the situation in their book.
“The IPCC’s Climate Change 1995 was reviewed by its consulting scientists in late 1995. The “Summary for Policy Makers” was approved in December, and the full report, including chapter 8, was accepted. However, after the printed report appeared in May 1996, the scientific reviewers discovered that major changes had been made “in the back room” after they had signed off on the science chapter’s contents. Santer, despite the shortcomings of the scientific evidence, had inserted strong endorsements of man-made warming in chapter 8 (of which he was the IPCC-appointed lead author):”
Other problems included the claim that the chapter was based on 130 peer-reviewed studies, but the actual chapter was primarily based on two papers by Santer. It was a precedent for the later dominance by lead authors of their chapter and what is put in the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM)
Santer also deleted the following statements from the approved draft.
“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”
· “While some of the pattern-base studies discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to [man-made] causes. Nor has any study quantified the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect or aerosol effect in the observed data – an issue of primary relevance to policy makers.”
· “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
· “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”
· “When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. “‘
At the time they were able to brush the incident under the rug because very few knew what was going on. Fred Singer knew and I knew, which is why I was honoured to share the stage with him at the First Heartland Conference in New York in 2008. But even that was before ClimateGate occurred and sceptics were the subject of the machinations of the CRU gang revealed in the emails and through RealClimate.
How much longer will such behaviour be rewarded?
Reminds me of the Nobel Peace Prize and Gore & Co.
So, Ben “The Power of Poop” Santer would give all the awards up if it meant he could present his research on human-induced climate change to a patient audience — an audience that would listen to all the facts before making judgments about reality of a “discernible human influence” on climate.
Once again, it’s just a communication problem. All we need to do is hear Ben out and be reasonable. Frankly, I don’t see any sign that the warmists are backing off… they’re doubling down. Santer just got another coat of whitewash.
LOL. They should also award him the Nobel peace prize, to emphasize how shallow and political these “prizes” are these days. What is funny an ironic is that NOBODY is fooled by all this crap!
By the way, here’s a story which illustrates how “effective” Santer and his ilk have been in convincing the world that their fantasies are real:
Gallup: Majority of Human Race Does Not See Global Warming as Serious Threat
Monday, April 25, 2011
By Terence P. Jeffrey
(CNSNews.com) – Most of the human race does not see global warming as a serious threat, according to a Gallup poll released last week that surveyed individuals in 111 countries.
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Heh!
Wow, a whole “community” … “expert in climate change research” … isn’t that like being an expert in palm reading? Or perhaps ghost hunting? Astrology maybe? Expert of horoscopes?
harvey says:
April 25, 2011 at 7:06 pm
No, all of my children are old enough (ages from 19 to 32) to be LAUGHING at what these AGW acolytes spew.
Can I ask you just one question for starters: Have you actually read Gore’s “An Inconvient Truth”? Read it and understood it, that is? And you’re not laughing too??
Any folks here members of the AGU? Care to write a joint letter of resignation?
Santer should give up his awards as he could publish his proof on the internet and a patient audience will find him. But I guess he isn’t genius enough to figure that out.
Such awards are like hemorrhoids .
So or later, every a$$hole gets one.
In the not too distant past I spent many years on scientific advisory committees for LLNL. I never met or encountered this fellow, but he embarrasses me and, I think, the Livermore Laboratory which, despite what some of you must think, ordinarily maintains the highest standards for scientific research.
A lot of the blame for this scientific denigration goes back to Washington, of course, and, in particular, to Steve Chu and his cohort. What used to be outstanding DOE laboratories are being systematically gutted to advance the “climate” agenda (LBNL, of which Chu was Director, is the most glaring case). Sadly, they don’t have to compel most of the “scientists” in these laboratories; they go where the money and the accolades are. But I do emphasize “sadly”.