The Mark Boslough Affair

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen

The Mark Boslough Affair or Who is Misrepresenting Whom?

Who is Mark Boslough anyway?   He is a “physicist. He is a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, an adjunct professor at University of New Mexico.”  And is best known for his “work on airbursts [which] challenged the conventional view of asteroid collision risk and is now widely accepted by the scientific community. He was the first scientist to suggest that the Libyan Desert Glass was formed by melting due to overhead heating from an airburst. His hypothesis was popularized by the documentaries “Tutunkhamun’s Fireball” (BBC) [wiki].

[Note for those involved in the Climate Wars – Yes, strictly speaking, this all means that he is, like myself,  “not a climate scientist”.]

So why has he spent over a decade (he admits to at least 13 years)  attacking an obscure 1998 paper by Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Zachary W. Robinson titled “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide”?  [hereafter R98, shortened from ‘Robinson et al. (1998)’].  Why did he  launch an attack on this very same paper as recently as 17 January 2017 in a post at  the RealClimate blog titled “Non-condensable Cynicism in Santa Fe”?  He has, in fact, made a sort-of sub-career out of attacking this particular paper – for example:  here and here.

I must admit it is a continuing mystery to me, though I have been looking into this affair for the last 48 hours.  My attention was drawn to it by a guest post here at WUWT by Trond Arne Pettersen titled “Friday Funny – ‘RealClimate’ gets shipwrecked in the Sargasso Sea”.   At first my interest was that Mr. Pettersen had so misunderstood why Mark Boslough was saying the graph had been doctored.  Pettersen had it wrong, the issue wasn’t that the time axis has been reversed.

But there was something that struck me odd.  It is 2017 (the year Two Thousand and Seventeen, a fact that still seems unlikely to me) and yet here is a current blog post on RealClimate that is attacking a paper published in 1998, nearly 20 years ago.

Mark Boslough says in his blog post that:

“I attended the Third in the series [of the “Santa Fe Conference on Global & Regional Climate Change”], which was held the week of Oct 31, 2011. I reported on it here in my essay “Climate cynicism at the Santa Fe conference”. Lloyd Keigwin, a senior scientist and oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and another top-of-his-field researcher. We submitted an abstract together about his paleotemperature reconstruction of Sargasso Sea surface temperature.”

“We submitted an abstract together about his paleotemperature reconstruction of Sargasso Sea surface temperature…. I had updated it with modern SST measurements, and in our abstract we pointed out that it had been misused by contrarians who had removed some of the data, replotted it, and mislabeled it to falsely claim that it was a global temperature record showing a cooling trend.”

My purpose here in this essay to try to discover:

Who is Misrepresenting whom?

Now, in the present, Boslough repeats the same attack, five and a half years later, at RC, showing the following two images:

While attempting to find the original R98, I stumbled on Robinson et al. (2007) [hereafter R07], which has the same title and cites R98 [imagine how this confuses search engines…].  Robinson et al. (2007) is a “ten-years-later” review of the original R98, with some additional data and re-writing to bring it up to date.  The image and caption in R07 for the contested graph is this:

 “Figure 1: Surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile region of the Atlantic Ocean, with time resolution of 50 to 100 years and ending in 1975, as determined by isotope ratios of marine organism remains in sediment at the bottom of the sea (3). The horizontal line is the average temperature for this 3,000-year period. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Optimum were naturally occurring, extended intervals of climate departures from the mean. A value of 0.25 °C, which is the change in Sargasso Sea temperature between 1975 and 2006, has been added to the 1975 data in order to provide a 2006 temperature value.”

That caption seems pretty clear to me, there is no “misrepresentation” as to what the graph is intended to show and the data is properly attributed to the original source, Keigwin (1996) (the footnote 3), with a note about the 2006 temperature datum.

The textual information in R07 about this graph is given as:

“Atmospheric and Surface Temperatures

“Atmospheric and surface temperatures have been recovering from an unusually cold period. During the time between 200 and 500 years ago, the Earth was experiencing the “Little Ice Age.” It had descended into this relatively cool period from a warm interval about 1,000 years ago known as the “Medieval Climate Optimum.” This is shown in Figure 1 for the Sargasso Sea.”

“During the Medieval Climate Optimum, temperatures were warm enough to allow the colonization of Greenland. These colonies were abandoned after the onset of colder temperatures. For the past 200 to 300 years, Earth temperatures have been gradually recovering. Sargasso Sea temperatures are now approximately equal to the average for the previous 3,000 years. The historical record does not contain any report of “global warming” catastrophes, even though temperatures have been higher than they are now during much of the last three millennia.”

There is nothing amiss in the image or the caption.

Boslough responds to my comment pointing this out with this:

Mark Boslough says:    4 Feb 2017 at 1:43 PM

….

Kip Hansen’s link is not to the 1998 version of the paper, but to Robinson’s (colorized and slightly-rewritten) 2007 version that he republished only *after* I confronted him in 2004 about his 1998 misrepresentation. For the 2007 paper he added the fabricated 2006 temperature data that he compared to the paleotemp data in order to claim temps are below the 3000-year mean. He simply made up the 2006 temperature data point.

[ paragraphs  snipped – to be revealed later on ]

Clearly, Boslough does not like the updated R07 version any better than R98 and makes a new accusation – “He simply made up the 2006 temperature data point.”  R07 clearly explains the origins of the 2006 datum and characterizes it as “approximately equal to the average for the previous 3,000 years.”   Deep reading into this more-than-a-decade long attack reveals that there seems to be some  uncertainty about the calculation of the 2006 datum on that graph – but a reading of the text shows that it is not in any way a major point of the paper.  Further, Boslough has elevated R98 to new heights of influence – in the same comment linked above, he says:

“By 2007 Robinson had already conned most of his victims into signing the Oregon petition. …. I was hoping for a chance to explain all this in Santa Fe to those like Hansen who are still confused by Robinson’s trick.”

“Already conned” PhDed scientists into signing the Oregon Petition – and even managed to “confuse”  …whom?  He says “in Santa Fe to those like Hansen who are still confused by Robinson’s trick.”    Now I am confused…but not by Robinson, but by Boslough….does Boslough mean me?  (my name is Hansen, but I’m wasn’t going to Santa Fea) or does he mean some other Hansen who was likely to be at Santa Fe for the meeting?

What we do know is that Boslough has made a many-years-long effort attacking an obscure paper published in an open source minor league journal – all on two little points – all about a single graph, which is 1 out of 23 in the paper.

1. The claim that R98 “deleted instrument data” from a graph produced by Keigwin (1996).
2. The claim that R98 misrepresented “local temperature” as “global temperature.
3. And, when R98 is re-worked 9 years later, Boslough throws in another claim that a single datum (2006 Sargasso Sea Surface Temperature) was “simply made up.”

So, Who is Mispresenting Whom?

Let’s take the points one by one:

Point # 1:  The claim that R98 “deleted instrument data” from a graph produced by Keigwin (1996).

Here is Figure 2 from R98 with its original caption, as an image from the pdf file at the publishing journal: (heading at the top is mine)

This is obviously not what Boslough uses in his presentation when he claims “misrepresentation”.  The caption is straightforward, describing the data shown and crediting it to Keigwin (1996) in the footnote.   We note that there is no “instrumental data” shown on this graph, but it is not Keigwin’s graph, just Keigwin’s paleo-data.  The R98 graph is clearly and only about the paleo-data – so though the graph of the paleo-data in Keigwin’s paper had instrumental data added on, there is no fault to be attached to not using it when showing only the paleo-data.  To say it has been “deleted” would only be true if R98 had represented the graph as being copied from Keigwin (1996), which it certainly isn’t.  Keigwin’s graph looked like this (the graph in question is the lower of the two):

Keigwin’s associated text (the very last paragraph of Keigwin (1996)), which is in general agreement with the point being made in R98,  reads:

“Because climate events like the LIA and MWP were of long enough duration (decades to centuries) to be resolved in Bermuda Rise sediments, and because the changes described here for surface waters over the Bermuda Rise are probably typical of a large part of the western Sargasso Sea, they most likely reflect climate change on the basin or hemispheric scale. Regardless of the exact cause for the LIA, the MWP, and earlier oscillations, the warming during the 20th century (0.5°C)²  is not unprecedented. However, it is important to distinguish natural climate change from anthropogenic effects because human influence may be occurring at a time when the climate system is on the warming limb of a natural cycle.”

[Note:  The cite  #2 is to:    P. D. Jones, T. M. L. Wigley, P. B. Wright, Nature 322,430 (1986); B. D. SanturetaI., Clim. Dynam. 12, 77 (1995); B. D. Santer et al., Nature 382, 39 (1996).”]

You decide:  Who is mispresenting whom?  Does R98 misrepresent the paleo-data of Keigwin ’96?  Does correctly referring to data from a colleague’s paper, properly cited, require one to actually copy the original graph image?  Is it scientific misconduct to re-graph properly credited, properly cited and properly labelled data to suit one’s own paper?

Point # 2:  The claim that R98 misrepresented “local temperature” as “global temperature.”

The image of the graph and its caption are shown in Point # 1.  The caption does not misrepresent anything, but clearly describes the data graphed and credits Keigwin.

So where does Boslough get the misrepresentation claim shown in his image (far above, labelled in red, as Figure 2 of Robinson et al. (1998)), which shows, appearing visually as if it were the caption, “For the past 300 years, global temperatures have been gradually recovering.  As shown in figure 2, they are still a little below the average for the past 3,000 years.” (highlighted words are shown in red in Boslough’s image).

This is not the caption seem in R98, nothing even close.  So where does it come from?  It is an excerpt from the text of the paper in the  section headed “Atmospheric and Surface Temperatures“:  (I have highlighted the text excerpted by Boslough)

“In any case, what effect is the rise in C02 having upon the global environment? The temperature of the Earth varies naturally over a wide range. Figure 2 summarizes, for example, surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea (a region of the Atlantic Ocean) during the past 3,000 years.’ Sea surface temperatures at this location have varied over a range of about 3.6 degrees Celsius (°C) during the past 3,000 years. Trends in these data correspond to similar features that are known from the historical record.”

“For example, about 300 years ago, the Earth was experiencing the “Little Ice Age.” It had descended into this relatively cool period from a warm interval about 1,000 years ago known as the “Medieval Climate Optimum.” During the Medieval Climate Optimum, temperatures were warm enough to allow the colonization of Greenland. These colonies were abandoned after the onset of colder temperatures. For the past 300 years, global temperatures have been gradually recovering.¹¹ As shown in figure 2, they are still a little below the average for the past 3,000 years. The human historical record does not report “global warming” catastrophes, even though temperatures have been far higher during much of the last three millennia.”

[Note:  Footnote 11, to which the sentence including the words “global temperatures” refers, is a cite “11. Lamb, H. H. (1982) Climate, History, and the Modern World, pub New York: Methuen.”]

The first paragraph of the text clearly states that “Figure 2 summarizes, for example, surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea (a region of the Atlantic Ocean) during the past 3,000 years.⁷”   The footnote 7 cites Keigwin 1996.   I would have certainly worded the second sentence of the highlighted portion a little differently, just for clarity sake…in fact, in Robinson et al. (2007), they do so, using this in its place:  “For the past 200 to 300 years, Earth temperatures have been gradually recovering²⁶. Sargasso Sea temperatures are now approximately equal to the average for the previous 3,000 years.”  [Footnote 26 cites Lamb’s book as above.]  But, taken in its context in the two paragraphs above,  there is clearly no misrepresentation of Figure 2 as being global temperatures.  Boslough has stripped two sentences out of their context to make the claim.

You decide:  Who is mispresenting whom?       Does R98 “misrepresent” “local temperature” as “global temperature”?  Is the R98 graph mislabeled?  Does the caption in R98 state that the data is “global”?  Or does Boslough misrepresent R98 with his images, with a textual excerpt made to appear as if it were the original caption?  Does Boslough take text out of context to make a poorly worded phrase seem like a “misrepresentation” and a “trick”?

Point # 3:  When R98 is re-worked 9 years later, and published as Robinson et al. (2007) Boslough claims that a single datum (2006 Sargasso Sea Surface Temperature) was “simply made up.”

The image of the 2007 graph and its caption is above, but digital space is cheap, I show it again for your convenience:

And its caption:

“Figure 1: Surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile region of the Atlantic Ocean, with time resolution of 50 to 100 years and ending in 1975, as determined by isotope ratios of marine organism remains in sediment at the bottom of the sea (3). The horizontal line is the average temperature for this 3,000-year period. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Optimum were naturally occurring, extended intervals of climate departures from the mean. A value of 0.25 °C, which is the change in Sargasso Sea temperature between 1975 and 2006, has been added to the 1975 data in order to provide a 2006 temperature value.”

Boslough has strongly contested the accuracy of the 2006 Sargasso Sea Surface temperature datum included by Robinson et al. in this re-writing and update of the 1998 paper.  Boslough and Keigwin tried to present a refutation of R2007 (on this point) at the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change (2011) but reports that they –

“…received a rejection letter from [Petr] Chylek, who told us,

“This Conference is not a suitable forum for type of presentations described in submitted abstract. We would accept a paper that spoke to the science, the measurements, the interpretation, but not simply an attempted refutation of someone else’s assertions (especially when made in unpublished reports and blog site).”

In the same link, Boslough talks about emails with Robinson, Soon, and a personal conversation with Fred Singer on the issue, which apparently has been left unresolved, sat least for Boslough.

 You decide:  Who is mispresenting whom?    Does  the R07 graph caption – attributing the 2006 data point to “A value of 0.25 °C, which is the change in Sargasso Sea temperature between 1975 and 2006, has been added to the 1975 data in order to provide a 2006 temperature value.” – evidence that it was “simply made up.”?  Is Boslough’s dissatisfaction with the answers he has received (over the now many years) proof of anything? Even if the datum is in fact incorrect, does that justify the years of accusations?  Would that one datum, in 1 figure in a paper containing 23 figures, even if incorrect, change the over-riding message of Robinson et al. (2007)?

YOU DECIDE:  Does any of the data presented here justify in any way Boslough’s years of repeated and continuing attacks on Robinson et al. (1998)?  

 My Opinion:  Mark Boslough’s attacks, as I have documented, are themselves gross  misrepresentations of Robinson’s work.

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It gets worse:  I have saved this bit from Mark Boslough’s recent comment at RC for last:

“The 1998 version seems to have been swept under the rug, and I only have the hard copy that came to me in a mass mailing with the Oregon Petition. It was published in a “Medical Sentinal” which was the pamphlet distributed by a political pressure group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Since it is not a science publication and is neither peer reviewed nor archived, it may not be available online.”

By his own admission, Mark Boslough has never seen nor read a real copy of the paper he has been publicly attacking, apparently at every chance, for years and years-for far more than a decade.    He has been relying on “the hard copy that came to [him] in a mass mailing with the Oregon Petition.”    His idea of a reliable source for copies of scientific papers, one important enough for him to stage years and years of [false and misleading] attacks, is, apparently,  JUNK MAIL. 

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Author’s Comment Policy:

This essay is about Mark Boslough’s seemingly never-ending attack on a rather obscure (and since updated) paper — Robinson (1998) – to which Boslough attaches almost supernatural powers of influence.  I am happy to discuss and respond to comments about the very narrow issue here:  Boslough’s false and misleading attacks on Robinson (1998).

I am not interested in discussing the further details any of the papers under discussion – I have provided links to pdfs of the actual journal pages to ensure accuracy in reporting.  Feel free to carry on about their contents but know I will not join in.

I do not engage in arguments about Climate Science, which I find boring.

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