Gresham’s Law at Work in Climate Change Science

In economics Gresham’s Law states that in a monetary system bad money drives out good money. From the article below, it appears that this principle also applies to scientists.

THE ELECTRICITY DAILY

August 18, 2005, Thursday

SECTION: Vol. 25, No. 34

HEADLINE: Scientist Resigns from NOAA Climate Group

BODY:
Another prominent scientist has resigned from an important governmental panel looking at climate change, charging politicization of climate science.

Roger Pielke Sr., Colorado state climatologist and professor at Colorado State University Fort Collins, last Saturday resigned from the U.S. government s Climate Change Science Program(CCSP), where he was a lead author of a chapter of the program s synthesis and assessment product committee. Pielke cited a New York Times article reporting on the latest dispute between climate modelers and data from satellite and weather balloons ( ED, Aug. 17), which claimed that corrections in some of the calculations in the satellite data had largely settled the issue and scuttled the doubts of the climate skeptics.

The article said that the findings will be featured in a report on temperature trends in the lower atmosphere that is the first product to emerge from the Bush administration’s 10-year program intended to resolve uncertainties in climate science.

In a letter to James Mahoney, deputy NOAA administrator and head of the CCSP, Pielke said, I have given up seeking to promote a balanced presentation of the issue of assessing recent spatial and temporal surface and tropospheric temperature trends. The NY Times article today was the last straw.

Piekle complained that premature representation of aspects of the report to the media and in a Senate hearing before we finalized the report has made me realize that, despite the claims of some of them to the contrary, only the minimal representation of the perspective that I represent will be begrudgingly included in the report.

Pielke added that he had recently learned that a member of the committee with different views that his own had drafted a replacement chapter and was circulating it among the committee members. This sort of politicking has no place in a community assessment, said Pielke. If such committees are put together with no intention of adequately accommodating minority, but scientifically valid, perspectives, then it would be best in the future not to invite such participation on CCSP committees.

In a blog on his web site, Piekle noted that the CCSP process is dominated by scientists who share the view that global warming is a dangerous, man-made phenomenon. When the draft CCSP report when to a National Research Council panel for review, the editor, Thomas Karl, a prominent modeler at NOAA, refused to allow my minority report to be submitted to the NRC committee for their formal review and response, or even be voted on by the members of the CCSP committee.

In January, a prominent hurricane expert, Chris Landsea, resigned from a committee of the U.N. s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, charging that the IPCC leaders were overstating the influence of climate change on hurricanes to further a political agenda ( ED, Jan. 19). [KM]