Hans von Storch

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Hans von Storch
Hans von Storch.jpg
Hans von Storch in February 2011
Born (1949-08-13) 13 August 1949 (age 74)
Alma mater University of Hamburg
OccupationClimate scientist
Years active1976–present
Notable work See below
Board member ofAdvisory boards: Journal of Climate
Awards

Hans von Storch (born 13 August 1949) is a German climate scientist. He is a professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and (since 2001) Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre (previously: GKSS Research Center) in Geesthacht, Germany. He is a member of the advisory boards of the journal Journal of Climate . He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology from 1986 to 1995 and headed the Statistical Analysis and Modelling research group there.

Contents

Opinion on global warming

Storch said in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006 that anthropogenic climate change exists:

"Based on the scientific evidence, I am convinced that we are facing anthropogenic climate change brought about by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere." [2]

He is also known for an article in Der Spiegel he co-wrote with Nico Stehr, which states that:

"Scientific research faces a crisis because its public figures are overselling the issues to gain attention in a hotly contested market for newsworthy information." [3]
"The alarmists think that climate change is something extremely dangerous, extremely bad and that overselling a little bit, if it serves a good purpose, is not that bad." [4]

In December 2009, he expressed concern about the credibility of science and criticized some publicly visible scientists for simplifying and dramatizing their communications. He pointed to the German Waldsterben (Forest dieback) hype of the 1980s: [5]

Research about the forest die back in Germany may serve as an example at the other end of the spectrum. The science of forest damages was in the 1980s heavily politicized, and used as support for a specific preconceived "good" policy of environmental protection. The resulting overselling and dramatization broke down in the 1990s, and news about adverse developments in German forests is now a hard sell in Germany. An observer wrote in 2004: "The damage for the scientists is enormous. Nobody believes them any longer." Of course, the damage was not only limited to the forest researchers, but also to other environmental scientists and politicians as well.

On 20 June 2013 Storch stated "So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We're facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn't happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year." [6]

Climategate controversy

Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming, [7] said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said. [8]

Climate Research controversy

In 2003, with effect from 1 August, Hans von Storch was appointed as editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Research , after having been on its editorial board since 1994. A few months before a controversial article (Soon and Baliunas 2003 [9] ) had raised questions about the journal's decentralised review process, with no editor-in-chief, and about the editorial policy of one editor, Chris de Freitas. [10] Storch drafted and circulated an editorial on the new regime, reserving the right as editor-in-chief to reject articles proposed for acceptance by one of the editors. Following the publisher's refusal to publish the editorial unless all editors serving on the board endorsed the new policy, Storch resigned four days before he was due to take up his new position. [11] Four other editors later left the journal. Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "climate science skeptics" “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” [12]

Publications and awards

In late 2004, Storch's team published an article in the journal Science which tested multiproxy methods such as those used by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, 1998, often called MBH98, [13] or Mann and Jones, [14] to obtain the global temperature variations in the past 1000 years. The test suggested that the method used in MBH98 would inherently underestimate large variations had they occurred; but this was subsequently challenged: see hockey stick graph for more detail.

To reach this conclusion, Storch et al. used a climate model to generate a series of annual temperature maps for the world over the past several centuries. They then added white noise to the proxy data and applied the methods used in MBH98, a variation of principal component analysis, to the computed temperature maps and found that the amount of variation was considerably reduced.[ citation needed ]

In April 2006, Science published a comment authored by Wahl and collaborators, asserting errors in the 2004 paper, stating that "their conclusion was based on incorrect implementation of the reconstruction procedure" a mistake with Repercussions; [15] and a disputing VS Reply. In this reply, VS and his team demonstrated that caveats raised in the Wahl comment did not invalidate their original conclusion. The inadequacy of the MBH98 methodology for climate reconstructions was later independently confirmed in other publications, for instance by Lee, Zwiers and Tsao, 2008 [16] or by Christiansen et al., 2009. [17]

In 2010, Storch received the IMSC achievement award at the International Meetings on Statistical Climatology in Edinburgh, to "recognize his key contributions to statistical downscaling, reconstruction of temperature series, analyses of climatic variability, and detection and attribution of climate change". [18]

Donald Duck

In 1977, Hans von Storch co-founded a 100-member Donald Duck Club, defending Donald Duck against accusations of indecent behavior. Between 1976 and 1985 he was publisher of a magazine on Donald Duck, Der Hamburger Donaldist. [19]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Temperature record of the last 2,000 years</span> Temperature trends in the Common Era

The temperature record of the last 2,000 years is reconstructed using data from climate proxy records in conjunction with the modern instrumental temperature record which only covers the last 170 years at a global scale. Large-scale reconstructions covering part or all of the 1st millennium and 2nd millennium have shown that recent temperatures are exceptional: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 concluded that "Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years." The curve shown in graphs of these reconstructions is widely known as the hockey stick graph because of the sharp increase in temperatures during the last century. As of 2010 this broad pattern was supported by more than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, with variations in how flat the pre-20th-century "shaft" appears. Sparseness of proxy records results in considerable uncertainty for earlier periods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific consensus on climate change</span> Evaluation of climate change by the scientific community

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael E. Mann</span> American physicist and climatologist

Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hubert Lamb</span> British climatologist

Hubert Horace Lamb was an English climatologist who founded the Climatic Research Unit in 1972 in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phil Jones (climatologist)</span> Climatologist

Philip Douglas Jones is a former director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) from 1998, having begun his career at the unit in 1976. He retired from these positions at the end of 2016, and was replaced as CRU director by Tim Osborn. Jones then took up a position as a Professorial Fellow at the UEA from January 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hockey stick graph (global temperature)</span> Graph in climate science

Hockey stick graphs present the global or hemispherical mean temperature record of the past 500 to 2000 years as shown by quantitative climate reconstructions based on climate proxy records. These reconstructions have consistently shown a slow long term cooling trend changing into relatively rapid warming in the 20th century, with the instrumental temperature record by 2000 exceeding earlier temperatures.

David Russell Legates is a former professor of geography at the University of Delaware. He is the former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the same university and a former Delaware state climatologist. In September 2020, the Trump administration appointed him as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Downscaling is any procedure to infer high-resolution information from low-resolution variables. This technique is based on dynamical or statistical approaches commonly used in several disciplines, especially meteorology, climatology and remote sensing. The term downscaling usually refers to an increase in spatial resolution, but it is often also used for temporal resolution. This is not to be confused with image downscaling which is a process of reducing an image from a higher resolution to a lower resolution.

Jan Esper studied geography at the University of Bonn, where he later earned his doctorate. After a postdoc position at Columbia University in New York City, he continued his work on dendrochronology at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), and qualified as a professor at the University of Bern. In 2018, Esper became a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature. Since 2010, he has been a professor at the Department of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

<i>Climate Research</i> (journal) Academic journal

Climate Research is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Inter-Research Science Center and best known to the general public for its 2003 publication of a controversial paper. The journal was established in 1990 and covers all aspects of the interactions of climate with organisms, ecosystems, and human societies. Its founder and long time publisher was marine biologist Otto Kinne.

The Soon and Baliunas controversy involved the publication in 2003 of a review study titled Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years, written by aerospace engineer Willie Soon and astronomer Sallie Baliunas and published in the journal Climate Research. In the review, the authors expressed disagreement with the hockey stick graph and argued that historical temperature changes were related to solar variation rather than greenhouse gas emissions as was the position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other researchers. The publication was quickly taken up by the George W. Bush administration as a basis for amending the first Environmental Protection Agency's Report on the Environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climatic Research Unit documents</span>

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References

  1. Official website
  2. Storch, Hans von. "Statement to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, July 19, 2006 Hearing "Questions Surrounding the 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments"" (PDF). Retrieved 6 August 2010.
  3. Hans von Storch; Nico Stehr (24 January 2005). "How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear". Der Spiegel .
  4. Simon Cox, Richard Vadon (20 April 2006). "A load of hot air?". BBC. Even government agencies have been criticised for overselling climate change.
  5. "The Sustainability of Climate Science" Guest post by Hans Von Storch at Roger A. Pielke, Jr.'s Blog, 5 December 2009
  6. Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter (20 June 2013). "Climate Expert von Storch: Why Is Global Warming Stagnating?". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 26 June 2013.
  7. "Hans von Storch". coast.gkss.de. Archived from the original on 19 July 2011. Retrieved 28 November 2009.
  8. Johnson, Keith (24 November 2009). "Lawmakers Probe Climate Emails". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
  9. Soon, Willie; Sallie Baliunas (January 31, 2003). "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years" (PDF). Climate Research. 23: 89–110. Bibcode:2003ClRes..23...89S. doi: 10.3354/cr023089 .
  10. "Stormy Times for Climate Research". Scientists for Global Responsibility. 28 November 2003. Archived from the original on 22 July 2009. Retrieved 1 September 2005.
  11. Hans von Storch (23 November 2009). "The CR Problem". Archived from the original on 21 August 2010.
  12. "Some Like It Hot". Mother Jones. May 2005.
  13. Mann M.E., Bradley R.S., Hughes M.K. (1998). "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries". Nature. 392 (6678): 779–787. Bibcode:1998Natur.392..779M. doi:10.1038/33859. S2CID   129871008.
  14. Jones P. D.; Mann M.E. (6 May 2004). "Climate Over Past Millennia". Reviews of Geophysics. 42 (2): RG2002. Bibcode:2004RvGeo..42.2002J. doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143 .
  15. "A Mistake with Repercussions". RealClimate. 27 April 2006.
  16. Lee, Terry C. K.; Francis W. Zwiers; Min Tsao (August 2008). "Evaluation of proxy-based millennial reconstruction methods" (PDF). Climate Dynamics. 31 (2–3): 263–281. Bibcode:2008ClDy...31..263L. doi:10.1007/s00382-007-0351-9. S2CID   3325498. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-01-19.
  17. Christiansen, B.; Schmith, T.; Thejll, P. (2009). "A surrogate ensemble study of climate reconstruction methods: stochasticity and robustness". Journal of Climate. 22 (4): 951–976. Bibcode:2009JCli...22..951C. doi: 10.1175/2008JCLI2301.1 .
  18. "Hans von Storch was awarded the IMSC achievement award at the 11IMSC in Edinburgh, 2010 to recognize his key contributions to statistical downscaling, reconstruction of temperature series, analyses of climatic variability, and detection and attribution of climate change". International Meetings on Statistical Climatology. Archived from the original on 8 October 2011. Retrieved 24 September 2011.
  19. "Der Hamburger Donaldist". Archived from the original on 31 July 2010. Retrieved 8 August 2010.

Selected publications