David Hawkins Responds to Senate Query on Stolen E-Mails and Global Warming

In testimony on Wednesday, December 2, Senator Bob Corker (one of only two out of twenty-three members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who bothered to be in the room for the hearing at that time) asked David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council about the scandal of climatologists’ private e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia. My transcription of that exchange:

Bob Corker: The whole notion of these e-mails that have just come out in the scientific community. Those of you who are most closely involved in that, do you consider that to be a major issue? I mean, is there any bloom off the issue of the signal climate change? Is this disturbing? Is this nothing more than a minor menace, or is this something with a greater impact on the whole movement regarding climate change itself?

David Hawkins: I would offer a couple of comments. I think there are two issues regarding this e-mail archive. One is, what does this say about the solidity of the scientific basis for concern about climate change? The second is, is there an issue of personal behavior that needs to be addressed? They are two very different questions.

On the impact on science, and I actually was describing to my college class e-mail list what this was all about, so I pointed out that there are about 8 scientific propositions that form the basis for the conclusion that human emissions are affecting the global climate and that the risk is great in the future. They are:

#1, the certain atmospheric gases absorb heat that would otherwise go back into space,

#2, that annual emissions of these so-called greenhouse gases have increased dramatically over the last 100 years or so, CO2 by a factor of 10 in the last century,

#3, the global annual average surface temperatures have increased over the course of that century,

#4, the 10 warmest years in the instrumental records since 1880 have occurred between 1997 and 2008,

#5, that some additional warming beyond what we’ve already measured is locked in because of the inertia in the atmosphere,

#6, that the amount of future warming is going to be determined by the amount of future emissions and by climate sensitivity,

#7, that the impacts of future warming are going to be widespread and substantial although the amount is uncertain,

Now, of those propositions, the e-mails don’t challenge anything related to those findings. The e-mails are related, when you look at them, to arguments about one line of evidence [#8] that has been used in some models to estimate the level of future warming associated with different emissions pathways. And even if you decided, which would be an overreaction, to say, “Well, we’re just going to assume that that line of evidence has no validity whatsoever, you still have all these other lines of evidence pointing to estimates about what the level of warming will be in the future if we don’t address these emissions….

These e-mails, even if they raise questions about the behavior of certain individuals or certainly their judgment in expressing themselves, touch nothing about the fundamental science.