The New York Times reports today that Dr. Benjamin Santer, atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, has received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $270,000 for research supporting the finding that human activity contributes to global warming.
We recall that earlier MacArthur "genius" grants have gone to Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, both noteworthy for forecasts of famines, cancer epidemics, and other population disasters that were somewhat wide of the mark.
Dr. Santer breaks new ground by having admitted to altering Chapter 8 of the most recent UN-IPCC report, deleting phrases that suggested scientific doubts about human influences on climate. According to the journal Nature, the changes were made to make the report conform to the IPCC Policymakers Summary, a political document. Nature editors said that the U.S. State Department had urged the head of the UN science advisory group to prevail upon chapter authors to make such changes.
Santer also edited a crucial graph in Chapter 8 (Fig. 8.10) from his original published version, leading readers to believe that human influence is present and increasing with time, and selected data in Figure 8.7 (discovered by climatologist Prof. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia) to suggest that aerosols could account for the discrepancy between calculated and observed temperature trends.
We congratulate Dr. Ben Santer on his success. We feel certain he has a bright future in his field of research.
We also express our deep appreciation to the New York Times for not putting this story on page 1.
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