Hans von Storch (born 13 August 1949 in Wyk auf Föhr) is a German climate scientist. He is Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and (since 2001) Director of the Institute of Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. He is a member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics.

Contents 1 Opinion on global warming 2 Climate Research controversy 3 Publications 4 Donald Duck 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Opinion on global warming

He said that global warming 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."^[1]

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."^[2]

"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."^[3]

In December 2009, he expressed concern about the credibility of climate scientists and compared Global Warming alarmism to the German Waldsterben (Forest dieback) hype of the 1980s:^[4]

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.

[edit] Climate Research controversy

In 2003 von Storch was appointed as editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Research (having been on the editorial board since 1994), with effect from 1 August 2003, after a controversial article (Soon and Baliunas 2003^[5]) had raised questions about the decentralised review process (with no editor-in-chief); and the editorial policy of one editor, Chris de Freitas.^[6] Von Storch drafted and circulated an editorial on the new regime, but following the publisher's refusal to publish it he resigned four days before he was due to start his new position.^[7] Four other editors later followed. Von 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.”^[8]

[edit] Publications

In late 2004 his team published an article in Science that tested multiproxy methods such as those used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998, often called MBH98,^[9] or Mann and Jones^[10] to obtain the global temperature variations in the past 1000 years. The test showed that the method used in MBH98 would inherently underestimate large variations had they occurred; but has subsequently been challenged: see hockey stick controversy for more detail.

To reach this conclusion, von 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.

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^[11]; 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 in the August 2008 issue of the journal Climate Dynamics or by Christiansen et al. in the Journal of Climate. Since 1999, the MBH98 method has never again been applied for climate reconstructions.

[edit] Donald Duck

In 1977, Hans von Storch co-founded a 100-member Donald Duck Club, defending Donald Duck against the accusations of indecent behavior. Between 1976 and 1985 he was publisher of a magazine on Donald Duck, Der Hamburger Donaldist.^[12]

[edit] References

• H. von Storch, E. Zorita, J.M. Jones, Y. Dimitriev, F. González-Rouco, and S.F.B. Tett, "Reconstructing past climate from noisy data", Science 22 October 2004; 306: 679-682 online September 30

• Soon, W., and Baliunas, S. (2003): "Proxy climate and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years." Climate Research, 23: 89-110

• Eugene R. Wahl, David M. Ritson, Caspar M. Ammann, "Comment on "Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data"", Science 28 April 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5773, p. 529

• H. von Storch, E. Zorita, J.M. Jones, F. González-Rouco, and S.F.B. Tett, Response to comment on "Reconstructing past climate from noisy data", Science 28 April 2006; 312: p 529c

• T.C.K. Lee, F. W. Zwiers, and Min Tsao (2008): Evaluation of proxy-based millennial reconstruction methods. Climate Dynamics 31, 263-281.

• B. Christiansen, T. Schmith and P. Thejll (2009) A surrogate emsemble study of climate reconstruction methods: stochasticity and robustness. Journal of Climate 22, 951-976

[edit] External links

• von Storch's web page at GKSS (with Biography, links to publications, etc)
• Clare Goodess, SGR Newsletter 28, November 2003, "Stormy Times for Climate Research"
• Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, Der Spiegel, 24 January 2005, "How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear"
• The decay of the hockey stick Nature blog article by von Storch and Zorita
• D.O.N.A.L.D. website
• [1] "The Perspectives of Climate Scientists on Global Climate Change", Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray, GKSS, November 2007 ('manuscript received in TKP May 2007'), 132 pgs. PDF
• His blog