Monce Replies to Achenbauch

You may have seen the list of 100 climate skeptics who signed a statement that was published in yesterday's Washington Post.

The Post's Joel Achenbauch wrote about the statement, and in particular called out one signer, Micheal Monce of Connecticut College, an atomic and molecular physicist:

Now back to that ad in the Post: Who ARE these people? "Scientists," is the answer, but what kind of scientists? Are they climate experts?

Let's take a look at "Michael Monce, Ph.d., Connecticut College":

"His area of expertise lies in atomic and molecular physics, particularly atomic collisions."

Probably a smart guy. But why do we care what he thinks about climate change? How many of these people have actually published something on climate change in a peer-reviewed journal?

So I wrote to Monce, and he courteously replied with his thoughts on the controversy:

"Wow... I guess I've suddenly become a lightning rod, and in some sense I can see why which leads me to answer your first question:"

No, I have never published about climate change in peer reviewed journals.

My response to Achenbach would be along the lines as: As a physicist I understand energy fairly well. Also as an experimentalist I have some experience in looking at physical data and analyzing what it means, What lead me to my present thoughts on climate change was when I was researching the topic in preparation for a course I was going to teach on energy issues about 4 years ago. As I looked more into the data and also the models that were being generated, a lot of it didn't add up to me. There's fairly good data that there was a warm period greater than what we are experiencing at the moment during medievel times when CO2 was much less than today. Also in historic terms, the current warming actually started in about 1840 when the earth emerged from the Little Ice Age. Why would it do that without a large human CO2 emission? The IPCC models generated in the late 1990's seem to have failed to predict the current leveling of temperature for the past decade. There are many more instances I can cite all of which tend to lead me to think that perhaps the current temperature trends are more due to natural variabillity than due to human causes. So, as a scientist, I came to the conclusion that many of the IPCC's basic premises may not be valid. If the data changes I will change my view.

As to your third question, if a climatologist had an opinion on a new finding in atomic physics, yes I would be skeptical. However, any scientist should always approach any new finding with some skepticism; that's our job. New findings must be verified independently by other researchers, and even then we may continue to try and find holes... that's what drives science. However, maybe that climatologist may have a different insight into the atomic physics finding that would be useful. Here's the real point as an example of how science really works: even today we are trying to find flaws in Einstein's work. Why? Because by finding the flaws we learn more about how nature runs. Wasn't it a physicist (Alvarez) who came up with the idea of the asteroid/comet impact extinction of the dinosaurs? Cross disciplinary discoveries do happen and are often met, appropriately, with great skepticism. However, such discoveries, when verified, lead to greater understanding of nature.