Gentlemen, In your recent Science Perspective piece (29 January 2010, vol 327, 530 - 531), you wrote:
*"Some authors have argued that the effects of polar testing could be confined to the Arctic (4)."* CItation (4) is: * K. Caldeira, L. Wood, **Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A 366, 039 (2008) * [available for free download at: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/4039.full] Nowhere in this paper do we argue that the effects of polar testing could be confined to the Arctic. In fact, we showed that even for the idealized case in which sunlight is reduced only over the Arctic, effects would be at least hemispheric (See Fig 3, panels b, c, d, and e). I think it is unfair to be criticized in Science for claiming that effects of polar testing could be confined to the Arctic when our paper shows that even in the unrealistic case where solar insolation reduction is confined to the Arctic, effects would not be confined to this region. Our paper is cited to support a statement that our paper in fact refutes. An appropriate citation would have been: *"Some authors (4) have shown that, even if solar insolation could be reduced only over the Arctic, effects of polar testing would not be confined to this area."* It is unpleasant to be set up as a straw man. I think a correction is in order. It is important that we respond to what people actually write and not what we imagine people may have written. Regards, Ken PS. Our paper describes a set of highly idealized sensitivity experiments. I think we made this clear with statements such as: * We present results of several climate simulations designed to estimate the climate consequences of idealized patterns and degrees of insolation reduction. >From a theoretical point of view, it is interesting to explore relationships between forcing and response in different latitude bands, to get a better idea of the degree of nonlinearity of the climate system. We recognize that these simulations are highly idealized and that real climate engineering is unlikely to produce step function changes in radiative forcing at a defined latitude.* *We have presented highly idealized numerical simulations of extremely simple climate engineering involving spatially uniform reductions of incoming sunlight at the top of the atmosphere over specified northern polar regions and the entire Earth. * PPS. For the foreign language speakers on this group, an explanation of "straw man" can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man *A straw man argument <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_argument> is an informal fallacy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy> based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#cite_note-book-0>To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#cite_note-book-0>[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#cite_note-files-1> * ___________________________________________________ Ken Caldeira Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA [email protected] http://dge.stanford.edu/DGE/CIWDGE/labs/caldeiralab +1 650 704 7212; fax: +1 650 462 5968 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
