---
title: "Soon and Baliunas controversy"
chunk: 3/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:22.543337+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Responses from other scientists, political intervention ==
Initially, the scientists whose work was being disputed by Soon and Baliunas felt it was one of a series of sceptical papers that, in Mann's words, "couldn't get published in a reputable journal". In March he wrote to Phil Jones that "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted, the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want is to bring attention to the paper." Jones replied "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set  paleo  back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor", referring to de Freitas. At the time the second Soon et al. paper was publicised, Mann emailed Fred Pearce to say that it "was absurd, almost laughable (if it wasn't, as is transparently evident, being used as a policy–and politics–driven publicity stunt to support the dubious positions on climate change of some prominent American politicians)", and added that the paper made no attempt to find if the past warm temperatures it reported were contemporaneous or merely one-off scattered events.
The Bush administration was involved in editing the first Environmental Protection Agency Report on the Environment prior to the draft being made public. The administration's Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney deleted all references to surface temperature reconstructions showing world temperatures rising over the last 1,000 years, and on 21 April 2003 sent a memo to Kevin O'Donovan in the Office of the Vice President stating "The recent paper of Soon-Baliunas contradicts a dogmatic view held by many in the climate science community that the past century was the warmest in the past millennium and signals human induced "global warming". ... We plan to begin to refer to this study in Administration communications on the science of global climate change; in fact, CEQ just inserted a reference to it in the final draft chapter on global climate change contained in EPA's first "State of the Environment" report. ... With both the National Academy and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) holding that the 20th Century is the warmest of the past thousand years (see below), this recent study begins to provide a counterbalance on the point to those two authorities. It represents an opening to potentially invigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past 1000 years and whether that history reinforces or detracts from our level of confidence regarding the potential human influence on global climate change."
By May the journal's editors Hans von Storch and Clare Goodess were receiving numerous complaints and critiques of the paper from other scientists, to such an extent that they raised the issues with de Freitas and the journal's publisher Otto Kinne. In reply, de Freitas said they were "a mix of a witch-hunt and the Spanish Inquisition".
Other scientists also criticized the study's methods and argued that the authors had misrepresented or misinterpreted their data. Some of those whose work was referenced by Soon and Baliunas were particularly critical. Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography commented that "the fact that [the paper] has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away". Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona, whose work on dendrochronology was discussed in the paper, said the paper was "so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all." Peter Stott, a climatologist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said "Their analysis doesn't consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time". The paper would count warm or wet conditions in one region from 800 to 850 and dry conditions in a separate region from 1200 to 1250 as both demonstrating the Medieval Warm period. He noted that regional periods of warmth or cooling do not always occur at the same time as the global average warms or cools.
The media requested opinions from climate scientists and paleoclimatologists familiar with the issues underlying the Soon and Baliunas papers, and to help with information Mann and Michael Oppenheimer drafted and circulated privately a memorandum providing detailed guidance on the topic. They stated "Nothing in the paper undermines in any way the conclusion of earlier studies that the average temperature of the late twentieth century in the Northern Hemisphere was anomalous against the background of the past millennium". Colleagues receiving these requests from the media included Tom Wigley, Philip Jones and Raymond S. Bradley.
The memorandum developed into a more general position paper jointly authored by 13 climate scientists, which was published on 8 July 2003 in the journal Eos as an article "On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late-20th Century Warmth". Most of the paper's authors had been cited in the Soon and Baliunas 2003 paper (SB03). The Eos paper made three key points: the SB03 and Soon et al. papers had misused precipitation and drought proxies without assessing their sensitivity to temperature, they had taken regional temperature changes as global changes without any attempt to show that they had occurred at the same time across the world, and they had taken as their base period for comparison mean temperatures over the whole of the 20th century, reconstructing past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends, thus failing to show whether or not late 20th century warming was anomalous. The IPCC TAR had concluded that late 20th century northern hemisphere warmth was likely to have exceeded warmth of any time in the past 1,000 years on the basis of studies that compared temperatures for recent decades with reconstructions of earlier periods while allowing for uncertainties in the reconstructions. Soon, Baliunas and Legates published a response to this paper in the same journal.