The Many Travails of Climatologist Ben Santer

One of the world's leading climate modelers, Ben SaSanter has long been a target for cocontrariansnd climate skeptics.

For well over a decade, climate skeptics undercut the science on climate change by citing satellite temperature records, which showed that the atmosphere was not warming. But all of this changed last August when three papers published in Science showed that the satellite data were not as accurate as people had reported. When the data were corrected for problems such as satellite drift, researchers found that the earth's atmosphere has been heating up.

Last May, scientists reached a consensus on the issue in a report by President Bush's Climate Change Science Program (CCCCSP The planet is warming, scientists concluded, and the satellite data now show this as well. One of the report's lead authors is Ben SantSanterworld-class climate scientist.

Santer normally maintains a low profile, as a climate modeler at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but he does have a knack for popping up in the media and stirring up controversy. In the mid-1990s, he made headlines as a lead author for the assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPIPCC

Environmental Science & Technology interviews climate modeler Ben Santer.