Every year, the world’s Earth and space scientists converge on San Francisco for the fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting. Around 25,000 scientists attended this year, most of whom do research relevant to climate change. I’ve just returned from the conference, at which I was struck by the quality and quantity of fascinating research and people.

Great humans, under attack

I had the pleasure of meeting with dozens of climate scientists, and they were without exception kind, brilliant, fascinating people with a passion for learning how the Earth’s climate functions and how humans are changing it. It was a stark contrast from the way the climate science community is often portrayed – as frauds, conspiring to falsify data as part of the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.

These claims have been made by several American political representatives, including Senator James Inhofe, Congressman Lamar Smith, and Senator (and leading Republican presidential candidate) Ted Cruz. Recent comments made by Smith and Cruz attacking climate scientists and misrepresenting their data were referenced in at least three talks at the conference.

Climate scientists are understandably unhappy with the way their and their data and research are being misrepresented by these politicians. These types of distortions have led to countless personal attacks on climate scientists. I spent time with Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes, who were attacked because they published groundbreaking research reconstructing past temperatures that resulted in the ‘hockey stick’ that certain parties found politically inconvenient. Mann and Bradley have written books documenting their journeys in navigating these attacks.

I also learned that the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was called upon to help 40 members of the climate science community last year. While this organization provides critical help to scientists who are being subjected to senseless legal attacks, it’s help that shouldn’t be needed in the first place. My colleague John Mashey was forced to enlist the help of the legal defense fund, and struck a chord with me when he said,

I’m not a climate scientist. I grew up on a farm with a respect for science, and it pisses me off to see climate scientists being attacked just because they’re doing important research whose answers some people really dislike.

Fascinating research and implications

Among the talks I attended was one by Sarah Myhre, who published important research about extreme oxygen loss in oceans during past climate change events. The paper received significant media attention, and when Myhre expressed personal concern about the implications of her research for her son’s generation, she received institutional pushback. Myhre talked about the importance of scientists having the option to make these types of personal connections, and for their institutions to support them, especially in the case of young researchers without job security.

Many of the scientific talks I attended addressed the current unprecedented California drought. Jay Famiglietti of NASA noted that because California produces so much food, the lack of water in the state is really a national and even a global problem. Richard Seager’s team estimated that global warming has intensified the California drought by about 20%, while another study suggested the warming contribution could be closer to 50%. Research led by Ivana Cvijanovic found that declining Arctic sea ice leads to high pressure ridges off the coast of California like the one that’s been pushing storm systems around the state – another way human-caused climate change could be exacerbating the California drought.

Several talks also dealt with the short-term slowdown in global surface warming, which Kevin Trenberth and Thomas Karl agreed has likely ended, with 2014 and 2015 breaking heat records, and the Met Office predicting 2016 will break once again. The experts agreed that during the slowdown, global warming merely shifted more heat from the atmosphere to the oceans, and that “pause” and “hiatus” are inaccurate descriptions that unfortunately seeped into the scientific literature from the contrarian media.

Zeke Hausfather presented his research in collaboration with Kevin Cowtan and others, which showed that climate models predicted global warming even more accurately than previously thought. In a second talk, Hausfather presented his findings on the viability of natural gas to act as a “bridge fuel” during the transition from coal to near-zero carbon energy sources. He found that while replacing coal with natural gas would make it easier to stay below 3°C warming from pre-industrial temperatures, it would also make it harder to stay below the 2°C target. Ultimately if coal can be replaced by near-zero carbon energy in less than 12 years, replacing it with natural gas in the near-term would do more harm than good.

Reprehensible attacks

That was just a tiny sample of the fascinating research presented last week. The most important point to take from the AGU conference is this: climate scientists are good, smart people who are just trying to learn about the many nuances of the Earth’s climate. Attacking these brilliant people because their research has some inconvenient policy implications is reprehensible, and our society should not tolerate it.