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This week’s newsstand, print-edition of FOCUS magazine (February 25, 2013, No. 9/13) has a 2-page interview with leading German climate scientist Professor Hans von Storch (HvS) titled: Climate Scientist Against Panic Spreading.

Hans von Storch

The sub-heading of the FOCUS article on page 92 reads:

Scientist Hans von Storch goes hard in his own way: He accuses climate science of hype and ‘methodical failure’.”

Here he is speaking about the IPCC scientists. The interview coincides with the official release of his latest book “Klimafalle“, which will hit the bookshelves tomorrow.

HvS says the focus of the climate issue is too much on the alarmists and those who claim it’s all humbug. His book attempts to move the discussion to the centre.

There’s little doubt that man-made CO2 emissions have caused the globe to warm since the industrial revolution, he tells FOCUS, but not all scientists say sea levels are going to rise 2 meters by the year 2100 and that hurricanes are getting more frequent.

He says the climate issue needs to be debated, and warns scientists against acting like they are the “keepers of the truth”.

At the center of the magazine’s 2-page spread are two juxtaposed images: the left one shows the divergence between the observed global mean temperature and the IPCC projections; the right image shows Chancellor Angela Merkel with Prof Han-Joachim Schellnhuber standing in the background. The text under the juxtaposed images reads “indeed the global mean temperature has stagnated for years” and that HvS’s book Die Klimafälle “criticises the alarmist view of the PIK” (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research).

HvS has always been critical of scientists interfering in the political process. FOCUS asks HvS if Chancellor Merkel ought not have a climate advisor, to which HvS replies:

Just a single advisor? No.”

FOCUS then asks HvS about efforts by scientists to intimidate any media critical of alarmism, a practice Stefan Rahmstorf is infamous for:

That is a not taking one of the most important institutions seriously, namely the media. Anyone who behaves like that obviously views himself as the judge who knows how media reporting is supposed to be.”

FOCUS then describes the IPCC’s embarrassing Himalayan error, asking HvS how it is that some scientists can claim to be infallible? HvS attributes it to a “circle-the-wagons mentality” within the climate science community, and even blames the political discussion in the USA “which has a very aggressive skeptics’ scene that extends all the way into Congress and has influence on policy-making.”

On the 15-year temperature stagnation, HvS still does not believe it disproves in the AGW theory, but concedes:

As the scientific community, we were just not prepared for the temperature not rising for a decade as CO2 concentrations rose. We had not thought enough about the possibility of falsification. […] We concentrated too much on looking ahead and said: Great! Everything fits our explanation. For many colleagues asking questions was frowned upon because this ‘could provide the climate skeptics with ammo‘. And that is a methodical failure.”

On Mojib Latif’s prediction that Central Europe would soon hardly see snow, HvS says criticism of the models here by skeptics is “completely legitimate” and adds:

Us climate scientists oversold. We said we had to announce the basic truth, and not to overload the people with too many details. Thus the problem arose because climate science did not understand its own role.”

In summary, HvS, a warmist, is calling for a fundamental correction in the way climate science goes about its business.

But one ought not think that HvS criticizes only the alarmists, he has plenty of criticism for the skeptics in his book as well.

Hans von Storch photo credit: European People’s Party, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.