Willie Soon, a climatologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is cranking up the heat within the global warming community. In a recent paper, he challenges a much-quoted United Nations expert panel, which concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade on record and that Earth heated up more in the 20th century than in any other century during the past millennium. "All of these statements about 20th-century climate change cannot be backed up with data," he says. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Virginia who was one of the U.N. panel's lead authors, counters that Soon's paper is "a thinly disguised publicity stunt" that is "not legitimate science."
The controversy stems from a meta-analysis in which Soon and his coauthors combed through hundreds of recent studies of long-term climate indicators, including tree rings, ice cores, sedimentary fossils, and the movements of glaciers. The data affirm that ...
