Hans von Storch (born 1949 in Nordfriesland) is a German climate scientist. He is Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and (since 2001) Director of the Institute of Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. He is a member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics. 1949 (MCMXLIX) was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1949 calendar). ... Nordfriesland (literally Northern Frisia) is a district in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. ... The University of Hamburg was founded on the 1 April 1919 by Wilhelm Stern and others. ... Geesthacht/Elbe is the largest city of Herzogtum Lauenburg in Schleswig-Holstein. ...

"Climate Research" controversy

In 2003 von Storch was appointed as editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Research (having been on the editorial board since 1994), with effect from 1 August 2003, after a controversial article (Soon and Baliunas 2003) had raised questions about the decentralised review process (with no editor-in-chief); and the editorial policy of one editor, Chris de Freitas [1]. Von Storch drafted and circulated an editorial on the new regime, but following the publisher's refusal to publish it he resigned four days before he was due to start his new position [2]. Four other editors later followed. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.”[3] Willie Soon (Wei-Hock Soon) is an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. ... Sallie Baliunas is at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division and formerly Deputy Director of the Mount Wilson Institute. ...

Publications

In late 2004 his team published an article in Science that tested multiproxy methods such as those used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998, often called MBH98, [4] or Mann and Jones [5] to obtain the global temperature variations in the past 1000 years. The test showed that the method used in MBH98 would inherently underestimate large variations had they occurred. This conclusion is disputed by Mann et al, who assert that the model used by von Storch overestimates the variability. Science is the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). ... The temperature record of the past 1000 years describes the reconstruction of temperature for the last 1000 years on the Northern Hemisphere. ...

To reach this conclusion, von Storch et al. used a climate model to generate a series of annual temperature maps for the world over the past several centuries. They then applied the methods used in MBH98, a variation of principal component analysis, to the computed temperature maps and found that the amount of variation was considerably reduced. In a subsequent exchange with Wahl, Ritson and Ammann in Science[6], he showed that the underestimation of past temperature variations by the MBH98 method is a very robust feature, which appears with detrended and non-detrended data and in two different climate models tested, ECHO-G (Germany) and HadCM3 (UK). In statistics, principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique that can be used to simplify a dataset; more formally it is a linear transformation that chooses a new coordinate system for the data set such that the greatest variance by any projection of the data set comes to lie on...

He is also known for his article in Der Spiegel in which he warns against exaggerated reports by scientists which want to catch the attention of public. He states in this article that;"Scientific research faces a crisis because its public figures are overselling the issues to gain attention in a hotly contested market for newsworthy information."[7] Photo of the cover of the first issue of Der Spiegel (1/1947) Der Spiegel (German for The Mirror) is Europes biggest and Germanys most influential weekly magazine, published in Hamburg, with a circulation of around one million per week. ...

Donald Duck

In 1977, Hans von Storch co-founded a 100-member Donald Duck Club, defending Donald Duck against the accusations of indecent behavior. Between 1976 and 1985 he was publisher of a magazine on Donald Duck, Der Hamburger Donaldist. Donald Duck Donald Duck is an animated cartoon and comic-book character from Walt Disney Productions. ...

References

• H. von Storch, E. Zorita, J.M. Jones, Y. Dimitriev, F. González-Rouco, and S.F.B. Tett, "Reconstructing past climate from noisy data", Science 22 October 2004; 306: 679-682 online September 30
• Soon, W., and Baliunas, S. (2003): "Proxy climate and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years." Climate Research, 23: 89-110

External links

• von Storch's web page at GKSS (with Biography, links to publications, etc)
• Clare Goodess, SGR Newsletter 28, November 2003, "Stormy Times for Climate Research"
• Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, Der Spiegel, 24 January 2005, "How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear"
• D.O.N.A.L.D. website