PIK Scientists Criticized For ‘Scouring For Most Alarmist Stories’

Climate researcher Björn Stevens, director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Meteorology in Hamburg, criticizes his Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) colleagues, calling them “alarmist”

By Die kalte Sonne

Björn Stevens is the director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Meteorology in Hamburg and an expert on clouds. [bold, links added]

In the Zeit (behind paywall), Stevens expresses criticism of colleagues, primarily at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK.

The Oldenburger Online Zeitung has taken up the interview and quotes indirectly from it.

Among other things, they had warned of the disappearance of all clouds due to global warming. ‘That’s nonsense,’ Stevens said. The scenario is wrong, he said. ‘It’s based on a paper from our institute taken out of context and on a second paper that has numerous flaws.’

The dramatic behavior of the climate in that simulation is based on a gross simplification of clouds that has nothing to do with reality, he said.

You can’t get rid of clouds that easily, said Stevens, whose research group simulates clouds in climate models and on whose expertise in cloud issues the world climate report relies heavily.

Why his colleagues claimed otherwise, he said, is a question for them to answer. ‘I can only admire the way colleagues there scour the literature for the most alarmist stories.‘”

But the blasphemy goes even further.

‘But the tipping points that my colleague Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and others at PIK emphasize are based on their private, much weaker definition.

‘They reinterpret tipping points to include less abrupt or even reversible climate changes. With this redefinition, they find tipping points everywhere. Then it’s permanent alarm.’”

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