If you ever wanted to know how it feels to be hunted by a pack of rabid wolves, Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick
is the book for you. The “hockey stick” graph became an icon in the
Climate Wars, at least in the sense that it gave a target for the
climate denialist industry to focus on in their efforts to deny the
science. For those who are confused the bottom line is this – the hockey
stick is robust, joined by a dozen other graphs into a veritable
hockey team, and represents one small piece of multiple lines of
evidence that demonstrate our planet is being warmed by human activity.
Mann begins by discussing how the hockey stick was “Born in a War”
during the mid-1990s. As his own research was just beginning to
develop, the climate denialist industry was already hard at work
attacking other scientists like Ben Santer in what Mann calls the
“Serengeti strategy.” In “Climate Science Comes of Age” and “Signals in
the Noise” Mann takes us through the state-of-the-science and how his
emerging research relates to the research of other scientists,
including future co-author Raymond Bradley. In “The Making of the
Hockey Stick” Mann gives us both the history and the science that led
to the seminal paper commonly referred to as MBH98 and its follow up
paper MBH99. The hockey stick papers. In short, the hockey stick is
merely a reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures going back a
millennia or so and based on a range of proxy data, that is, data from
corals, ice cores, tree rings and other sources of long-term
information that are used to define atmospheric temperatures. This one
(relatively) simple graph was the result of “a substantial body of
work.”
But as the science developed so too did the attacks on that science by
fossil fuel industry lobbyists and their allies. The hockey stick graph
became part of the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, and was
perceived as a major threat to the denialist industry’s interests. It
was actually only one of three figures used in that IPCC report showing
the same sort of pattern of historical temperatures. As Mann
discusses, the MBH papers didn’t even attempt to establish causality,
but this fact – like most facts – didn’t seem to slow the denialist
desire to set up the hockey stick as THE pedestal of climate change…and
then proceed to try to tear it down.
Mann goes on in ensuing chapters to discuss the “Origins of Denial”
(e.g., going back to the tobacco industry’s “doubt is our product”
strategy), and the various critiques of the hockey stick. Some of the
more interesting chapters have to do with the political attacks on Mann
and his co-authors. The chapter “Say It Ain’t So, (Smokey) Joe!”
refers to Joe Barton (“I apologize to BP” for holding them accountable
for the Deepwater Horizon spill). Barton called a House hearing on the
hockey stick based solely on an opinion piece written in the Wall Street
Journal. Barton was universally chastised for abusing his position to
carry on a political intimidation. Even other Republicans like Sherwood
Boehlert and John McCain rebuked Barton’s clear attempts to harass
scientists.
In “A Tale of Two Reports,” Mann relates the findings of two
evaluations of the hockey stick paper – one by the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) commissioned by Sherwood Boehlert, and one by a
statistics professor named Edward Wegman commissioned by Joe Barton.
The NAS review was conducted by a team of highly qualified scientists
and looked intensively at the research. The Wegman team consisted of
Wegman, one of his graduate students, and one other co-author. The NAS
review universally reaffirmed the veracity and robustness of the MBH
hockey stick. The Wegman report disagreed. Not surprisingly, evidence
later determined that Wegman had collaborated with denialist
organizations, had passed off much of Stephen McIntyre’s faulty work as
his own, and as much as 1/3 or more of the Wegman report had been
plagiarized. Despite reaffirmation by the NAS, the addition of a dozen
other independent reconstructions all showing the same thing, and
voluminous evidence from multiple lines of investigation all showing
that the hockey stick accurately represents the state-of-the-science,
the denialist bloggers still repeat the false talking points coming out
of Wegman’s ethically-challenged and factually-deficient report.
There is much more in the book, of course, and along the way Mann also
discusses the ubiquitous inability of any denialist argument to stand
up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. He discusses the cadre
of industry-sponsored blogs that serve as an echo chamber for denialist
talking points, even long after they have been thoroughly debunked
many times (including, for example, the falsehood that the hockey stick
is broken).
Mann further discusses attempts to intimidate climate scientists in
chapters called “Heads of the Hydra” (whenever one false talking point
is debunked, two more false talking points are tossed out and/or
recycled from the ones already debunked), “The Battle of the Bulge”
(about how the denialist industry has made a last ditch effort to
harass and intimidate scientists now that the science has become
undeniable), and “Climategate: The Real Story” (how the denialist
industry coordinated an orchestrated disinformation campaign). Mann’s
recounting of how the “hide the decline” false talking point required
the convenient omission of 23 words and the combining of two completely
unrelated topics for the denialists to create their fake scandal is
enlightening.
The final chapter “Fighting Back” is about how climate scientists have
started to defend themselves and the science against the vicious
harassment and intimidation of the climate denial lobby. One example he
lists is Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli’s witch hunt that was
working its way up through the courts. Just this past week the Virginia
Supreme Court ruled that Cuccinelli had no basis for pursuing what all
parties acknowledge is nothing more than a politically motivated
attempt to intimidate scientists who are doing research politicians
find ideologically inconvenient.
In an Epilogue, Mann notes that his views of the “role of the
scientist” have evolved over the last 10 years. Previously Mann, like
most scientists, believed the role of the scientist was to do
scientific research and that others should take on the duty of
communicating it to the public. Now he believes that it is a
responsibility of all scientists to ensure that their science is
accurately communicated, and sometimes that means being out there to
correct the intentional disinformation pushed by the science denial
lobby. All scientists should consider this advice.
I highly recommend this book. I also highly recommend the book Global Warming and Political Intimidation by Raymond S. Bradley, the “B” of MBH98/99. Like Mann, Bradley has experienced first hand the “Serengeti Strategy” of harassment.
Photo Credit and to order the book: Amazon.com
No comments:
Post a Comment