The Age of Global Warming: A History (34 page)
Read The Age of Global Warming: A History Online
Authors: Rupert Darwall
Asked for his opinion on Mann’s statistical methodology, Bloomfield said that some of the choices had been ‘appropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr Wegman.’
[79]
Holed beneath the water line, the SS Hockey Stick was listing badly.
Privately, leading climate scientists recognised it had never been seaworthy. In his exchange with Jones in October 2004, Wigley said he had read McIntyre and McKitrick’s paper. ‘A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH [Mann, Bradley & Hughes] is a very sloppy piece of work – an opinion I have held for some time.’
[80]
The public line was denial. Asked in 2005 whether it had been unwise for the IPCC to have given so much prominence to the Hockey Stick, the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri replied:
No. It is no exaggeration and it doesn’t contradict the rest of the IPCC assessment. Of course you can always argue about details. But we assess all the available literature, and we found the hockey stick was consistent with that.
[81]
The authors of the Fourth Assessment Report continued to tiptoe away from it. In May 2006, Mann emailed Briffa. It was ‘an absolute travesty’ that the Hockey Stick was being relegated.
[82]
Both found it convenient to blame Susan Solomon, Working Group I co-chair. Briffa complained that ‘much had to be removed’. He had been ‘particularly unhappy’ that he could not get the statement into the Summary for Policy Makers. ‘I tried my best but we were basically railroaded by Susan,’ Briffa wrote.
[83]
Some climate scientists argued that even if the Hockey Stick failed, it didn’t matter. In 2005 Stefan Rahmstorf, a partisan of Mann’s at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote that even if the Hockey Stick was wrong it would ‘tell us nothing about anthropogenic climate change’ because it post-dated the 1995 Second Assessment Report’s verdict that the balance of evidence suggested a ‘discernible’ human influence on the climate.
[84]
If so, why have any more IPCC reports?
Such revisionism needs to be set against the context of what prominent climate scientists had been saying previously. For Schneider, the one-thousand-year record did matter. Otherwise scientists could only gauge the probability that climate change in the twentieth century was natural or anthropogenic based on a single coin toss. For Gerald North, the Hockey Stick had been, bam! – the temperature jumps up.
Alternative temperatures reconstructions, telling essentially the same story, were therefore pressed into service. It was like someone was looking for sixes from rolling dice – use an algorithm that gave greater significance to series with high numbers of sixes (Mann’s technique). It still left two others: pre-selecting runs that had a high number of sixes (bristlecones and foxtails were essential to most reconstructions) and through truncations and interpolations to create runs with higher numbers of sixes. According to McIntyre, ‘The active ingredients in the twentieth-century anomaly remain the same old whores: bristlecones, foxtails, Yamal’ – a narrow selection of tree rings from the Siberian Yamal peninsula. ‘They keep trotting them out in new costumes,’ McIntyre blogged in 2007.
[85]
The one seen by more people than any other turned out to be a cross-dressed version, Mann’s original dolled up in an entirely different set of clothes – starring in the most famous climate change movie of all time.
[1]
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(2001), p. 2.
[2]
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(2004), p. 186.
[3]
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(1996), p. 140.
[4]
ibid., p. 96.
[5]
ibid., p. 64.
[6]
ibid., p. 47.
[7]
ibid., p. 68.
[8]
ibid., p. 94.
[9]
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 17
th
January 1961 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12086
[10]
ibid.
[11]
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th
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[12]
Stephen McIntyre, ‘Climategate: A Battlefield Perspective – Annotated Notes for Presentation to Heartland Conference, Chicago’ 16
th
May 2010, p. 10 www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-heartland_2010.pdf
[13]
A.W. Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 72.
[14]
Stephen McIntyre & Ross McKitrick, ‘Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series’ in
Energy & Environment
Vol. 14. No. 6 (2003), p. 753.
[15]
ibid., p. 766.
[16]
Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 106.
[17]
Ross McKitrick, ‘What is the “Hockey Stick” Debate About?’, 4
th
April 2005, p. 10.
[18]
Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 128.
[19]
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mission statement, http://www.nature.com/nature/about/index.html
[20]
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430, 105, 1
st
July 2004.
[21]
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, 15
th
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[22]
Bert Bolin,
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[23]
Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 434.
[24]
ibid., p. 435.
[25]
Stephen H. Schneider email to Ben Santer, 6
th
January 2009.
[26]
David Verado email to Stephen McIntyre, 17
th
December 2003, reproduced in Michael E. Mann letter to Joe Barton, 15
th
July 2005 www.realclimate.org/Mann_response_to_Barton.pdf
[27]
Email from Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia to Warwick Hughes, 21
st
February 2005 http://www.climateaudit.org/correspondence/cru.correspondence.pdf
[28]
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th
January 2007. Cited in Holland (2008), p. 7.
[29]
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(2007), p. 495.
[30]
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(1959), p. 56.
[31]
David Appell, ‘Behind the Hockey Stick’ in
Scientific American
, March 2005, p. 35.
[32]
Antonio Regalado, ‘In Climate Debate, the “Hockey Stick” Leads to a Face-Off’ in the
Wall Street Journal
, 14
th
February 2005.
[33]
ibid.
[34]
ibid.
[35]
Sherwood Boehlert letter to Joe Barton, 14
th
July 2005 www.realclimate.org/Boehlert_letter_to_Barton.pdf
[36]
Henry Waxman letter to Joe Barton, 1
st
July 2005.
[37]
www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/docs/05-7-13_climatebarton.pdf
[38]
Michael Bender and others, letter to Joe Barton & Ed Whitfield, 15
th
July 2005 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/barton-and-the-hockey-stick/
[39]
John Orcutt and Walter Lyons letter to Joe Barton, 8
th
August 2005 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/barton-and-the-hockey-stick/
[40]
Nature
, ‘Climate of distrust’ Vol. 436, No. 7047, 7
th
July 2005.
[41]
Mann letter to Joe Barton, 15
th
July 2005.
[42]
Alan Leshner letter to Joe Barton, 13
th
July 13 www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/docs/05-7-13_climatebarton.pdf
[43]
John Orcutt and Walter Lyons letter to Joe Barton, 8
th
August 2005 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/barton-and-the-hockey-stick/
[44]
Roger Scruton,
The Uses of Pessimism
(2010), p. 170.
[45]
Mann letter to Joe Barton.
[46]
Bridgman,
The Way Things Are
(1959), p. 56.
[47]
Stephen H. Schneider,
Science As A Contact Sport
(2009), pp. 147–8.
[48]
Ralph J. Cicerone letter to Joe Barton, 15
th
July 2005 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/barton-and-the-hockey-stick/
[49]
Juliet Eilperin, ‘GOP Chairmen Face Off on Global Warming’ in the
Washington Post
, 18
th
July 2005.
[50]
Richard A Kerr, ‘Draft Report Affirms Human Influence’ in
Science
, Vol. 288, 28th April 2000.
[51]
Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 229.
[52]
House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs,
The Economics of Climate Change
, Vol. II (2005), pp. 16–17.
[53]
Phil Jones email to Tom Wigley, 21
st
October 2004.
[54]
J.T. Houghton, Testimony to the US Senate – Energy and Natural Resources Committee, 21
st
July 2005 http://ftp.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/109s/24631.txt
[55]
ibid.
[56]
Gerald R. North, Presentation to Dessler Seminar (2006) http://www.met.tamu.edu/people/faculty/dessler/NorthH264.mp4
[57]
Stephen McIntyre, ‘D’Arrigo: Making Cherry Pie’ 6
th
March 2006 http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/07/darrigo-making-cherry-pie/
[58]
Montford,
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
(2010), p. 237.
[59]
ibid., p. 289.
[60]
Stephen McIntyre, ‘Climategate: A Battlefield Perspective – Annotated Notes for Presentation to Heartland Conference, Chicago’.
[61]
Richard Alley email to Jonathan Overpeck & Keith Briffa, 8
th
March 2006.
[62]
National Research Council,
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
(2006), p. 3.
[63]
ibid.
[64]
ibid., p. 113.
[65]
ibid., p. 4.
[66]
ibid.
[67]
ibid.
[68]
ibid., p. 98.
[69]
ibid., p. 99.
[70]
Andrew Revkin, ‘Panel Supports a Controversial Report on Global Warming’ in the
New York Times
, 23
rd
June 2006.
[71]
Geoff Brumfiel, ‘Academy affirms hockey-stick graph’ in
Nature
, 441, 1032-1033 (29
th
June 2006).
[72]
Brumfiel, ‘Academy affirms hockey-stick graph’ in
Nature
, 441, 1032-1033 & Revkin, ‘Panel Supports a Controversial Report on Global Warming’ in the
New York Times.
[73]
National Research Council,
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
(2006), p. vii.
[74]
Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott & Yasmin H. Said, ‘Ad Hoc Committee Report on the “Hockey Stick” Global Climate Reconstruction’ July 2006, p. 4.
[75]
ibid.
[76]
ibid.
[77]
ibid.
[78]
Questions Surrounding The ‘Hockey Stick’ Temperature Studies: Implications For Climate Change Assessments Hearings Before The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of The Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, 19
th
and 27
th
July 2006, p. 74.
[79]
ibid.
[80]
Wigley email to Jones.
[81]
‘Climate change: Is the US Congress bullying experts?’ in
Nature
, Vol. 436, No. 7047, 7
th
July 2005.
[82]
Michael E. Mann email to Keith Briffa.
[83]
Keith Briffa email to Michael E. Mann, 29
th
April 2007.
[84]
Stefan Rahmstorf, ‘What If … the “Hockey Stick” Were Wrong?’ 27
th
January 2005 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/what-if-the-hockey-stick-were-wrong/
[85]
Stephen McIntyre, ‘Bürger Comment on Osborn and Briffa 2006’ 30
th
June 2007 http://climateaudit.org/2007/06/30/burger-comment-on-osborn-and-briffa-2006/
