The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: a book review
No climate scientist has been subject to more attacks on their science and character than Penn State's Michael Mann, originator of the famed "hockey stick" graph of Earth's temperature history. Dr. Mann has an excellent new book called "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines" that takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the front lines the high-stakes battles between climate scientists and their detractors. It's a must-read for every serious student of Earth's climate. Along the way, you'll learn about tree rings, the IPCC process, the fossil fuel industry's savvy PR campaigns to discredit climate change science, and get an insider's view of the notorious stolen emails of "climategate."
For those unfamiliar with the "hockey stick", the shape of the graph showing Earth's temperature has a long, relatively flat portion representing the period 1000 AD - 1800 AD--the shaft of the hockey stick--followed by a sharp upward rise that began in the late 1800s and continues to this day--the blade of the hockey stick. When Dr. Mann first published the hockey stick graph in papers he wrote in 1998 and 1999, it quickly became a central icon in the climate change debate. As he writes in "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars," the hockey stick graph "told an easily understood story with a simple picture: that a sharp and highly unusual rise in atmospheric warming was occurring on Earth." Contrarians bent on discrediting the science of climate change have fiercely attacked the hockey stick, attempting to portray it as the key piece of evidence upon which all of climate change science depends (which is not correct, since many different data sets unrelated to the tree ring studies under attack show a hockey stick-like shape.) The contrarians have adopted "the Serengeti strategy" towards Dr. Mann--"a tried-and-true tactic of the climate change denial campaign...isolate individual scientists just as predators on the Serengeti Plain of Africa hunt their prey: picking off vulnerable individuals from the rest of the herd."
The history of the hockey stick
The book starts with some interesting background on Dr. Mann's career. He got into climate science by accident--while working on his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, funding got tight, and he elected to switch to the Department of Geology and Geophysics, where funding to perform research on natural climate cycles was available. In the mid-1990s, while working on his Ph.D., he helped discover the decades-long natural cycle of alternating warm and cool ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean thought to be responsible for the active hurricane period that began in 1995. He gave the phenomenon the now widely-used name, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), during an impromptu interview with science writer Dick Kerr. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1996, Dr. Mann moved on into using statistical methods to study past climate, as gleaned from tree ring studies. He takes the reader on a 5-page college-level discussion of the main technique used, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and shows how his famed "hockey stick" graph came about. It's one of the best descriptions I've seen on how PCA works (though it will be too technical for some.) His inaugural PCA work showing that the 1990s were likely the warmest decade in at least the past 600 years was published in 1998. Since the paper coincidentally happened to be published on Earth Day during the warmest year in Earth's history, the paper received a huge amount of media attention. His follow-up 1999 paper went further, suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade in the past 1,000 years, and 1998 was the warmest year. Dr. Mann was appointed as one of the lead authors of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the massive United Nations summary of climate change science that comes out every six years. We learn some interesting details about the approval process for the 2001 IPCC report, like the fact for two days, the scientists haggled with the Saudi Arabian delegation about one word in the Summary for Policy Makers. The IPCC report's summary requires unanimous approval by all nations, and the Saudis objected to the language that said, "the balance of evidence suggests an appreciable human influence on climate." They debated 30 different alternatives before finally settling on the language, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate."
Figure 1. The hockey stick graph as it appeared in the IPCC Third Assessment Report WG1 (2001) summary, Figure 2.20, Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction. Tree rings, corals, ice cores, and historical records are shown in blue, and instrumental data in red, from AD 1000 to 1999. The grey shaded region indicates the uncertainty in the annual temperature estimates (there is a 95% certainty that the temperature for any given year lies in the gray shaded region.) The thick black line is a smoothed version which highlights the long-term variations. A similar version of this graph appeared in Dr. Mann's original 1999 paper. Climate scientist Dr. Jerry Mahlman was responsible for giving this graph the nickname, the "hockey stick".
The battle begins
The majority of the book focuses on the battles over the hockey stick that ensued in 1998, as soon as Dr. Mann published his research. He writes: For more than a decade, the scientific community, in its effort to communicate the threat of climate change, has had to fight against the headwind of this industry-funded disinformation effort. The collective battles are what I term the "Climate wars". The battle raged furiously through 2006, when an extensive review of the hockey stick was performed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--an organization founded in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science" for the purpose of informing government policy. The NAS reaffirmed the validity of the hockey stick, concluding: "based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this new supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium." Dr. Mann writes, "One might think that this would have put an end to the accusations once and for all. But one would be wrong."
In November 2009, a few weeks before the December international climate summit in Copenhagen, the RealClimate.org website that Dr. Mann contributes to was hacked into, and a file with emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was posted. Dr. Mann explains in detail how these "climategate" emails were taken out context and distorted to appear scandalous by "a massive public relations campaign conducted by major players in the climate change denial movement." To illustrate, he gives the example of Isaac Newton's writings, which can easily be taken out context and distorted to give the impression that he was guilty of "conspiring to avoid public scrutiny," "insulting dissenting scientists," "manipulation of evidence," "knowingly publishing scientific fraud," "suppression of evidence," "abusing the peer review system," and "insulting critics." In the end, no evidence of scientific misconduct was found by any of the five independent reviews of the affair, conducted by the UK Parliament, a CRU commission led by eminent geoscientist Lord Oxburgh, Penn State University, the National Science Foundation Office of the Inspector General, and the University of East Anglia. As a result of "climategate", nothing at all changed in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change. It was a phony scandal.
A fierce advocate of good science
As I read the book, I was impressed by Dr. Mann's tremendous passion for science and knowledge that comes through. He loves figuring out how things work, and stands in fierce opposition to shoddy science and anti-science political attacks. I had the opportunity to sit down over a beer and talk with him at a recent conference, and he had little interest in talking politics. He'd much rather talk about science, and we had a great discussion about hurricanes--he's published several papers that use statistical techniques to estimate how many tropical storms we missed counting in the Atlantic before the advent of satellites. He frequently talks about how science works and the importance of following the scientific method in his book: "The scientific process--left to operate freely--is inherently self-correcting, even if the gears may at times turn more slowly than we would like...Scientists must be allowed to follow the path along which their intellectual inquiries take them, even if their findings and views might appear inconvenient to outside special interests." In the end, Dr. Mann is "cautiously optimistic" that humanity can meet the challenge of climate change, but acknowledges that climate scientists are in a "street fight" against well-funded climate change disinformers bent on obscuring the science.
Conclusion: five stars out of five
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines is a must-read for every serious student of climate change science, and gets my highest rating: five stars out of five. The book is $17.78 at Amazon.com. True to its title, the book has spawned its own mini-war in the ratings section of Amazon, where readers either loved it or hated it--75% of the reviews were 4 or 5 stars, while 21% were 1 star reviews. Only 4% of the readers gave it a mediocre 2 or 3 star rating. Some of the 1 star reviews are no doubt there because “Watt’s Up With That,” one of the most prominent climate science confusion sites, put up a post calling on readers to attack Mann’s book and to attack positive reviews.
Links
Besieged by Climate Deniers, A Scientist Decides to Fight Back, an opinion piece by Dr. Mann that appeared on the Yale Environment 360 site on April 12.
Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration from Penn State — time for some major media apologies and retractions. Climateprogress.org blog post by Joe Romm.
An interview with Dr. Mann about his book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", appeared on Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog in the New York Times on May 3.
My favorite climate science blog is realclimate.org, which Dr. Mann co-founded. You can see one of the latest challenges to the hockey stick answered in a May 11 post discussing tree ring records from Siberia.
I'll have a new post by Friday at the latest.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Wow! That's very cool looking.
Aletta does not want to go out without a bang.
nice nuclear explosion from the nuclear furance
3.2 / 999.3mb/ 49.0kt
Tampa, I hope you enjoyed you're rain because I believe that your atmosphere in Hills/Pinellas Counties have been picked over and it will take several hours (tomorrow 4-6 AM) before significant convection will reintiate.
The Main rain bands have been initiated (as of 10 PM) Along I-4 East of 75 to Western Orange County, expect the remaining showers W of 75 to taper off in the next hour, with only 10-20% coverage West of I-75, Polk County Eastward will remain with a 60-90% chance of rain, again tapering as you head East of the FLA Turnpike. N of Tampa, support of convective based Showers and T-storms will decrease as drier air at the upper levels supress and slow thunderstorm formation. Further South, moisture remains high and support is there for a light- moderate steady rain bath across SWFL with occasional pockets of heavier rain in complexes and isolated cells. Severe threat looks extremely limited w/o daytime heating, but do not be surprised if we don't have 1 or two strong to marginally severe thunderstorm where thermodynamics are best... mainly S of Tampa Bay.
Rain totals of 1 to 2 inches are expected with this system combining todays and tomorrows totals and averaging totals out across the area.
Stay safe... if you want me to do a weather forecast for your area, I take requests by mail or on the blog.
Have a great Nite
FM, (NWS Intern Hopeful)
All of it can be viewed in this image below.
Updated 5/17/2012 @ 02:00 UTC
1476 Produces Solar Flare
Just as we thought we have seen the last of Sunspot 1476, the former active region decided to produce a solar flare reaching near the M5.0 level. The GOES Solar X-Ray data did show M4.6 before it stopped reporting at 01:43 UTC Thursday morning. Because of the sunspots location, any possible CME may be directed mostly away from Earth. Stay Tuned for more information.
M-Class Solar Flare (Early Thursday) - SDO
The coastline does make a difference. The northern GOM coast is particularly vulnerable to surge from large major category storms because of the bathymetry of the coastline and the swampy lowlying nature of the shore. The Caribbean coastline of the Yucatan is quite different.
but the address is to youtu.be which is NOT YouTube. Not interested in finding out what's there because address MIMICRY is often attached to very NASTY garbage, especially including malware.
214 divingpyrate: ...climate warming...to assume it is all man-made is just as ridiculous as saying it does not exist.
True... If ya lose grip on a wine glass held over a granite floor, it wouldn't fall then shatter if it weren't for that pesky party-poopin' physics.
Cain't even begin to tell ya how many times I got blamed for stuff that was obviously physics' fault.
WTPZ41 KNHC 170231
TCDEP1
TROPICAL STORM ALETTA DISCUSSION NUMBER 11
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL EP012012
800 PM PDT WED MAY 16 2012
THE TROPICAL STORM CONTINUES TO HAVE A DISORGANIZED APPEARANCE ON
SATELLITE IMAGES WITH LITTLE OR NO EVIDENCE OF BANDING FEATURES.
A STRONG BURST OF THUNDERSTORMS HAS RECENTLY FORMED OVER A SMALL
AREA JUST NORTH OF THE ESTIMATED CENTER. THE INTENSITY IS HELD AT
35 KT FOR THIS ADVISORY BASED ON DVORAK RULES AND THE ASCAT PASS
FROM EARLIER TODAY...WHICH INDICATED THAT ALETTA WAS A LITTLE
STRONGER THAN IT LOOKED. DRY AIR AND SOUTHERLY SHEAR ARE LIKELY TO
TAKE THEIR TOLL ON THE TROPICAL CYCLONE AND ALETTA SHOULD WEAKEN TO
A TROPICAL DEPRESSION VERY SOON...AND DEGENERATE TO A REMNANT LOW
IN 48 HOURS OR LESS. THE OFFICIAL INTENSITY FORECAST IS CLOSE TO
THE MOST RECENT LGEM RUN AND IS THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS NHC WIND
SPEED FORECAST.
INITIAL MOTION CONTINUES WESTWARD...280/8...FOR THE TIME BEING. A
WEAKNESS IN THE MID- TO LOW-LEVEL RIDGE TO THE NORTH OF ALETTA
SHOULD CAUSE THE CYCLONE TO TURN NORTHWARD WITHIN THE NEXT DAY OR
SO. AFTERWARDS...A BROAD LOW-LEVEL WESTERLY FLOW TO THE SOUTH AND
SOUTHWEST OF MAINLAND MEXICO IS LIKELY TO CARRY ALETTA...OR ITS
REMNANT...EASTWARD OR EAST-SOUTHEASTWARD UNTIL THE SYSTEM LOSES ITS
IDENTITY. THE OFFICIAL TRACK FORECAST IS SIMILAR TO THE PREVIOUS
ONE AND CLOSE TO THE DYNAMICAL TRACK MODEL CONSENSUS.
FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS
INIT 17/0300Z 11.5N 114.3W 35 KT 40 MPH
12H 17/1200Z 12.0N 115.0W 30 KT 35 MPH
24H 18/0000Z 12.6N 115.3W 30 KT 35 MPH
36H 18/1200Z 13.2N 115.0W 25 KT 30 MPH
48H 19/0000Z 13.6N 114.4W 25 KT 30 MPH...POST-TROP/REMNT LOW
72H 20/0000Z 14.0N 113.0W 20 KT 25 MPH...POST-TROP/REMNT LOW
96H 21/0000Z 13.5N 111.5W 20 KT 25 MPH...POST-TROP/REMNT LOW
120H 22/0000Z...DISSIPATED
$$
FORECASTER PASCH
2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season
LASCO latest Image
I'd hate to see if it hit a few more miles to the north.
oh great... What's worse than Tyranosaurs in F-14s?
Hurricanes joining the nuclear club.
Tagged..
The Denver protocol is now in Play.
Have you been prank calling the white house again?
I see.
U do know the NSA, CIA and FBI monitor all heavily trafficked websites. Your on here everyday as well as many of us.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
Just imagine dat file.
Maybe all your posts about government got noticed... They're calling you next Pat!
Im a former Marine, they know me like you know PS2.
: )
Link
Some comments from there:
19. Levi32 4:33 AM GMT on June 22, 2006 +1
Welcom to WU Dr. Master's! ROFL!!!
24. KEEPEROFTHEGATE 8:29 PM GMT on July 29, 2008 +1
hello
26. CybrTeddy 1:42 AM GMT on June 30, 2009 +2
Oh this blog has no idea what it's in for..
I don't know PS2. I am XBOX all the way! :D
Viewing: 451 - 501
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