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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18zfirst 2012 Tropical Waves
May 16, 2012 - 23:45 UTC
A STRONG TROPICAL WAVE IS CURRENTLY OVER W AFRICA ALONG 15N9W TO
7N9W CAUSING WIDESPREAD CONVECTION ACROSS W AFRICA. MODEL
GUIDANCE INDICATES THE WAVE WILL MOVE OFF THE COAST AND OVER E
ATLC WATERS WITHIN THE NEXT 24-36 HOURS.
A TROPICAL WAVE IS ALONG 8N50W TO 4N52W MOVING W NEAR 15 KTS.
WHILE THE WAVE WAS NOT EASILY IDENTIFIED OVER MUCH OF THE ATLC
WATERS...UPPER AIR TIME SECTIONS FROM DAKAR SENEGAL INDICATE
THAT THE WAVE MOVED OFF THE COAST AROUND 10/1200 UTC. THE
CURRENT SPEED IS BASED OFF THIS ESTIMATION. TOTAL PRECIPITABLE
WATER IMAGERY INDICATES THAT AN AREA OF MAXIMUM MOISTURE IS NEAR
THE WAVE AXIS AS WELL AS TO THE W OF THE AXIS. CURRENTLY
SCATTERED MODERATE/ISOLATED STRONG CONVECTION IS MAINLY W OF THE
AXIS FROM 2N-10N BETWEEN 50W-56W. MODERATE CONVECTION IS ALSO
FARTHER W NEAR THE LESSER ANTILLES...BUT IS MORE ASSOCIATED WITH
UPPER LEVEL DIFFLUENCE THAN THE WAVE. AS THE WAVE MOVES WWD
THESE AREAS WILL LIKELY INTERACT AND COULD PRODUCE HEAVY
RAINFALL OVER THE LESSER ANTILLES.
Bordonaro.
well still , u should join.
donuts are good.
Second, we're in the longest drought of landfalling Category 3+ in USA history
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/05/updated -us-intense-hurricane-drought.html#comment-form
Idk but mine's song is White and Nerdy by Weird Al, lol!
(Er...when's our next chance of rain?! LOL)
I just saw that on wwxrisk.com on Facebook, that's a good article!
Our time is running out.
BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA
857 PM EDT WED MAY 16 2012
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A
* SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR...
NORTHWESTERN WORCESTER COUNTY IN CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS...
EASTERN FRANKLIN COUNTY IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS...
THIS INCLUDES THE CITY OF GREENFIELD...
* UNTIL 1000 PM EDT
* AT 853 PM EDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING QUARTER SIZE HAIL...AND
DAMAGING WINDS IN EXCESS OF 60 MPH. THIS STORM WAS LOCATED NEAR
DEERFIELD...OR NEAR GREENFIELD...AND WAS MOVING EAST AT 25 MPH.
* SOME LOCATIONS IN THE WARNING INCLUDE...MONTAGUE...BERNARDSTON...
GILL...WENDELL...ERVING...NORTHFIELD...ORANGE...WA RWICK...ATHOL...
ROYALSTON...PHILLIPSTON...TEMPLETON AND GARDNER.
A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1000 PM EDT
WEDNESDAY EVENING FOR NORTHERN CONNECTICUT AND SOUTHERN MASSACHUSETTS
AND SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
&&
LAT...LON 4262 7274 4273 7243 4272 7221 4256 7188
4247 7274
TIME...MOT...LOC 0057Z 255DEG 22KT 4256 7258
$$
FRANK
Still, we had the 2nd most destructive US Hurricane hit in those 7 years. Ike.
Was Ike really our second most destructive hurricane ever?
With $37.6 billion dollars in damage (2008 USD), yes, it was.
Yes, at 37.6 billion at the most recent update by the NHC earlier this year, accounting for final insurance claims, ect.
I'd say more of Late-October, but still, by that point. Over 3/4 of the season is over.
Ike was a category 2, but i sure do remember it. It was on the verge of becoming a 3 once more, so personally i dont care, its not about the rating, its about the damage.
That number isn't adjusted for changes in the value of the dollar though... Andrew caused $43.9 billion in damage if you adjust its actual $26.5 billion to today's dollars
And if one assumes that the government has all that power, one should also ask why it hasn't run roughshod since MacArthur and Eisenhower gunned down the WWI BonusMarchers.
The Taliban has assault rifles and worse. And come out of a "nation" of various peoples who have been through lifetime training in a country-in-rebellion (against each other when foreign "conqueror"s couldn't be lured in) since the death of Alexander the Great (and also before Alexander'sEmpire).
I fail to see how handguns and rifles held by a buncha American slackers is gonna fight off drone strikes and the USMarines.
Maybe the government ain't interested in a takeover -- ie taking all of the blame for society's problems -- when most of the blame can be shouldered by the folks who keep voting the government in.
The Great Miami Hurricane would be #1 then.
However, adjusted for real damages and insurance claims - Ike is #2.
What? The Great Miami Hurricane only caused $100 million in 1926 USD. That's a little over $1 billion 2012 USD.
Hurricane Katrina caused $108 billion in 2005 USD. That's $127 billion in 2012 USD.
EDIT: Oh, I see what you are looking at.
I don't think you're supposed to adjust for inflation. But the money value today isn't equal to that of several years and decades ago.
I hope you do too.
If it quacks like a duck...
Quite a debate has been raging in the weather office today. The topic has been our current weather pattern – and whether we're seeing the start of our summer rainy season.
By the strictest scientific standards, many meteorologists would say no, not yet. The textbook says that the rainy season begins with the establishment of the Bermuda high over the Western Atlantic. This high is literally a warm air bubble that brings the partly sunny – hot and humid days of summer where daily high temperatures soar well into the 90s.
On the other side of the debate, Doppler radar has been lit up every afternoon for about a week. Page Field, our official rain gauge in Fort Myers has measured over 4 inches of rain since Friday...and there are an awful lot of lawns that are suddenly looking greener.
Both arguments have merit. But for me, if it looks like a duck...and quacks like a duck...it probably is a duck.
Enjoy the rains.
By: Hurricane Expert Jim Reif
Read the entire article here.
Link
I think we can all agree that all the storms that came up were extremely powerful and destructive regardless of exact damage figures
That's where I got it from, lol.
Ike was badddd, I agree. Thanks the lord it wasn't at Rita's strength in that area or it'll be 1900 hurricane all over again (talking about damage, not deaths of course)
Where Ike landed made it worse.
JMO
Link
Had she landed several hundred miles West?
God forbid.
There are so many circumstances and vulnerable lands.
One can compare multiple factors..ten ways to Sunday....
But now is the time to prepare and contemplate such scenarios.
HURRICANE BUD?
Our last task is the generator purchased after Charley.
Add some new gas. Start her up.
Clean her filters.
And pray we dont need her :O)
And gas for the grill.
Yup. Thats it.
Pat you have the list at hand ready to post?
Its amazing what one can forget from year to year.
Burp then purrrrr....goes the generator.
Hopefully.
Probably her little last hurrah...
We just had a near X class solar flare:
Good night everyone
Oh...
Aletta :O)
Non-Perishable food
Water
Medication
Fresca
Money
First aid Kit
Safe Place
Flashlights
Batteries
Cell Phone
Clothing
Evacuation Plan
Any needed transport secured
Storm shutters or plywood
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