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] J.T. Houghton, Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K. Maskell, C.A. Johnson (ed.), Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (2001), p. 2.
[2] J.S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (2004), p. 186.
[3] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (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, 17th January 1961 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12086
[10] ibid.
[11] Science Daily, ‘Increased Snow Is Shortening Tree-Growing Season in Subarctic Siberia’ 8th July 1999 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/990707181851.htm
[12] Stephen McIntyre, ‘Climategate: A Battlefield Perspective – Annotated Notes for Presentation to Heartland Conference, Chicago’ 16th 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?’, 4th April 2005, p. 10.
[18] Montford, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010), p. 128.
[19] Nature mission statement, http://www.nature.com/nature/about/index.html
[20] Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes, ‘Corrigendum: Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries’ in Nature 430, 105, 1st July 2004.
[21] Richard A. Muller, ‘Global Warming Bombshell’ in Technology Review, 15th October 2004.
[22] Bert Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) p. 167.
[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, 6th January 2009.
[26] David Verado email to Stephen McIntyre, 17th December 2003, reproduced in Michael E. Mann letter to Joe Barton, 15th 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, 21st February 2005 http://www.climateaudit.org/correspondence/cru.correspondence.pdf
[28] Letter from Phil Woolas MP to Tim Boswell MP, 8th January 2007. Cited in Holland (2008), p. 7.
[29] Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (2007), p. 495.
[30] P.W. Bridgman, The Way Things Ares (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, 14th February 2005.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid.
[35] Sherwood Boehlert letter to Joe Barton, 14th July 2005 www.realclimate.org/Boehlert_letter_to_Barton.pdf
[36] Henry Waxman letter to Joe Barton, 1st 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, 15th 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, 8th 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, 7th July 2005.
[41] Mann letter to Joe Barton, 15th July 2005.
[42] Alan Leshner letter to Joe Barton, 13th July 13 www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/docs/05-7-13_climatebarton.pdf
[43] John Orcutt and Walter Lyons letter to Joe Barton, 8th 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.
[4
6] 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, 15th 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, 18th 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, 21st October 2004.
[54] J.T. Houghton, Testimony to the US Senate – Energy and Natural Resources Committee, 21st 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’ 6th 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, 8th 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, 23rd June 2006.
[71] Geoff Brumfiel, ‘Academy affirms hockey-stick graph’ in Nature, 441, 1032-1033 (29th 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, 19th and 27th 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, 7th July 2005.
[82] Michael E. Mann email to Keith Briffa.
[83] Keith Briffa email to Michael E. Mann, 29th April 2007.
[84] Stefan Rahmstorf, ‘What If … the “Hockey Stick” Were Wrong?’ 27th 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’ 30th June 2007 http://climateaudit.org/2007/06/30/burger-comment-on-osborn-and-briffa-2006/
22
Climategate
O, That this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.
Hamlet
Over Memorial Day weekend at the end of May 2006, four cinemas screened a movie.
‘You look at that river gently flowing by … It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about this.”’
Cut to a lecture theatre.
‘I used to be the next President of the United States.’
Pause.
Deadpan: ‘I don’t find that particularly funny.’
Smile.
Audience applause.[1]
A week later, An Inconvenient Truth moved into the top-ten grossing movies playing that weekend. By mid July, it overtook The Da Vinci Code. At the end of the year, it had grossed nearly $50 million and won two Oscars.[2] (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, released in 2004, grossed $222 million worldwide, receiving a twenty-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival – but no Academy Awards.)[3]
An Inconvenient Truth was the cinematic sequel to Earth in the Balance, fusing Gore’s search for the meaning of life and saving the environment. He recalls listening to Roger Revelle as a student (‘I just soaked it up’); his six-year-old son’s near fatal car accident (‘It just changed everything for me. How should I spend my time on this Earth?’); a tobacco farming family, losing sister Nancy to lung cancer (‘It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots. I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning’); the 2000 election (‘a hard blow … It brought into clear focus the mission that I had been pursuing for all these years’); and the ultimate meaning of what Revelle had told him (‘It’s almost as if a window was opened through which the future was very clearly visible. “See that?” he said, “see that? That’s the future in which you are going to live your life”’).[4]
After the biopic segments, ice took up a large part of the movie.
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet could shut down the Gulf Stream and plunge Europe into an ice age. Viewers were left in the dark about when this might happen. In his 2007 book, Bert Bolin acknowledged that the rim of the Greenland ice sheet was melting faster than a few decades earlier, but snow was still accumulating over the ice sheet plateau. ‘At some point, probably more than centuries into the future, a situation of no return may be reached and the ice sheet might disappear in a matter of a millennium or more.’[5] An Inconvenient Truth was ‘not always adequately founded in the basic scientific knowledge that is available,’ Bolin wrote.[6] It created the impression that the ice ages were caused by variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide, ‘which of course is wrong’.[7]
Gore visited Antarctica. The ice has stories to tell us. ‘Right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act.’[8] Wrong again. Eric Steig, an isotope geologist, wrote, ‘You can’t see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores — not with the naked eye.’[9]
Ice cores can measure the different isotopes of oxygen and figure out a ‘very precise thermometer’, Gore explains. ‘They can count back year by year the same way a forester reads tree rings. And they constructed a thermometer of the temperature,’ as a graph with a remarkable similarity to Mann’s Hockey Stick flashed up on a seventy-foot digital screen. ‘The so-called sceptics will sometimes say, “Oh, this whole thing is a cyclical phenomenon. There was a medieval warming period, after all,”’ Gore continued. ‘But compared to what’s going on now, there’s just no comparison.’[10]
Gore’s ice core temperature graph looked like Mann’s Hockey Stick because it was Mann’s Hockey Stick.[11]
In February 2007, the IPCC started to release its Fourth Assessment Report. The attribution of rising temperatures to human activity was upgraded a further notch: ‘Most of th
e observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations’ – ‘very likely’ meaning a higher than ninety per cent chance of being correct.[12]
In October, Gore and the IPCC were jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their role in creating ‘an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming’.[13] The timing was propitious. In December, negotiators were to meet in Bali and adopt the Bali Road Map with a deadline of agreeing a follow-on deal to the Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 36