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
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 — Blog Index
Yup, that is true, only 21:40 here (PDT)
got a nice page myself if looking for information check it out
Link
iam out myself
talk to everyone tomorrow
sleep time
goodnight
He sure does. Heed this man's suggestion. :D
ETA: But if you want to...
You live in Honduras, right? An expressed interest in hurricanes is to be expected.
cool I got a friend from there
It's not like the country doesn't get hit from both sides....
Don't worry, mine thinks the same thing, especially when I say I won't go outside in anything more intense than a Category 2.
Wait, what? They say you're crazy for NOT wanting to go out in Category 3 conditions? Most people don't*. o_O
*Except me. A buddy of mine wants to go hurricane chasing with me this year.
So has every single cent of the money I've earned before I've ever earned the money -- except it's been taxed many times over : money circulates -- then I'm taxed again for having earned&received it.
So somehow, the argument that lower taxes should be paid on unearned profits (arising mostly from unearned capital) than on earned income doesn't make a whole heck of a lotta sense to me.
Yeah, that's the amusing bit extra that made me to add a link to CaicosSailor's comment about "hurricane crabs".
Me and my mouse screwed up _again_ and the forum program won't allow me to fix my error.
It's WELL worth reading if you haven't read it already.
410 : WxGeekVA: Idk but mine's song is White and Nerdy by Weird Al, lol !
And my motto is: Never pass up an opportunity to insert a link to WeirdAL.
(especially into a comment not mine)
Ike was bad enough... but the weaker side hit the Galveston-TexasCity area. A landfall a short few miles to the southwest woulda made Galveston/etc look like the BolivarPeninsula
except worse because there's more area to flatten and a LOT more buildings to be broken and swept away into the Bay. I doubt that even the seawalls woulda survived.
And a far lower percentage of those on the BolivarPeninsula stayed than those on the much more heavily populated Galveston/etc area, so the casualty toll woulda probably been MUCH higher...
...maybe even approaching that of the 1900GalvestonHurricane
Your link was doubly bad: it started with the WUaddress, then fused into a bad YouTube address.
HomelandSecurity. Accidentally hit the call button instead of the insert covert-recording virus button.
It's not a very detailed pic, but I'd say about 16.
”The idea of concentrated solar power is 100 years old: the journey from Philadelphia in the past to the Sahara in the future.”
The Authorities like to send in underaged kids with stubble heavier than most 20somethings as their entrapment decoys. Sometimes they even have squint-lines etched deeper than most 20somethings.
After a while, it gets fairly easy to distinguish baby-faced 20somethings from teenagers. Most clerks and bouncers still check IDs most of the time -- HUGE fine for guessing wrong -- until the customer's face becomes sufficiently familiar.
92E is still poorly organized however and still at 30% according to the NHC
17 :P
From the NWS, Wilmington, NC
DRY MID LEVELS AND SOME SUBSIDENCE BEHIND
A DEPARTING VORT WILL MAKE SATURDAY A DRY DAY AND WILL KEEP ONLY
SILENT POP. MOIST NE FLOW MAY KEEP CONSIDERABLE CLOUD COVER NEAR THE
COAST HOWEVER. NOTE ALSO THAT SURFACE CYCLONE DEVELOPMENT MAY BE
ONGOING SATURDAY OFF THE SOUTHEAST COAST. ATTM EXPECT ANY IMPACTS
FROM THIS TO HOLD OFF UNTIL SUNDAY AND BEYOND...BUT SOME GUIDANCE
INDICATING THAT MOISTURE WILL BE THROWN BACK TOWARDS THE COAST
SATURDAY. FORECAST PROFILES SUGGEST OTRW...SO WILL KEEP FORECAST DRY
FOR SATURDAY...ESPECIALLY WITH RELATIVE MINIMUMS IN POP SHOWING UP
IN MOS GUIDANCE DURING THE DAY.
http://www.wwltv.com/news/national/151844745.html
About 1.5" so far.
Incredible !
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAMPA BAY RUSKIN FL
531 AM EDT THU MAY 17 2012
FLZ039-042-043-048>052-055>057-060>062-065-GMZ830 -850-853-856-870-
873-876-172145-
LEVY-CITRUS-SUMTER-HERNANDO-PASCO-PINELLAS-HILLSB OROUGH-POLK-
MANATEE-HARDEE-HIGHLANDS-SARASOTA-DE SOTO-CHARLOTTE-LEE-
TAMPA BAY WATERS-TARPON SPRINGS TO SUWANNEE RIVER OUT 20 NM-
ENGLEWOOD TO TARPON SPRINGS OUT 20 NM-
BONITA BEACH TO ENGLEWOOD OUT 20 NM-
TARPON SPRINGS TO SUWANNEE RIVER OUT 20 TO 60 NM-
ENGLEWOOD TO TARPON SPRINGS OUT 20 TO 60 NM-
BONITA BEACH TO ENGLEWOOD OUT 20 TO 60 NM-
531 AM EDT THU MAY 17 2012
THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR WEST CENTRAL AND SOUTHWEST
FLORIDA.
.DAY ONE...TODAY AND TONIGHT.
...THUNDERSTORM IMPACT...
SCATTERED TO NUMEROUS THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED AGAIN
TODAY...ESPECIALLY DURING THE AFTERNOON AND EARLY EVENING HOURS
AWAY FROM THE COAST. A FEW STORMS COULD BECOME STRONG WITH GUSTY
WINDS...FREQUENT LIGHTNING...AND HEAVY RAINFALL BEING THE PRIMARY
HAZARDS.
.DAYS TWO THROUGH SEVEN...FRIDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY.
...THUNDERSTORM IMPACT...
SCATTERED AFTERNOON AND EVENING THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED EACH
DAY THROUGH THE MIDDLE OF NEXT WEEK. THE STRONGEST STORMS THAT
DEVELOP WILL BE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING GUSTY WINDS...FREQUENT
LIGHTNING...AND HEAVY RAINFALL.
.SPOTTER INFORMATION STATEMENT...
SPOTTERS SHOULD MONITOR THE WEATHER AND SELF ACTIVATE IF NEEDED.
$$
JELSEMA
AS OF 300 AM THURSDAY...LOWERED CONFIDENCE CONTINUES FOR MUCH OF THE
LONG TERM...EVEN WITH DECENT MODEL AGREEMENT. ALL GUIDANCE NOW
INDICATING THAT THE UPPER TROUGH WILL PERSIST THROUGH THE
EXTENDED...WITH THE AXIS ORIENTED SW TO NE FROM NORTH FLORIDA TO OFF
THE MID ATLANTIC COAST. THE CORE OF THIS TROUGH WILL FEATURE A
CLOSED UPPER LOW NEAR GA/SC...WITH SEVERAL IMPULSES PROGGED TO
ROTATE AROUND IT DURING THE LATE WKND AND FIRST HALF OF NEXT WEEK.
AT THE SURFACE...RESIDUAL BOUNDARY (NO LONGER REALLY A COLD FRONT
DUE TO LACK OF ANY BAROCLINICITY) WILL REMAIN DRAPED JUST OFF THE
COAST AND BACK INTO NORTH FLORIDA.
MODELS HAVE BEEN FLIP-FLOPPING OVERALL SOLUTIONS FOR SEVERAL DAYS
NOW...BUT MODEL CONSENSUS IS STARTING TO COME TO AGREE IN SURFACE
CYCLONE (OR CYCLONES) DEVELOPMENT JUST OFF THE SOUTHEAST COAST.
THERE ARE SEVERAL ISSUES TO RESOLVE...AND UNFORTUNATELY WE CANNOT
HAMMER OUT DETAILS EVEN ONLY A FEW DAYS OUT. WE CAN GLEAN SOME IDEAS
HOWEVER...WHICH CAN BE OUTLINED HERE:
WITH CLOSED CENTER WELL INLAND FROM THE COAST...ANY UPPER IMPULSE
WILL PROVIDE DECENT PVA...WHICH COULD WORK IN TANDEM WITH RICH
THETA-E AIR AND LATENT HEAT RELEASE TO SPAWN CYCLOGENESIS ALONG THE
OFFSHORE BOUNDARY. HOWEVER...THE ATMOSPHERE WILL BE IN THE PROCESS
OF BECOMING MORE BAROTROPIC (THAT IS...LACK OF ANY SIGNIFICANT
TEMPERATURE GRADIENTS) DUE TO LATE MAY SUBTROPICAL HEATING...A
NEARLY NEUTRAL-TEMPERATURE FRONT OFFSHORE...AND LACK OF ANY REAL
FORCING TO MOVE THINGS ALONG. THESE WOULD WORK AGAINST A STRONG
CYCLONE DEVELOPING IN THESE LATITUDES THIS TIME OF YEAR. TO NOTE
HOWEVER...IS THAT THESE ALL DESCRIBE FUNCTIONS TO PROMOTE A COLD-CORE
CYCLONE...AND GUIDANCE IS CLEARLY INDICATING THAT THICKNESSES WILL
INCREASE OVER ANY SURFACE LOW...SUGGESTING TRANSITION TO A WARM
CORE...OR HYBRID TYPE SYSTEM. THIS IS MORE PLAUSIBLE BASED OFF THE
REASONING OUTLINED ABOVE...BUT SST`S ARE MARGINAL FOR WARM CORE
SYSTEMS...SO A STRONG HYBRID CYCLONE SEEMS UNLIKELY AS WELL...AND
HPC IS KEEPING ALL PRESSURE ABOVE 1008MB ATTM. ADDITIONALLY...UPPER
IMPULSES ARE PROGGED TO REMAIN RATHER WEAK...SO SEVERAL WEAK LOWS
MAY DEVELOP THROUGH THE EXTENDED VERSUS ONE STRONGER SYSTEM. BOTH
ECMWF AND GFS HAVE MULTIPLE LOWS DEVELOPING DURING THE FIRST HALF OF
NEXT WEEK...WHILE CMC KEEPS ONE PRIMARY LOW CENTER.
STILL...CANNOT NEGATE THE CONSISTENCY OF THE ECMWF AND NOW THE
CONSENSUS OF A LOW DEVELOPING OFFSHORE. WITH WEAK STEERING
FLOW...THIS SYSTEM COULD GO ANYWHERE...AND GUIDANCE IS CONFUSED AS
TO WHICH LOW WILL BECOME PRIMARY...AND THEN WHERE IT WILL GO.
GFS/ECMWF BRING ONE LOW INTO THE CAPE FEAR REGION AND ANOTHER INTO
THE MID ATLANTIC...WHILE CMC PUSHES A PRIMARY LOW INTO THE OUTER
BANKS. THE COMMON THEME...ALL GUIDANCE SHOWS SOMETHING! WITH SUCH
A DEEP TROUGH PERSISTING...DO EXPECT SOME WEAK TROUGH OR LOW TO
DEVELOP OFFSHORE AND THEN MEANDER THROUGH EARLY NEXT WEEK...AND
ATTM THINK THE BEST BET WOULD BE FOR LOW DEVELOPMENT NEAR THE ONLY
SIGNIFICANT TEMP GRADIENT OUT THERE...THE GULF STREAM! WILL HAVE
TO CARRY SCHC POP EACH DAY THROUGH TUESDAY...WITH SOME LOW-END CHC
NEAR THE COAST MON AS UPPER TROUGH OPENS UP AND ALLOWS WHATEVER
SURFACE FEATURE DOES EXIST TO MOVE NORTH TOWARDS THE COAST.
EXPECT NEARLY CLIMO TEMPS THROUGH TUESDAY...WARMING ABOVE
WEDNESDAY AS TROUGH WEAKENS AND THICKNESSES RETURN TO NORMAL FOR
LATE MAY. IF RAIN DOES RETURN TO THE AREA...TEMPS WILL BE LOWER THAN
CURRENT FORECAST VALUES.
501 AM EDT THU MAY 17 2012
THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA.
.DAY ONE...TODAY AND TONIGHT.
.THUNDERSTORM IMPACT...
A MID LEVEL DISTURBANCE WILL APPROACH THE STATE TODAY...WHICH IN
ADDITION TO THE MOIST ATMOSPHERE THAT REMAINS IN PLACE WILL LEAD
TO NUMEROUS SHOWERS AND STORMS DEVELOPING LATE THIS MORNING THROUGH
THE EVENING HOURS. ISOLATED SHOWERS AND A FEW STORMS WILL MOVE
FROM THE EASTERN GULF OF MEXICO INTO THE STATE EARLY THIS MORNING
WITH ACTIVITY INCREASING IN COVERAGE THROUGH THE DAY AS WARM
AFTERNOON TEMPERATURES INCREASE INSTABILITY. THE HIGHEST COVERAGE
OF SHOWERS AND STORMS IS EXPECTED TO BE ACROSS OKEECHOBEE AND THE
TREASURE COAST WHERE MOISTURE WILL REMAIN HIGHER.
STORMS ARE EXPECTED TO MOVE TO THE EAST-NORTHEAST AT AROUND 20
MPH...AND STORMS INTERACTING WITH THE EAST COAST SEA BREEZE MAY
ACQUIRE ROTATION AS THEY MOVE OVER THE COAST WITH FUNNEL CLOUDS OR
A BRIEF TOUCHDOWN POSSIBLE. COOLER TEMPERATURES ALOFT WILL ALSO
INCREASE THE CHANCES FOR SMALL HAIL IN ANY STRONG TO SEVERE STORMS
THAT DEVELOP. FREQUENT LIGHTNING STRIKES AND TORRENTIAL RAINFALL
WILL BE POSSIBLE WITH ANY ACTIVITY THAT DEVELOPS TODAY...WITH
TEMPORARY PONDING OF WATER ON ROADWAYS POSSIBLE ESPECIALLY IN
LOCATIONS THAT SAW HEAVY RAINFALL OVER THE PREVIOUS FEW DAYS.
S FLA HAS BEEN UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE UPPER TROUGH
OVER THE E U.S. COAST THAT CURRENTLY EXTENDS SW ACROSS THE SE U.S.
INTO THE GULF OF MEX. TODAY AND INTO THE WEEKEND...A CLOSED LOW WILL
DEVELOP OVER THE SE U.S./ADJACENT ATLC AND WILL PERSIST THROUGH THE
WEEKEND INTO EARLY NEXT WEEK DUE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A REX BLOCK
AS A STRONG UPPER RIDGE EXTENDS NW OVER NEW ENGLAND FROM THE ALTC
HIGH. THIS STOPS THE MOVEMENT OF THE UPPER LOW. BY MIDWEEK NEXT
WEEK...LONG RANGE MODELS DIFFER SOME ON THE SCENARIO...BUT A DEEP
UPPER TROUGH OVER THE WESTERN U.S. MOVES E WHICH PULLS THE CLOSED
LOW N AND ABSORBING THE FORMER SYSTEM. THE GFS INDICATES MULTIPLE
SMALL UPPER TROUGHS THAT MAY CROSS FLA WITH THE ECMWF INDICATING A
WESTERLY FLOW ALOFT WHICH MAY BRING MINIMAL SHORT WAVES ACROSS THE
AREA.
I don't know if that's a fair assessment. I wouldn't think it would be that bad, as there is plenty of food, medical supplies, and cheap Chinese toys to play with. With those foam ninja swords, I could stay in a Dollar General for days!
LOL! That's great!
Viewing: 551 - 601
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 — Blog Index