The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines Paperback – Illustrated, November 26, 2013

I have to admit that a few years ago I believed that Dr. Michael Mann was a fraud and that his Hockey Stick curve was bogus. I did believe that human caused Global Warming probably was real because it simply made too much sense based on the physics, but that it was exaggerated and there are always some bad apples even among scientists taking advantage of a good scare. As I started digging more into the topic, which included reading peer reviewed articles on the topic I began to change my mind. My educational background makes digging deeper into a topic like this easier for me. I found that not only was the evidence for human caused Global Warming overwhelming, but that those who argued otherwise often were doing so dishonestly, and I also came to realize that Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a very serious and underappreciated problem. In addition I came to realize that Dr. Michael Mann was certainly not a fraud and that he also most likely is right. I knew all this before reading this book. After reading this book I am outraged about the dishonest abuse that he and his colleagues have been subjected to and I have come to admire him for his courage and integrity.The Hockeystick is a long term global temperature graph (600 or 1000 years) showing a recent prominent temperature spike. It was derived using tree rings and other proxy data, such as coral records and ice cores. According Dr. Mann the Hockeystick was a by-product, almost like an afterthought resulting from research on why Europe cooled more than other regions during the “Little Ice Age”. Dr. Mann was always careful not to claim that the Hockeystick would firmly establish human role in the warming. However, it incidentally challenged the prevailing myths surrounding the medieval warm period, which is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented topics in all of paleoclimatology. To climate skeptics (or often more accurately climate deniers) MWP was a holy cow, and Dr. Mann killing it made him the target of powerful corporations, media outlets and organizations, politicians, and enraged citizens. The messenger had to be shot.The Hockeystick was also criticized by some scientists, and it is nothing wrong with that per se. A paper by McKitrick and McIntyre claimed that the Hockeystick was an artifact by bad data, but this claim was readily refuted, and the authors quietly dropped the claim. A paper by Baliunas and Willy Soon came to a conclusion contradicting the Hockeystick but this paper had several serious problems including misrepresentations and mischaracterizations and probably should not even have been published. Yet it was immediately promoted uncritically and widely by those with a policy ax to grind. As a side note (not in book); Willy Soon was later investigated for failing to disclose (to article publishers), the $1.2 million in funding over 10 years that he had received from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and other fossil-fuel interests. At the same time more than a dozen other independent studies confirmed the Hockeystick. Despite this the Hockeystick was claimed to be wrong and even a fraud (as I said, I once believed that too) and there were aggressive calls for investigations, which was ridiculous but they were still done, and they cleared Dr. Mann of any wrong doing.I should add that this book explains some of the science related to the Hockeystick and anthropomorphic global warming, as well as some of the typical areas of climate change skepticism/(or denial). However, the main focus of this book is on what Dr. Mann refers to as the climate wars. This war features massive corporation funded disinformation campaigns, attacks on climate scientists, large scale defamation campaigns, threats, death threats, the media wars, the media glorification of charlatans, bogus lawsuits, etc. Climate Scientists received death threats via emails or phone messages, some of them credible, and dead rats at their door steps. As an example, Dr. Mann was told “you and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families.” However, a lot more troubling in my opinion was the ridicule, disinformation, and threats from established organizations, public figures, and prominent politicians.A video defaming (lying) and ridiculing Dr. Mann created by Koch and Scaife funded groups was widely promoted and distributed. Right wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart had tweeted “Capital punishment for Dr. James Hansen” (James Hansen is a famous climate scientist). Commentator Marc Sheppard called climate scientists “lying perpetrators of fraud”. Glenn Beck listed bogus allegations against IPCC. Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli demanded that the University of Virginia turn over every email, record, or document it had related to Dr. Mann from his time there from 1999 to 2005. Organizations such as Global Climate Coalition, Koch Industries, Scaife, ExxonMobil, American Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, and Citizens for Sound Economy, the Telegraph in the UK, National Review, Fox News, Washington Times, etc, misrepresented the science and defamed scientists. I should add that long before I read this book I had detected dishonest distortion of the science in many of the publications mentioned. I cannot trust the Telegraph or National Review and I’ve stopped watching Fox News.Since I am from Texas the case involving Representative Joe Barton was especially interesting to me. In 2005 Joe Barton sent a letter to Dr. Mann that started out by ironically grossly misrepresenting Dr. Mann’s own research and then demanding extensive materials stretching back throughout his entire career for a congressional investigation. However, curiously, Joe Barton had no such subpoena power, that required congressional approval, and most of Dr. Mann’s data was available on the internet. This was an obvious attempt to intimidate and silence a scientist or perhaps create a “phony scandal”. However, Dr. Mann still had to prepare to defend himself and luckily the European Geophysical Union stepped up to protest the abuse of power.In my opinion the most interesting chapter in the book is chapter 14 “Climategate: The Real Story”. I have to admit that I once thought that this was a real scandal. The truth is that the so called Climategate is a manufactured/phony scandal created to defame certain scientists and to cast doubt on climate science. In November 2009 a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) was hacked by an external attacker. Thousands of private emails were stolen and scanned for juicy content that could implicate the climate scientists in something. Words and phrases in twenty of the emails were picked and taken out of context in an effort to malign Dr. Mann and a few other climate scientists. As an example, by cherry picking a couple of words and by deleting 23 words in between the often repeated phrase “trick to hide the decline” was created. However, the “trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other, and was not referring to recent warming, but rather the far more mundane issue of how to compare proxy and instrumental records. Someone (falsely) called it “Dr. Mann’s dirty laundry” and the Telegraph and National Review had a field day with this issue. Fox News called it Global Warming’s Waterloo. The issue was investigated and the climate scientists involved (Dr. Mann and a few others) were cleared of all wrong doing. I wonder how many of us could be made out to be terrible people if all our emails were hacked and phrases were selected out of context to show wrong doing? The perpetrators of this illegal cyber attack have not been found. I wonder who they were.One thing I like about the book is that it has extensive end notes with lots of references for further reading and backup of claims, including references to peer reviewed articles. You can really dig in as deep as you wish. The book is very interesting, well organized, and intelligently written, but I have to say that I still found this book difficult to read. That is not because it is boring, or because the science is too complex. It was difficult to read because it was so troubling. How does Dr. Mann keep himself from exploding in rage? After reading this book I feel sorry for climate scientists. I could possibly have ended up as one since I started out with an interest in physics (Masters Degree) but I switched to computer/robotics engineering. I certainly don’t want to be intimidated and defamed for just doing my job with diligence and integrity. This is scary stuff. A couple of my kids are interested in science. Should I discourage them? Well I won’t discourage them. I am just glad to be aware of what is going on. As a final word I highly recommend this book, it is a very important and eye opening book.

Dr. Michael E. Mann's book is a must-read for those that are relatively new to learning about climate science. This book has it all: science, drama, and politics. How many non-fiction science books can make that claim?The hockey stick is a famous historical temperature plot that shows for the past 2,000 years global temperatures moved up and down very slightly (hockey shaft) but in the past several decades the temperature has rapidly risen (hockey blade). Although there are multiple lines of evidence and well-understood physics that show humans are dramatically warming the planet, climate science contrarians have seized upon the stick as being the single pillar that holds up the entire climate science edifice. They figure if they can take down the stick and Mike Mann, they can take down all of climate science. I know, sounds foolish, right?Mike's book takes the reader on a journey beginning with his early interest in math and science as a youngster, his various areas of career research (hockey stick is just one of many), and ends the book detailing the disturbing attacks on him and colleagues - many of which occurred on Capitol Hill!The early parts of the book describe how he ended up researching climate. Mike, like just about all scientists, is motivated by curiosity. Even as a young boy he was fascinated by science and math and got his greatest adrenalin rushes from discovering elegant solutions he calls "tricks" to solve unique problems. While he was in high school he discovered a trick to program a tic-tac-toe game that used artificial intelligence to improve on itself and at UC Berkeley he worked with superconducting materials and found a neat trick to better model their properties.While at Yale, Mike wanted to work on something that was big, new, and had many unanswered questions. Climate science was not on his radar at the time but then he met with Barry Saltzman who was using the tools of physics to simulate (model) Earth's climate. Climate modeling was a big and new area of research so naturally Mike wanted to help. Mike's research focused on understanding the importance of natural climate oscillations. In fact, in the early 1990s Mike thought natural causes of change were more important than human causes. However, by the mid-1990s, due to the mounting evidence, it became clear to him that human causes were "rising above the noise" of natural causes. During that time he was oblivious to the attacks on Ben Santer being waged by S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Patrick Michaels, Global Climate Coalition (a group of fossil fuel interests) and others because Santer's (and others) research showed that humans were in fact causing climate to change (IPCC 2nd Assessment ,1995). Mike explains that by the mid to late 1990s scientists knew that humans were warming the planet and offers five easy steps of understanding.It was Mike's curiosity about multi-decadal natural climate changes and a serendipitous moment that led him to his research that led to the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction. Mike's parents happened to be speaking over a glass of wine with Ray Bradley of UMass-Amherst and suggested that their son Mike should meet up. After their first "scientific blind date" a partnership emerged. When Mike began working with Ray Bradley, he was interested in reconstructing the patterns of temperature variation in a way that would provide insight into the workings of the climate system. It was from this landmark research that the Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1998/1999) hockey stick was born. (For the real climate/math geeks there is a lengthy chapter describing principal component analysis [PCA] but I think many readers might quickly skim over this section.)Mike explains why his plot was highlighted alone by the IPCC TAR (2001) even though there were other reconstructions at that time. "(1) It was the only reconstruction done at the level of individual years rather than decadal or longer-term averages, and (2) it came with error bars, which the other reconstructions didn't. Thus, unlike other studies, it spoke to whether recent years, such as 1998, stood out as unusual against the backdrop of the longer-term reconstruction and its uncertainties."The most important information in this book is the extensive detail describing climate science denial and the attacks on scientists. Mike is clear to distinguish true skepticism which all scientists possess versus denial which is the refusal to accept facts due to one's political or financial interests. Mike offers to the reader his "six stages of denial".Mike describes the well-documented tobacco industry "doubt is our product" misinformation strategy that is now being used in climate discussions. This strategy is being funded by industry groups such as Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations that find climate change science to be inconvenient to their bottom lines. Mike also calls out other groups such as American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Advancement of Sound Science Center, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, Heartland Institute, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Media Research Center, National Center for Policy Analysis, and Citizens for a Sound Economy (better known now as Freedomworks).As Mike explains, various media outlets often propagate climate change disinformation in their editorial and opinion pages. He mentions newspapers such as the National Post and Financial Post in Canada; theDaily Telegraph, Times , and Spectator in the United Kingdom; and U.S. newspapers such as the Washington Times and the various outlets of the Murdoch, Scaife, and Anschutz conservative media empires, which include Fox News and the Wall Street Journal , the regional Examiner.com network and Web sites like Newsbusters.The most disturbing sections of this book detail the personal attack on Mike Mann and his family as well as attacks on other prominent scientists such as Ben Santer Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Herbert Needleman, Stephen Schneider, James Hansen, Eric Steig, and Wei-Chyung Wang. Mike relates these attacks as using "`Serengeti strategy'-- the tried and-true tactic of the climate change denial campaign. The climate change deniers 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 book also chronicles the dirty politics of climate change denial in Washington, D.C. Mann begins with Philip Cooney. In 2001, Cooney, a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics and no formal scientific training, was appointed as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). He was previously a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API). Cooney was instrumental in getting the environmentally friendly Christine Todd Whitman, head of the EPA to resign. Cooney also worked with the Competitive Enterprise Institute to invalidate a climate change report known as the National Assessment. Cooney also removed the hockey stick plot from the EPA's 2003 State of the Environment report and instead placed in a study by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas that was financed by Cooney's former employer, the American Petroleum Institute. The Soon and Baliunas paper was so bad that half of the Climate Research journal editorial staff resigned in protest because the seriously flawed paper should never have passed peer review.Mike also details the 2003 Senate hearing called by friend of oil, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). In this hearing Inhofe's expert witnesses included Soon, Baliunas, and Michael Chrichton - a novelist! It was in this hearing that Inhofe made his notorious claim that "manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."Mike then moves on to Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) who was the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (Barton is a household name now for his notorious public apology to British Petroleum in June 2010 when the White House asked BP to pay for the clean-up and lost jobs.) In 2005 Barton sent threatening letters to Mike Mann and several others suggesting that they may have engaged in scientific malpractice. Many major science organizations and the mass media issued loud protests because it was an obvious witch hunt. Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle including Republican Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chair of the Science Committee, and Republican Senator John McCain (R-AZ) told Barton he should immediately retract the letter but Barton refused.In November 2005, Sen. Boehlert formally commissioned the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to review the science behind paleoclimate reconstructions and the final NAS report fully vindicated Mann.Barton commissioned his own study by tapping stats professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University - a man with no climate science background. The Wegman Report repeated the debunked McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) claim that the hockey stick was a mathematical artifact of using PCA conventions, while ignoring published peer reviewed papers that refuted M&M's claim. The more authoritative NAS review, for example, dismissed the claim that PCA conventions had any significant impact on the hockey stick results. (Currently, Edward Wegman is being investigated for plagiarism and his 2008 journal article on the subject was retracted Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.) Mike then summarizes the two House hearings on the subject in July 2006 where Barton's witnesses, including Wegman, were embarrassed by their own incompetence. Sadly, Wegman did not even understand the heat-trapping physics of greenhouse gases!As the book nears the finish Mike describes the value of the peer-review process in rooting out bad science but admits it is not perfect and it is much slower than the immediately available Internet pseudo-science that most in the public read. To show how peer review can allow bad papers to slip through he discusses papers from Craig Loehle (2007), David Douglass, John Christy, Ben Pearson, and S. Fred Singer (2007), and John McLean, Chris de Freitas, and Bob Carter (2009). Each of these were trumpeted as the final nail in the coffin for manmade warming but subsequent analysis has dismissed them because of their many errors. (Of course, Mother Nature does not read these journal articles and the planet keeps on warming.)Mike then moves on the stolen emails from Climate Research Unit, a well-orchestrated smear job on climate science that the press had unfortunately dubbed Climategate. Mike opens that chapter with this famous line by Cardinal Richelieu: "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." In an attempt to sabotage the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the anti-science crowd loudly proclaimed (yet again) that climate science and its scientists were a sham. They used taken out of context quotes with words such as "trick" and "hide the decline" to smear Mike and many others. Of course, we all know that "trick" is just another word for an elegant solution which Mike has made a career out of. The media coverage was appalling and Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations played a particularly important role. One report showed that twenty or so organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had "repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople" in stories about climategate. In time there were many independent investigations and Mike and others were fully vindicated. (Sadly, the vindications received little coverage and I do not recall seeing any formal apologies from the press and certainly not from the ant-science crowd which still today trumpets climategate even while droughts, floods, fires, and sea level rise keep increasing.)Mike also writes about the failed attempt of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to try to access his private emails and other documents while he was a researcher at University of Virginia. (Although not appearing in the Kindle version of the book, Mike is under attack again by American Tradition Institute, a right-wing astroturf group that has ties to Koch Industries and others. Mike is now fighting a long and expensive legal battle to prevent them from using his and many others' emails to spin up another climategate. It is a shame that so much of his time is being taken away from his research but I must commend him for standing up for climate science on his own dime. I wonder how many others would do what Mike is doing?)One would think that after all of this bad history, Mike might end the book with sadness or cynicism. Instead, he offers much hope and describes how these attacks on him and others have awakened climate scientists to their responsibility to defend their work and speak out against attempts to stifle the free exchange of science.To those that still question Mike's research, know this: since the first hockey stick paper of 1998, there have been more than a dozen studies published by many scientists using different methodologies (PCA, CPS, EIV, isotopic analysis, & direct T measurements) that duplicate the hockey stick. To believe Rep. Joe Barton, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and American Tradition Institute, one must also believe in magic. Consider the odds that various international scientists using quite different data and quite different data analysis techniques can all be wrong in the same way. What are the odds that a hockey stick is always the shape of the wrong answer?

This book is a landmark in Mankind's journey towards civilization.I was well aware of most technical aspects related to the problemsof climate change and global warming. What I never reckoned before,was the role which the same forces supporting the tobacco industry,the creationism hoax and all politically retrograde agenda play in thecontext. Of course, I always new that the oil industry was one ofthe very active parties in the effort of denying global warming.The story showing the direct attacks on one of the pillars of Science,the peer review process for publication of results is impressive. Thecynicism of politicians and all sorts of "hired guns" playing the denialgame is also remarkable.The process of increasingly awareness Dr. Mann went through along theyears of his battle holding the "Hockey Stick" is most inspirationaland exposes the role every one of us play today with respect toenvironment we live in the future of the next generations.After all, Dr. Mann has a cautious but optimistic view on how thefuture on planet Earth will look like: if guided by rationality andScience, we may have a chance of surviving.

Michael Mann has been vilified by politicians, the energy industry and scientists who have been paid to maintain the status quo - oil and gas at any cost to our environment, our home, our lives. Yet Mann has retained his integrity and commitment to reveal the facts surrounding the impacts of human consumption on climate change. Many whistle blowers pay the ultimate price to bring the truth to people - Mann is not a whistle blower, he is simply a man with the discipline to extrapolate consequences from the current state of environmental affairs and share those with the world wide community. As a result, he has been demeaned, his science brought into doubt, and his results denied. This is a shocking story of what can happen to a world renowned scientist when pitted against money, power and greed.

Indispensable pour découvrir la difficulté qu'il peut y avoir à faire connaître les données scientifiques sur les changements climatiques alors que ces changements vont considérablement perturber nos modes de vie et surtout ceux de nos enfants.

For the past 15 years, a largely invisible struggle, critical to the future of the planet, is being fought between the global community of climate scientists on one hand and fossil fuel companies-funded think-tanks and politicians on the other. During this time, climate scientists have reached an overwhelming scientific consensus that the carbon dioxide emissions caused by our reliance on coal, oil and gas have already caused significant global warming, and will ultimately endanger our planet unless all fossil fuel usage is rapidly phased out. Simultaneously, the fossil fuel industry has run a huge misinformation campaign to keep the public in the dark about climate change. Ground-breaking scientist Michael Mann writes about in this struggle in his new book.The critical study which solidified scientific opinion about the truth of global warming was the "hockey stick graph" discovered by author Michael Mann himself in 1998, and highlighted in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" documentary on global warming. Mann's graph showed global average temperatures slowly decreasing towards a distant new ice age for most of the past 1000 years, only to spike sharply upwards in the last one, like the end of a hockey stick. The hockey stick graph was strong evidence that man-made global warming was real, and was already happening. The hockey stick graph was confirmed by many subsequent scientific studies; the handful of studies, which contradicted it, were found to have critical errors. Among climate scientists, there is no longer any doubt about the reality and seriousness of global warming.The fossil-fuel industry, composed of multinational coal and oil companies, sought to protect their business interests by sowing public doubt in global warming, and was quick to strike back at climate scientists. They funded think-tanks and websites propagating reports by their own "experts" who cast doubts on the hockey stick. These experts were usually economists and meteorologists/TV weathermen who knew little of climate science, as well as an ever-shrinking minority of climate scientists. The misinformation campaign took advantage of a public and media largely ignorant of science, and unable to appreciate that the real scientific debate on climate change was over.US congressmen in the thrall of oil and coal lobbyists undertook an official witch-hunt of climate scientists in 2005. Congress was unable to find any problems with the climate scientists' views; but the damage was done. Widespread media coverage of politicians like Senator James Inhofe saying that climate change was "the single greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public" ensured that doubts about global warming continued in the public mind.The anti-climate science campaign ultimately descended to criminal acts of hacking and baseless accusations of fraud directed at Mann and his fellow scientists. In the "Climate-gate" incident in 2009, unknown hackers stole thousands of e-mail messages from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK. One particular e-mail from another climate scientist to Mann was repeatedly used as evidence to claim that Mann had used a "trick" to falsify his hockey stick data and was thus able to "hide the decline" in global temperature.Climate change deniers had a field day. In fact, the word "trick" is commonly used among mathematicians and scientists to describe a clever means of solving a difficult problem, seemingly by magic; it did not imply any wrongdoing. Likewise, the "decline" in that was being hidden was a series of temperature measurements from one particular study acknowledged by the original author to be doubtful due to pollution. A number of subsequent inquiries were conducted, and none found any wrongdoing on the part of climate scientists. Again, the damage was already done; public belief in global warming and political will to tackle it both fell dramatically.The fog of public doubt created over global warming had long-term consequences; firstly, Barack Obama's attempts at regulating carbon emissions were rejected by the Congress. Secondly, the Climate-gate hacking had been timed to occur just before the Copenhagen summit on global warming in December 2009. Due to doubts raised by Climate-gate as well as Obama's failure to pass any carbon dioxide emissions legislation in the US, Copenhagen failed to produce any meaningful international agreement to prevent global warming.This failure has left the planet in continued peril of global warming and consequent sea level rise, cyclones and drought. Hurricane Sandy, US/Russian crop failures and high food prices in 2012 are the beginnings of what is in store for us unless the public and politicians start taking real action to replace fossil fuels with nuclear, solar and wind power.

Oltre alla versione del Climategate raccontata da una delle vittime della campagna di diffamazione andata in onda nel 2011, colpisce il racconto che Mike fa della persecuzione giudiziara di cui è oggetto lui stesso e gli altri scienziati del Clima in America e GB. Verrebbe da dubitare seriamente della validità del sistema giudiziario degli USA.....