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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"Therein lies the problem with dendrothermometry — growth rings are completely dependent on the growing conditions during the season, and temperature is a relatively minor factor. A warm dry season will result in pretty much the same width ring as a cool dry season, a cool wet season with an increase in available nutrients will result in a wider growth ring than a warm wet season with few available nutrients. Trees located on a slope will have narrower rings than trees located at the base of that same slope, and trees growing in thin soil overlying bedrock will have narrower rings than those of trees growing on a stream bank 50 feet away.
You can intuit whether growing conditions in any particular year were favorable or unfavorable by analyzing tree rings, but coaxing each separate condition — temperature, nutrients, available light, water — out of them is pretty much an exercise in futility."
Mann fought ALL FOIA requests for years. His work was not peer-reviewed and cannot be duplicated. Yet, and this is the funny part, the "hockey stick" is accepted as gospel by people who should know better.
Confirmed warming in Greenland, when the Vikings farmed today's permafrost for 400 years where it is impossible today, that is considered only "regional warming" and not proof of the Medieval Warm Period? In spite of Roman records, church records, farming records across Europe, etc, which cover a region more than 5,000 miles across. Yet cherry-picked tree ring data from a small, obscure Russian arctic pennisula produces a spike, and that's declared proof of global warming? When the removal of certain trees from the data set eliminates the "hockey stick", or the addition of other tree ring data from other Russian survey does the same, it cannot and should not be called science. It is merely statistical manipulation.
While I applaud Mann for writing a book from his viewpoint, and Dr. Masters for actually reading it, Mann might as well claim to have invented cold fusion or room-temperature superconductors for all of the concrete scientific evidence he has produced over the last 14 years.
And as far as global warming goes, even a cursory glance at the average yearly temperature for my hometown shows in 1981 it was 75 degrees. Last year, and for the three years preceeding it, it was 74 degrees. During the intervening years there have been both higher and lower numbers, but if a desert in the Western US doesn't show a warming signature at all is it a sign of globally-stable temperatures?
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAMPA BAY AREA - RUSKIN FL
1250 PM EDT WED MAY 16 2012
FLC101-161745-
/O.NEW.KTBW.FA.Y.0012.120516T1650Z-120516T1745Z/
/00000.N.ER.000000T0000Z.000000T0000Z.000000T0000 Z.OO/
PASCO FL-
1250 PM EDT WED MAY 16 2012
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE OFFICE IN RUSKIN HAS ISSUED A
* URBAN AND SMALL STREAM FLOOD ADVISORY FOR...
CENTRAL PASCO COUNTY IN FLORIDA.
* UNTIL 145 PM EDT
* AT 1250 PM EDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED
RAINFALL RATES OF THREE INCHES PER HOUR ASSOCIATED WITH THUNDERSTORMS
OVER THE ADVISED AREA...LOCALIZED FLOODING IS IMMINENT OR OCCURRING.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
KEEP CHILDREN FROM BEING SWEPT AWAY IN FLOODED DITCHES AND DRAINS.
FLOOD WATERS ARE USUALLY DEEPER THAN THEY APPEAR AND MAY STALL YOUR
VEHICLE. JUST ONE FOOT OF FLOWING WATER IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO SWEEP
VEHICLES OFF THE ROAD. TURN AROUND...DONT DROWN.
&&
LAT...LON 2832 8260 2833 8246 2821 8248 2818 8262
$$
And boy do we need it!!!
THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA.
.DAY ONE...TODAY AND TONIGHT.
.THUNDERSTORM IMPACT...
A MOIST ATMOSPHERE AND WEAK SURFACE WINDS REMAIN IN PLACE ACROSS EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA. WIDESPREAD CLOUDS...RAIN AND EMBEDDED STORMS CONTINUE TO STREAM EASTWARD FROM THE GULF OF MEXICO ACROSS THE PENINSULA... WHICH IS LIMITING DAYTIME HEATING. WHILE THE EAST COAST SEA BREEZE MAY FORM LATER TODAY... THE HIGHEST COVERAGE OF SHOWERS AND STORMS THIS AFTERNOON WILL BE OVER AREAS THAT SEE MORE BREAKS IN THE CLOUDS AND RECEIVE THE MOST SURFACE HEATING. ACTIVITY WILL MOVE NORTHEAST BACK TOWARD THE EAST COAST AT 10 TO 15 MPH.
THE MAIN THREATS WILL BE FREQUENT LIGHTNING STRIKES AND TEMPORARY PONDING OF WATER ON ROADS FROM TORRENTIAL RAINFALL OF ONE TO TWO INCHES AN HOUR...ESPECIALLY IN LOCATIONS THAT SAW HEAVY RAINFALL
ON TUESDAY. STRONG WIND GUSTS UP TO 50 MPH AND SMALL HAIL WILL ALSO BE POSSIBLE.
.MARINE THUNDERSTORM GUST IMPACT...
SCATTERED TO NUMEROUS SHOWERS AND STORMS ARE EXPECTED TO DEVELOP AND AFFECT INLAND LAKES THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON...WITH ACTIVITY SHIFTING TOWARDS THE INTRACOASTAL AND LOCAL ATLANTIC WATERS FROM LATE THIS
AFTERNOON INTO EARLY EVENING. A FEW STRONGER STORMS WITH WIND GUSTS TO 35 KNOTS AND FREQUENT LIGHTNING STRIKES ARE EXPECTED. STORMS WILL MOVE NORTHEAST AT 15 KNOTS.
.FIRE WEATHER IMPACT...
THERE IS A LOW TO MODERATE ENVIRONMENTAL FIRE DANGER DUE TO DRY FUELS. SOME RAIN WETTING IS EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON...BUT LIGHTNING STORMS COULD INITIATE NEW FIRES.
.DAYS TWO THROUGH SEVEN...THURSDAY THROUGH TUESDAY.
SUFFICIENT MOISTURE WILL EXIST FOR SCATTERED TO NUMEROUS STORMS THROUGH THIS WEEKEND. UPPER LEVEL TROUGHING WILL RESULT IN STEERING WINDS THAT WILL FAVOR THE HIGHEST COVERAGE OF AFTERNOON STORMS OVER THE EAST SIDE OF THE PENINSULA INTO LATE WEEK...WITH THE FLOW SHIFTING OUT OF THE EAST STARTING THIS WEEKEND.
.SPOTTER INFORMATION STATEMENT...
SPOTTERS ARE REQUESTED TO MONITOR THE WEATHER AND SELF ACTIVATE IF NEEDED.
$$
MOSES/CRISTALDI
(for me) Excellent, simple explanation by Arnie Gundersen about what is happening with the vibrating tubes that caused the release of radioactive steam......
Link
Cut your personal use of fossil fuels.
Encourage others to cut theirs.
Vote for people who will fix the problem.
Link
It's just north of here. I got .50" yesterday on top of 4.26" last week and everything has really greened up here. Sanford got 2.20" yesterday which isn't far from me. This next area of rain coming in looks like it will deliver 1" to 3" areawide over the next 12 hours or so.
The majority of Americans are worried about climate change. A large majority of Americans want us to switch to clean energy sources, even if it costs them more for electricity.
We were understandably distracted by the deep recession we just experienced, but we're now crawling out of that hole.
I don't care if you're a Republican. This might be the time you really need to vote for the Democratic ticket because we cannot afford another round of fossil fuel interests controlling the government.
We are very close to making wind and solar major industries. We need to curtail natural gas. We need to finish closing coal plants.
A few years of government by leaders who want to get us off fossil fuels will set us on a path that people like the Koch brothers will not be able to reverse.
The northern hemisphere is not the globe.
Early research on historical temperatures was not as robust in regards to spatial averaging of the temperature over the globe. Newer research has indicated a more regional appearance of these relatively warmer/cooler periods such that they could still be global, but occurring at different times for different regions.
Also keep in mind that this is just one climate reconstruction; several exist. The consensus of these reconstructions is that the recent warming period is very pronounced and likely warmer than the MWP.
UTEP has 10 electric vehicle charging stations
May 16, 2012 17:16 GMT
EL PASO, Texas (AP) -- The University of Texas at El Paso is primed for plugging in by students, staff and visitors.
UTEP on Wednesday announced 10 electric vehicle charging stations are now operating.
The stations are located at the Sun Bowl and Schuster parking garages, plus the Mike Loya Academic Services Building.
UTEP says the 220-volt stations are made possible by a $256,000 Texas State Energy Conservation Office grant. The money was approved in 2009 for the City of El Paso in partnership with UTEP.
An additional $98,000 state grant, approved last June, will pay for more vehicle charging stations by the end of 2012.
January - 0.34
February - 0.84
March - 2.82
April - 1.49
May - 0.81
As with some other available electric vehicles currently available, this vehicle is strictly for short ranges and slow speeds.
Fuel type: All-electric
Price: $12K – $15K
Range / top speed: 35 miles / 25mph
Funding: This company is publicly traded on the TSX.
Release date: Available now
I've wondered that myself. Around here if you're going to work or a lot of other places you take I-10. And they've just raised the speed limit to 75. But maybe it won't always be like that.
Here is the text.
TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1100 AM PDT WED MAY 16 2012
FOR THE EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC...EAST OF 140 DEGREES WEST LONGITUDE..
THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER IS ISSUING ADVISORIES ON TROPICAL
STORM ALETTA...LOCATED ABOUT 785 MILES SOUTH-SOUTHWEST OF THE
SOUTHERN TIP OF BAJA CALIFORNIA.
SATELLITE IMAGERY INDICATES THAT CLOUDINESS AND SHOWERS ASSOCIATED
WITH A LOW PRESSURE AREA LOCATED ABOUT 500 MILES SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF
ACAPULCO MEXICO CONTINUE TO GRADUALLY BECOME BETTER ORGANIZED.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS REMAIN CONDUCIVE FOR SLOW DEVELOPMENT OF
THIS SYSTEM DURING THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS.THIS SYSTEM HAS A
MEDIUM CHANCE...30 PERCENT...OF BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING
THE NEXT 48 HOURS.
ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE
NEXT 48 HOURS.
$$
FORECASTER KIMBERLAIN
They like mulch, it's cool underneath, and perfect breeding ground for ants, I always have to keep an eye on it
If you try to compare the climate of today to the one you remember 20 years ago, you're still comparing the current climate to another that was greatly affected by AGW (only today there may be an additional .20 or .30C of warming). But if you could build a time machine and travel back to 1850, I think then most people would understand and appreciate the enormity of the situation.
* URBAN AND SMALL STREAM FLOOD ADVISORY FOR...
EXTREME NORTHEAST VOLUSIA COUNTY IN FLORIDA...
THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF ORMOND BEACH...ORMOND BY THE SEA...
* UNTIL 300 PM EDT.
* AT 157 PM EDT...WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED VERY HEAVY
RAIN FALLING ACROSS NORTHEASTERN VOLUSIA COUNTY. UP TO AROUND TWO
INCHES OF RAIN HAS ALREADY FALLEN IN THIS AREA...AND ANOTHER INCH OF
RAIN IS POSSIBLE BEFORE THE RAIN TAPERS OFF.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
A FLOOD ADVISORY MEANS HEAVY RAINFALL IS CAUSING OR IS LIKELY TO
CAUSE PONDING OF WATER IN URBAN AREAS AND ELEVATE RIVER OR STREAM
FLOWS. MINOR FLOODING MAY CAUSE TEMPORARY LANE OR ROAD CLOSURES BUT
THE THREAT OF WATER ENTERING HOMES AND BUSINESSES IS LOW.
EXCESSIVE RUNOFF FROM HEAVY RAINFALL WILL CAUSE TEMPORARY FLOODING
OF URBAN AREAS...SUCH AS HIGHWAYS...STREETS AND INTERSECTIONS AS
WELL AS POOR DRAINAGE AREAS AND LOW LYING SPOTS. IT WILL WILL ALSO
CAUSE ELEVATED LEVELS ON SMALL CREEKS AND STREAMS...AND PONDING OF
WATER ON COUNTRY ROADS AND FARMLAND ALONG THE BANKS OF CREEKS AND
STREAMS.
Should this be true, how do you explain Justin Bieber?
Good thing we can own as many guns as we want in Texas :D
or its just another year in the billions of years the earth has been in existence...
Why Uncle Sam wants GUN CONTROL, and to be able to confiscate your weapons at any time when needed to protect itself and for it's own existence and survival. Uncle Sam has longed plan for the Event.
Ants are in my house... again... just like every year darn things... haha
You hit your head?
We're all made of stardust, and mother earth has long been around before us
Ok?
It's all part of it too Nea, everything will come together
Nope
How fast? As fast as you want them. The Tesla Roadster is incredibly quick.
This is a few years old. There may be faster now.
"The fastest street legal electric car is a Chevy S-10 called 'Smoke Screen' which was built and is owned by Dennis Berube, who also built the worlds fastest EV dragster 'Current Eliminator'.
The S-10 has a best time of 11.083 @ 120 mph and can accelerate to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds."
EVs have tremendous torque and are very responsive when accelerating from just about any speed.
Rain was just POURING here at USF...
Car crash and fire occured just down the road. Pretty big fireball. hope they all got out ok.
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