Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence
Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years.
A recent op-ed on this page by blogger and climate-change denier James Delingpole attacked the “hockey stick” graph my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago with well-worn, discredited arguments (“Climategate 2.0,” Nov. 28).
Our original work showed that average temperatures today are higher than they have been for at least the past 1,000 years. Since then, dozens of analyses from other scientists based on different data and methods have all affirmed and extended our original findings.
Contrarians have nonetheless painted a misleading picture of climate science as a house of cards teetering on the edge of a hockey stick. In reality, my research is just one piece in a vast puzzle scientists have painstakingly assembled over the past 200 years establishing the reality of human-caused climate change.
Does that mean that everyone should have to drive an electric car and adopt a polar bear? Of course not. Policy decisions must balance matters of economics, international diplomacy and ethics in a way that is informed, rather than prescribed, by science.
In 2006, then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.) asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into studies like the hockey stick. It affirmed our conclusions.
In recent years, attacks on climate science have become personal. After my colleagues and I had our emails stolen and posted online in November 2009, attacks from climate contrarians were subsequently shot down by investigations from two universities, the National Science Foundation, two federal agencies and several media outlets. Contrarians declared that those institutions were part of an imagined global-warming conspiracy.
In April 2010, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli demanded emails I sent or received from other scientists while at the University of Virginia. A judge concluded Mr. Cuccinelli hadn’t demonstrated any good reason to see that correspondence. Shortly after that, the American Tradition Institute, a group with ties to fossil-fuel interests, asked for the same emails under the state’s open records laws. The university rightly asserted that much of my private correspondence is just that and not subject to release.
Many fossil-fuel interests and their allies are following the same attack-the-science strategy that tobacco companies adopted to delay smoking regulation. Climate scientists can also find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman, who identified a link between lead contamination and impaired childhood brain development in the 1970s. The lead industry accused him of misconduct. Later, the National Institutes of Health exonerated him.
Mr. Delingpole ends his piece by saying the anonymous hacker or hackers who stole emails from me and my colleagues deserve thanks. What they deserve is to be brought to justice. But British police have not determined who stole the emails. Recent reports of police expenditures suggest they may be devoting far fewer resources to it than other similar investigations.
Celebrating theft is silly. We should respect the role science and scientists play in society, especially when scientists identify new risks. Whether those risks stem from smoking, lead exposure or the increasing use of fossil fuels, scientists will always work to increase knowledge and reduce uncertainty. And we all benefit from that work.
Prof. Michael E. Mann
Meteorology Department
Penn State University
Director, Penn State Earth System Science Center
University Park, Pa.
Seems like you pretty much lose the high ground when you, as a scientist, use the word "denier." Particularly when you decry "personal" attacks.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat is it with Penn State?
Mann is trying to do to the tax payer and our freedoms what Jerry Sandusky was doing to those little boys.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIts not 'theft', its a whistleblower. Reporting someone for fraud is protected by federal law.
Speaking of which, once Obama/Holder are gone and we have a Justice Dept that is interested in actually enforcing the law, shouldn't Mann and Penn State be prosecuted for fraud?
His 'research' is financed by tax dollars. He's been repeatedly proven to have fabricated the 'evidence' he bases his papers on.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOther scientists confirming the validity of the hockey stick. That is one of the more bizarre / delusional claims of the AWG scientists.
The hockey stick pretends the MWP did not exist. The hockey stick pretends the little ice age did not exist.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is how it was confirmed:
Tommy Thompson has a paper that contains a hockey-stick graph, which was presented to Congress as supporting Mann's theory.
Source of the hockey stick diagram? Thompson's own original research?
Nope. Mann's own MBH98.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI am surprised (ok, not too surprised) to find Mann still defending his hockey stick graph. There is more to science than just number crunching, and Mann's only rebuttal to the well-documented evidence for the medeival warm period and the little ice age is a hand-wavy assertion that they weren't "global."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI also find the answer that the MWP and little Ice age were regional a little to cute.
Both lasted approximately 300 years. The primary driver of the MWP was the Medieval maximum ( a period of high solar activity). The primary driver of the little ice age was the Maunder minimum (a period of light solar activity). To claim that either period was not global, you have to believe the suns rays were somehow able to focus on a region of the globe for 300 odd years or in the case of the Medieval warming period, that a high pressure zone sat over 1/4 of the same part of the globe for 300 years.
While, the AGW proponents have provided ample proxy data to support the regional aspect (though not acknowledging contradictory data), they have not provided a coherent scientific explanation on why or how a claimed regional (weather) event could have lasted 300 years.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere is also massive amounts of world wide evidence for the Roman warm period of 2000ya that was warmer than the Mideval warm period. There is massive amounts of world wide evidence for the Minoan warm period of about 3000 years ago that was warmer still. There is even more world wide evidence for the Holocene optimum of about 20,000ya which was as much as 5C warmer than today.
None of those were caused by CO2 by the way. All of them prove as well that there is no such thing as a tipping point, they also prove that life thrives when the climate warms.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMann's comment that the validity of the hockey stick was confirmed by other scientist is one of the more bizarre/delusional claims by the AWG scientists. That is the same hockey stick that erases the MWP. The same hockey stick the erases the little ice age.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCurious, why do you write AWG instead of AGW? I assume this stands for anthropocentric global warming. Is this correct?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere is no science in selecting a "model" which does not "predict" the known.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI am really disturbed that Dr. Mann is upset with all of us evil, polar-bear-killing deniers. He has every right to be distressed with the "silly" little "theft" of climategate 2 memos. After all, they don't seem to cast him, or climate science, in a very good light.
Thanks to Dr. Mann, I have been a global warming skeptic since the early 2000's. When I saw his "hockey-stick" graph for the first time, and compared it to the graph published by the IPCC in the early 1990s, I noticed that the little ice age and medieval warming periods had been erased. This led me to ask: "What is the truth, and when did it change?"
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI am science. You must not attack me. [ / hmmm]
I suppose it was "silly" for Toto to pull back the curtains on the Wizard too. But when we're at the mercy of Mann's "Earth System," we're not exactly in Kansas.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnonymous leaking documents that can harm diplomats and soldiers = good
Anonymous leaking documents that show "climate scientists" to be charlatans and liars = bad
That tells you all you need to know about the moral ground of the Left.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThese so called "confirming" studies, just happen to have been conducted by close collegues of Mann, and used the same data and statistical tricks that he used.
Hardly surprising that they reached the same conclusion.
Meanwhile back in the real world, there are thousands of studies that show that the Mideval Warm Period was as warm or even warmer than temperatures today. Or should I say as warm or warmer than they were in 1998. Temperatures have been falling since then.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen is someone going to ask Mann to explain the "teleconnections" between his special, special trees whose tree rings respond to the general global climate zeitgeist instead of local conditions?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn looking at the tree proxies - it has generally amazed me that there is very little difference year to year in the reconstructed temps ( definitive trend line, but very little year to year difference). As most everyone knows, the growing season for a tree varies between 4 months to 8 months, so the tree ring data will only capture that part of the year. As any weatherman knows, the local temps will vary as much 5-10 degrees in one local from one summer to the next. Maybe it is not odd that the tree ring proxies dont capture the local variance, but are able to capture the global variances in temps.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat makes no sense. A tree ring is wider the more the tree grows in a given season, and it grows according to how favorable the conditions are.
The LOCAL conditions. The ones that the tree itself experiences. Favorable growing conditions can be produced by warmth, water, CO2, deer droppings, or any combination thereof.
Mann has no earthly clue why a particular tree ring is wide: maybe it was warmer that year, but maybe it was merely wetter. Furthermore, he persisted in using strip-bark bristlecones and foxtail bristlecones, long after NSA told him to knock it off. Mann is utterly unreliable on tree-ring data.
Furthermore, if the tree's growth happens only part of the year, that's another good reason NOT to use tree rings as a temperature proxy.
His trees were "tuned in" to the global thermal zeitgeist and not the local temps? Ex-squeeze me?
That Mann wasn't laughed off the planet by his peers is proof positive that climate science is utterly corrupt.
Also, what's with this rhetorical tic? "As most everyone knows," "As any weatherman knows." It sounds like you're trying to sound more analytical than you really are. Given that you're defending Mann's absurd explanation for the temperature divergence, I guess that's par for the course.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDicentra - Far from defending Mann - I was pointing out the limitations of the tree ring proxies.
I have scanned a sampling of numerous individual tree proxies (linked from the NOAA website. For example, most of the tree proxy data that has converted each year ring growth into a temp have shown very little variance from year to year in the proxied temp. While there may be a slow trend over long period of time of either warming or cooling, each individual year for a specific location may vary as much as 5-10 degrees from one year to the next. (compare most of the summer US temps in 2011 vs 2010, the growing season). Those individual swings in annual temps are not reflected in the tree ring proxy studies. (At least not in any of the proxies I saw)
Another point that I made was that the tree rings only capture the temps for the growing season. The winter temps are barely captured in the tree rings proxies. (though the root systems do grow during the winters - but the tree ring ring proxies are not done on the root system).
The results of tree ring proxies studies, not only smooth out the annual growing season variances, they make extrapolations regarding winter temps. I find these to be highly improbable.
Far from defending Mann - I was pointing out just a few of the many reasons there is a divergence from the tree ring proxies to the actual temps (some say as much as 40%). Though one of the explanations for the divergence is the extra co2 since 1960 has caused the divergence - an scientific explanation which I find a little "too cute".
While I agree that the tree ring proxies have some value in determine a range of temps and a general trend line, there are significant limitations of using tree ring proxies to attempt to nail down the accuracy of the temps as Mann has done.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe only studies that confirm Mann's were made by members of the Hockey Team. But Mann fails to mention that the hockey stick has been thoroughly discredited.
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