Hockey sticks and brawls aren't just for NHL playoff games. Climate scientist Michael Mann has the scars to prove it. But along the way he has picked up some fans as well.
Juan Karita, AP
A man walks on Glacier Chacaltaya in the Andes mountains in Bolivia.
The "Hockey Stick" â€" the term given to a graph depicting the globe's average temperatures over the last millennium, looking like a flat shaft with a "blade" spiking upward at the end of the 20th Century â€" made Penn State's Mann and his colleagues into magnets for controversy among climate naysayers. Largely, they criticized the hockey stick's stark depiction, based for the most part on tree-ring data, of rising temperatures driven by global warming. The graph became famous after it appeared in a 2001 United Nations climate panel report.
Critics, most notably Canadian mining executive Steve McIntyre, argued that the type of statistics Mann used to collate past temperatures from tree rings inevitably introduced biases toward warming in the hockey stick reconstruction. But among scientists, a 2006 National Academy of Sciences report headed by Texas A&M's Gerald North that largely vindicated temperature reconstructions settled a lot of debate.
Along the way, Mann, author of the recently-released The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, has faced Congressional hearings, university investigations and court cases, such as an ongoing fight with the American Tradition Institute, a climate science critic group pursuing his e-mail looking for signs of his bias. In the book, Mann recounts such episodes, including the four-month Penn State investigation in 2010, which found him, "cleared of any wrongdoing," in the infamous University of East Anglia case. In that episode e-mails lifted from British university's climate research center revealed that climate scientists basically don't like climate naysayers, don't like releasing their work to them, and quibble quite a bit with each other as well.
"Each one has been a roller coaster ride, down, down, down and then up, up, up when we came out ahead on the other side," he says, by phone. But the oft-embattled climate scientist reports that he has finally found a way to put his critics to work. "The more attention they give my book, the more people come to my next talk," Mann says from Bloomington, Ind., where he was looking toward the final leg of a three-month book tour. "We had record turnout at Penn State for the very first one, thanks to efforts to prevent me from talking."
That February 9 lecture in State College, Pa., acquired standing-room attendance after the Washington D.C.-based Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee, headed by coal industry figures such as Bituminous Coal Operators Association president David Young, urged folks to send Penn State letters dis-inviting Mann from speaking on campus.
'The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars' by Michael E. Mann. Columbia University Press
The politics are very simple: Coal is the conventional fossil fuel that releases the most carbon dioxide, pound-for-pound, compared to oil or natural gas. Efforts to get across to the public that emissions of such greenhouse gasses inevitably lead to global warming, a position repeated recently by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in a series of 2010 reports, increases public support for further regulating the stuff, almost certainly raising the cost of doing business for coal mine operators.
At any rate, the effort to keep Mann from speaking attracted a lot of criticism, where DotEarth's Andy Revkin called it "a shameful attack," and the university's president, told The Guardian that the school "has a deep and profound commitment to the First Amendment and the principles of free speech," in declining to cancel the talk.
The reception at schools, bookstores and elsewhere has been overwhelmingly friendly, Mann says, often packed after climate naysayer complaints spark a backlash from science fans. One of the more amusing things Mann notes is that the Amazon book's page for a frequent climate science critic, Sen. James Inhofe, R. - Okla., lists Mann's book in the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" category. "I appreciate him helping my sales," Mann jokes.
Also noting the book, another well-known climate critic, former weatherman Anthony Watts, called it a "climate hoax book," at the start of the tour, and urged his followers to post reviews of it online.
One of the central ironies of the hockey stick debate has been that the rightness or wrongness of its temperature reconstruction, reproduced in more than a dozen studies, has little or no bearing on the argument for the reality of global warming. The increase in average global atmospheric temperatures driven by fossil fuel use and deforestation over the last century is largely seen in temperature records dating back to the 1880's, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its 2010 reports. The most recent support for the warming seen in those records came last year from the effort by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group, headed by University of California, Berkeley, physicist Richard Muller. Reaction to the BEST findings has largely split along political lines, as usual.
"Political attacks on science, that's what people want to hear about," Mann says. "I could bore people all day long talking about statistics, but what they want to hear is the politics."
Perhaps the most dramatic political confrontation of Mann's career came in 2005, when he was called to testify before a Congressional committee headed by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, , along with his University of Massachusetts colleague Ray Bradley, who has written about the experience in last year's Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up. The hearings featured a climate science critic, George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, who argued that a "clique" of climate scientists controlled the discipline, popularizing the conspiracy theory strain of climate naysaying now often voiced by Inhofe. Wegman's 2008 Computational Statistics and Data Analysis study describing some of this argument was retracted last year, and he was reprimanded by his university this year for scientific misconduct, after it emerged that his team had plagiarized Bradley, Wikipedia and other sources in their efforts.
Mann emerged from the hearings buoyed by the 2006 National Academy of Sciences report, which found that statistical complaints about Mann's first two hockey stick papers, while worth considering, didn't amount to much: Other temperature studies using different techniques and data had come to similar hockey-stick-shaped conclusions. "The real hero of the whole thing was a Republican congressman, Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the House Science Committee, who stepped in and asked the academy to review things," Mann says. "People forget that. And I like to end my talk by reminding people that climate science doesn't have to be a political issue that divides everyone."
The hockey stick still has its critics: In his forthcoming book, Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines, Muller criticizes the hockey stick findings that Mann and colleagues presented in a 1999 World Meteorological Organization report, arguing they buried numbers that spoke against global warming deep in a study. And at last year's American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Mann moderated a panel where climate scientist James Annan argued that hockey stick-style temperature reconstructions are likely only reliable going back about 800 years, not as far back as some of Mann's projections. But these are largely disagreements along scientific lines.
For all the politics surrounding climate science, "I don't have a political view to offer on the solution," Mann says, such as whether pollution rights for greenhouse gases should be bought and sold on the market, the "cap and trade" proposal that died in Congress in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic meltdown. "There are lots of legitimate views on what should, or shouldn't, be done about climate," Mann says. "My only real political position is that we should have an honest debate about what to do, not about the science."
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