Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (15 page)

In a full frontal assault published in the journal
Energy and
Environment,
McIntyre and McKitrick said that the graph “contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects.”

Energy and Environment,
however, is a less than prestigious journal; its editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, is another member of the Robert Durward U.K. Scientific Alliance. So McIntyre and McKitrick continued to press for more high-profile attention. They were rebuffed by
Nature
but succeeded in 2005 in getting a second version of the paper published in the journal
Geophysical Research Letters.

The criticisms, though actively rebutted by Mann and others, still forced Mann to add a clarification to the record—a “victory” that gave McIntyre and company courage enough to claim that the hockey stick had been discredited. And they didn’t stop there. As the news passed through the think tank echo chamber, the assault on the hockey stick became a proxy for an attack on all climate science. There was an error in the hockey stick, so (the think tanks argued) that cast all climate science into doubt. By the time the message was spun back out to the most malleable of mainstream media outlets, the point seemed conclusive. Barry Cooper (that University of Calgary professor who set up the oil-industry slush fund to finance the Friends of Science), dismissed all “global warming hysteria” in a
Calgary
Herald
column on the last day of 2008 (“Cooling Global Warming Hysteria Just One Story of ’08”), sneering especially at “the notorious intellectual swindle of the hockey stick graph.” Lawrence Solomon, writing in Canada’s
National Post
on February 6, 2009 (“Mann’s Conclusion Not to Be Believed”), said, “Conclusion about the hockey stick graph: Mann-made science does not support the hypothesis that global warming is man-made.”

The hockey fight also carried over to the political arena. Senator Inhofe, in his all-encompassing “Hot & Cold Media Spin” climate change speech on the Senate floor in 2006, gave the distinct impression that the “fall” of the hockey stick was a matter of established fact: “The ‘hockey stick’ was completely and thoroughly broken once and for all in 2006. Several years ago, two Canadian researchers tore apart the statistical foundation for the hockey stick. In 2006, both the National Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the foundation of the ‘hockey stick.’”

Well, that was Inhofe’s interpretation of the National Academy of Sciences review. For another interpretation you could refer to
Nature,
one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, which carried a June 2006 account of a National Academy of Sciences panel review of Mann’s work under the headline, “Academy Affirms Hockey-Stick Graph.”

Statistician Edward Wegman completed a second, Congress-ordered review of the hockey stick in July 2006. Wegman complained that Mann was not trained in statistics and had not sought the assistance of a statistician in preparing the graph. He endorsed some of McIntyre’s criticisms and concluded, “Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”

So the debate rages on. But here’s the suspicious part: no one among the ideological media commentators or among industry’s favorite political leaders seems to be asking any searching questions about the science behind the stick. They seem uncurious about whether Mann’s work has been tested by other scientists or confirmed or falsified by the use of other methods or other proxy data sources. They just want to whip up and sustain the controversy around this single piece of evidence.

Here’s why: if you look at the other climate-reconstruction graphs that have been prepared and published since Mann’s leading example, you could outfit a whole hockey team and still have sticks left over. As we detail at DeSmogBlog, more than a dozen other scientists have come up with numerous reconstructions, which all feature a long, relatively straight line through most of the past millennium punctuated by a sharp upturn in the middle of the last century. McIntyre and Wegman can quibble with Mann’s methodology or wiggle the historic figures however much they like, but they can’t challenge the slope of the “blade.” And they seem unable to find a single foible or flaw in the content or methodology of all these other studies.

It’s clear from reading McIntyre’s blog, ClimateAudit.org, that he puts huge amounts of time and a significant amount of care into what he does. He also gets the odd thing right—he caught another statistical error in the past year in the way that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was reporting temperatures. But you can also tell that the argument between McIntyre and Mann has grown deeply personal, and that McIntyre is not the least interested in resolving the underlying issue. He’s famous because he is a think tank darling, and he seems more interested in maintaining that fame than in really answering whether the world is burning while he fiddles.

It should be remembered, too, that Michael Mann is one of the most impressive climate scientists in the country. He is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University and the director of Penn State’s interdepartmental Earth Systems Science Centre. He has more than eighty peer-reviewed articles to his credit, just one of which availed itself to a very narrow technical criticism from Steve McIntyre. Mann is also one of the founders of the Web site RealClimate.org, one of the best sources on the Internet for clear and accessible, but soundly scientific, discussion about climate change.

IF, BY DINT of his doggedness, Steve McIntyre stands as one of the more credible climate change quibblers, Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, must register a little further down the list. Styling himself “Lord Monckton” (or, if you’re a close friend or a Canadian talk-radio host, “Lord Christopher”), the Viscount is forever inserting himself into the climate conversation, on the side of confusion and disbelief.

His actual science credentials are thin. His most prominent current position seems to be as “chief policy advisor at a think tank called the Science and Public Policy Institute.” (This Frontiers of Freedom knockoff, founded with a start-up grant from Exxon, has my favorite denier webname: SPPINstitute.org. You have to give them points for transparency.) Monckton’s biography on the SPPINstitute reads as follows: “Christopher, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as U.K. Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986, and gave policy advice on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics.”

This is unfounded self-promotion. In 1982 Monckton was a thirty-year-old researcher who had studied classics and journalism. You have to wonder if he would have been the expert of choice when the Iron Lady and the Royal Navy were considering the design of their warships. The biography goes on to say that Monckton had special skills in “psephological modelling (predicting the result of the 1983 General Election to within one seat).” Those who have served in political offices during elections might speculate that this meant Monckton had won the office election pool.

But if Monckton is to be suspected of overstating his qualifications, his claim to Nobel status must certainly be his most outrageous exaggeration. The SPPINstitute biography goes on to say, “His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007—the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise—earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.” This is an insult to the members of the IPCC, whom the Nobel committee actually honored along with Al Gore. Official Nobel recipients—the actual authors and editors of the IPCC report—received a very handsome certificate (my friend, University of Victoria climate modeller and leading IPCC chapter author Andrew Weaver, described his with considerable pride). With Monckton not being on the Nobel list, it is beyond comical that one of his buddies would melt down the components of an old experiment to fashion a pin. It’s worse yet that Monckton would boast of this as somehow legitimizing his claim to Nobel status.

Monckton says in a 2006 letter to two U.S. Senators that he is a Member of the House of Lords. But the evidence, described in Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog, shows that he is not. Monckton (or someone using his computer) tried to convince the editors at Wikipedia that he had won a £50,000 libel judgment against
Guardian
columnist George Monbiot. But the evidence, available at Monbiot.com, shows that he did not. Most broadly, Monck-ton says that former U.S. vice president and legitimate Nobel laureate Al Gore is all wrong about climate change. But the evidence . . . the evidence is such a nuisance.

The clash of fact and comedy came to a head in July 2008 after Monckton submitted to
Forum on Physics and Society
(an online newsletter of the American Physical Society) a lengthy attack on the most recent IPCC report. Almost immediately the news began pounding through the think tank echo chamber that one of their own had published a “peer-reviewed” article contradicting the scientific consensus about climate change.

Unless you use the definition of “peer” that invokes membership in the British peerage, this claim fell down rather publicly. The newsletter had edited Monckton’s piece. They had even assigned a real physicist to help him make sense of the math. But the
Forum on Physics and Society
is not a refereed journal, and Monckton’s piece had neither enjoyed nor endured a formal process of review. In response to complaints from American Physical Society members who were outraged that Monckton was using their organization to claim credibility for his views, the society quickly posted this note on top of Monckton’s harangue, making it clear that the organization had not moved from its support of the consensus and that Monckton’s piece was not considered a formal scientific paper: “The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: ‘Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.’”

Monckton was incensed. He wrote what the SPPINstitute called a “sharp letter” to American Physical Society president Arthur Bienenstock, condemning the advisory as “discourteous” and demanding the names and addresses of everyone who was involved in adding it above his article. This excerpt from Monckton’s July 18, 2008, letter of complaint, now available at scienceandpublicpolicy.org, is typical of the Viscount’s usual writing style: “If the Council (of the American Physical Society) has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts
primo,
that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had;
secundo,
that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the ‘overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community’; and,
tertio,
that ‘The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions’?” It seems certain that Monckton is not a fan of George Orwell, who would have steered the Viscount away from the Latin numbering. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell says: “Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.”

Despite his literary ticks, despite his Orwellian track record of rewriting history and his paucity of scientific credentials, he remains a favorite on the lecture and radio talk show circuit. His video from a lecture titled “Apocalypse? No!” is available on the SPPINstitute Web site or from Steven Milloy at JunkScience .com. He was also on the speakers list at the Heartland Institute’s “International Conference on Climate Change.”

A LAST CATEGORY of junk scientist is the unwitting accessory. The unwitting accessory is not to be confused with the witless denier—the kind of person who is armed with too little information and too great a sense of personal certainty. Rather, these are people who are dragged into the argument without their permission and sometimes without their knowledge. For example, Dennis Avery took advantage of dozens of unwitting collaborators in compiling his list of “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares.” But an even creepier example cropped up in a video that the Heartland Institute sent to eleven thousand Canadian schools, urging teachers to tell their students that scientists are exaggerating how human activity is affecting global climate.
²

The DVD, now on YouTube, was titled
Unstoppable Solar
Cycles: The Real Story of Greenland,
and it begins with Rie Olden-burg, curator of the Narsaq Museum in Greenland, talking about the warm and habitable climate that made the early Viking settlement in Greenland thrive. The video then switches suddenly from an interesting historical retrospective to a political polemic. One minute you have people talking about early Viking fashions, and the next, the veteran denier Willie Soon is talking about coping with “natural changes in the Earth’s climate system.” What began as a charming history story is suddenly a video tribute to Fred Singer and Dennis Avery’s latest book,
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.
It becomes a carefully constructed argument to convince children, in the words of the announcer, that “this current (and natural) climate cycle is what most people call ‘global warming.’”