By Randy Brich
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) relied on flawed historical global temperature reconstructions to make the case that unprecedented warming occurred in the latter half of the last century. Furthermore, the UN IPCC preached that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels most likely caused the warming. When the Canadian Government’s mass mailing to all Canadian households of a pamphlet depicting the UN IPCC’s judgments reached retired mining consultant and mathematics savant Steve McIntyre, he read it with stark disbelief.
As a Canadian, McIntyre was well aware of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the 250-year concomitant colonization of Greenland by Vikings during the middle portion of the past millennium. Their Greenland occupation ended after the climate changed and the island returned to its former arctic environment. Not only was the MWP warmer than anytime in the current contemporary warming, the MWP had caused a problem that the new climate scientists needed to erase.
Michael Mann and his co-authors of the famed “Hockey Stick” graph expunged the MWP from their historical temperature record by selectively using tree ring temperature proxies combined with unconventional statistics in their 1998 paper published in the journal Nature.
They replaced the MWP with a graph indicating much cooler temperatures based on a limited set of bristlecone pine tree rings. Then, when the modern day tree rings failed to record the temperature spikes of the 1990s, they replaced the tree ring proxy data with thermometer readings, thus “hiding the decline,” a phrase that circled the virtual world faster than a fossil fuel derived CO2 molecule.
The result of these deliberate data manipulations produced a graph resembling a horizontal hockey stick with its blade pointing up, showing the late-20th Century being the warmest since 1400.
While reading A. W. Montford’s (aka, Bishop Hill) The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, inestimable account of the history of the UN IPCC and McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s quest for the answers to their questions, the following Carl Sagan quote kept reverberating through my cranium:
We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.
In a masterful expose on scientific sleuthing, practiced primarily by Steve McIntyre and his fortuitous statistical economist friend, Ross McKitrick, Montford’s captivating climate science chronology commands attention and must, I assume, be giving Mann and his co-conspirators fantastic fits.
In exquisite, excruciating and exacting detail, this one book answered all of my questions regarding the nature of the disagreement between Michael Mann and his colleagues, now collectively known as The Hockey Team, and McIntyre and McKitrick and their band of merry auditors, now referred to as The Climate Auditors.
Montford’s a natural storyteller and his captivating style meticulously contrasts the entire history of McIntyre and McKitrick’s polite and patient requests for data, methods and techniques used in the historical temperature reconstruction with the refusals, rebuffs and retributions practiced by the Hockey Team scientists, their journal editors and UN IPCC accomplices.
With all but the last chapter of the book written before the CRU hack released the now infamous East Anglia emails, Montford relishes in the vindication the emails offer of his previous assertions and conclusions. The emails provide convincing evidence that the scientists, the UN IPCC and journals conspired to withhold the truth from the rest of the world.
Without the untiring and uncompensated efforts of McIntyre, McKitrick and the rest of The Climate Auditors we would never have known about the unscientific, agenda-driven efforts of a few self-proclaimed climate scientists doctoring the books to match their view of the world. Now, through the capable eyes of A.W. Montford, the world can finally see through the charade and people can decide for themselves what it all means.
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
A. W. Montford
Stacy International, paperback 2010, 482 pp.
ISBN 978 1 906768 35 5