The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession With 'Climate Change' Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? by Christopher Booker

Author:Christopher Booker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, Science
ISBN: 9781441110527
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2009-12-15T23:00:00+00:00

HOW THE ‘HOCKEY TEAM’ SAVED THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’

When, at the end of April 2007, the IPCC finally released online the full version of its scientific report ‘The basis of physical change’ – nearly three months after the publication of its Summary for Policy-makers – one question was bound to attract particular interest. How would the IPCC respond to the comprehensive discrediting of the ‘hockey stick’, which in 2001 it had made the star of the show?

The message of the ‘hockey stick’ after all remained absolutely crucial to the global warming ‘consensus’ because it was the only real evidence to suggest that the warming of recent decades was without precedent in human history. If temperatures had been as high or even higher in pre-industrial times, the theory that the current warming could not have been caused by natural means would lose its central underpinning. At all costs this dramatic image of temperatures having suddenly hurtled upwards at the end of the twentieth century to levels never known before must somehow be kept alive.

McIntyre and McKitrick’s first questioning of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ in 2003 had set off widespread discussion of the issue on the internet. This helped to give a whole new dimension to the climate change debate as, away from the main public arena, an increasingly important part came to be played in the debate by specialist blogs. These used the internet to carry on technical discussions with an intensity of interchange which the mainstream media and even scientific journals could not emulate.

In 2004, Mann and a group of scientific allies set up a blog called RealClimate to defend their case and generally to promote their particular view of global warming, Calling themselves the ‘Hockey Team’, they liked to insist that they were ‘genuine climate scientists’, in contrast to the unqualified ‘amateurs’ who dared to criticise them.

Mann’s RealClimate colleagues, whose work was centred on computer models, included Gavin Schmidt, a British-born senior colleague of Hansen’s at GISS; Ray Bradley, one of Mann’s co-authors on the original ‘hockey stick’ studies; and Caspar Ammann, a Swiss palaeoclimatologist employed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and one of Mann’s most active defenders.

Other key allies of the ‘Hockey Team’ included two senior staff members of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Dendrochronologist Dr Keith Briffa specialised in tree ring studies. The CRU’s director, Professor Phil Jones, ran the world-ranking temperature series operated by the CRU with the Hadley Centre. Almost all of them, Mann, Bradley, Briffa, Jones and Ammann, were not only key contributors to IPCC reports but, as Wegman observed in 2006, had extensively collaborated with each other on a succession of papers defending the ‘hockey stick’ and the methods used to reach its conclusions.aj

On the other side of the debate, in 2005 Steve McIntyre launched his own blog, Climate Audit, specialising in the analysis of data related to climate change. Having by now established something of a reputation in this field, he was to

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