Hockey Stick Goes to Washington - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 86

obscure correction notice published two weeks later. 51 USA Today 's senior science journalist, Dan
Vergano, would further correct the record with a far more objective account of this latest
manufactured controversy, but this, too, was printed well after the Senate vote. 52 Meanwhile, deniers
were playing the controversy up for all it was worth. An e-mail a colleague sent on to me indicated
that Fred Singer had sought to pressure Nature into “withdrawing” the MBH98 article based on the
McIntyre and McKitrick paper.
As would often prove to be the case with future such attacks, my spirits were lifted by
supportive letters and notes from colleagues. A couple stood out in this instance. One was an
exchange with the climate scientist Stephen Schneider, long a personal hero of mine, who exhorted me
to stand my ground. Another was a short note from Walter Munk of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography/University of California-San Diego. I'd studied Munk's seminal work on ocean
circulation in introductory graduate courses on physical oceanography. Munk had also developed the
concept of acoustic tomography (using the behavior of sound waves as they travel through the ocean
to infer the thermal structure of seawater) and was the first scientist to rigorously explain a simple,
but rather enigmatic, observation: why the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. There was no
living scientist in my field that I respected more. In early November 2003 in the aftermath of the latest
developments, Munk sent a kind note praising me for the way that I had dealt with and responded to
the attacks, and offered the sage observation that “the problems of climate reconstructions are
sufficiently challenging when all work together in good faith. Little is served by introducing
unnecessary elements of controversy.”