When You Get Your Picture on the Cover of - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 87

Chapter 9
When You Get Your Picture on the Cover of …
A half-truth is a whole lie.
—Yiddish Proverb
A hit song of 1972 by the rock group Dr. Hook, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” satirized musicians
knowing they had “made it” when they appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. 1 In the
global warming debate, it was the climate change deniers who would win that honor—in January
2010. 2
David Versus Goliath
I instead got a dubious honor of a different sort some five years earlier: On February 14, 2005, I
received a Valentine's Day present—a rather unwelcome one—from the Wall Street Journal ( WSJ ). 3
My likeness was featured as one of the paper's stylized, hand-rendered portraits on the front page
accompanying the article “In Climate Debate, the 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off” by
environment reporter Antonio Regalado. The article reported the latest attacks on the hockey stick by
Stephen McIntyre, whose likeness was also featured on the front page. McIntyre missed making the
cover of the Rolling Stone five years later, however, as he was not chosen for its list of the planet's
seventeen “worst enemies”—a list that included other now-familiar protagonists such as James
Inhofe, Marc Morano, Fred Singer, and the Koch brothers (McIntyre did make a similar list of
“climate villains” compiled by another publication around the same time 4 ) . Though separated in time
by five years, the Rolling Stone and WSJ cover stories were emblematic of the dueling narratives of
the two sides in the climate change debate.
While it was easy to dismiss the numerous denialist columns that had run over the years on the
WSJ 's typically right-leaning opinion pages, contrarians could now point to an ostensibly more
credible WSJ news piece in their efforts to discredit the hockey stick and, more important, what it
represented. Regalado invoked an archetypical David versus Goliath narrative, describing how a
simple “semi-retired minerals consultant” supposedly toppled “one of the pillars of the case for man-
made global warming.”
There were a few complications with that narrative that Regalado glossed over, however. The
David in the scenario (McIntyre) had the backing of the most powerful industry on Earth, 5 while the
Goliath (me) was a lowly assistant professor at a small public university. And the “pillar” in question
—the hockey stick—was hardly the central piece of evidence for human influence on climate that
deniers liked to pretend it was, though its iconic status had made it a frequent whipping boy.
The major deficiency in Regalado's article was that it conveyed the highly misleading