When You Get Your Picture on the Cover of - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 97

stick was an artifact of our PCA procedure—a claim that hadn't yet been published, let alone subject
to the independent scrutiny under which it would later wither. With the imprimatur of an MIT journal
behind it, Muller's piece helped the “hockey stick is a statistical artifact” view penetrate into
respected academic circles.
The most prodigious of the anti-hockey stick attacks, however, was a thirty-plus page polemic
that appeared in the Dutch magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek in January 2005, authored by an
individual named Marcel Crok. The title of the article was rather peculiar, in a telling sort of way:
“Proof That Mankind Causes Climate Change Is Refuted: Kyoto Protocol Based on Flawed
Statistics.” Evidently, I was such a powerful force that I now had control over both space and time:
Somehow, the hockey stick (first published on April 22, 1998) and I must have traveled four months
back in time and halfway around the world to influence the Kyoto Protocol, which had been adopted
in Kyoto on December 11, 1997 (Superman meets H. G. Wells?). A plot of the hockey stick,
compared against the bogus “corrected” version of McIntyre and McKitrick, was featured near the
beginning of the article, and bore the caption “Mann versus McIntyre”—the David versus Goliath
narrative rising up again. Crok, like Muller before him, simply repeated the discredited McIntyre and
McKitrick claims about bad data handling, PCA conventions, and so forth. But he added a new touch
of innuendo, characterizing the directory that was titled “censored” in our public data archive as if it
were indicative of a nefarious plot rather than simply an appropriately descriptive name for a folder
containing analyses wherein individual series were censored—a statistical term for “left out”—to
determine which records were playing the most critical role in yielding a skillful reconstruction (see
chapter 4 ) .
Battle of the Blogs
As we entered the first decade of the third millennium, the new media of the Internet age began to
outpace traditional print media as the primary means through which Americans obtained their
information. Climate change deniers fully exploited this trend, increasingly making use of the internet
as a means for purveying climate change disinformation. As individuals searched the Web for
information on climate change, increasingly what turned up were contrarian litanies from “news”
sites such as junkscience, TechCentralStation, and newsbusters to climate change contrarian Web sites
like John Daly's Waiting for Greenhouse, Patrick Michaels's World Climate Report, and Fred
Singer's SEPP. Performing a Google search on “climate change” or “global warming” invariably
turned up denialist sites as the leading hits, with legitimate sources of scientific information buried
further down the list, a casualty of the virtual flood of climate change disinformation that now
saturated the Internet.
An increasingly large cross-section of the public was thus being exposed to biased, sometimes
dishonest reporting of what was known about climate change. There was no reliable online outlet
available for climate scientists to correct the record in real time. That situation worried many of us,
including my friend and colleague Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
and other colleagues such as Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Eric Steig
of the University of Washington. We'd discussed amongst ourselves possible ways of better
communicating accurate science to the public and had even touched on the possibility of doing some
sort of blog. Nothing had yet materialized from these discussions—that is, until a friend working with