When You Get Your Picture on the Cover of - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 99

appreciate and better understand whatever climate change-related stories might be in the headlines on
a particular day.
Another purpose, of course, was to help fight the climate change disinformation campaign. The
climate contrarians had huge amounts of industry funding and a seemingly infinite network of
advocacy groups and PR professionals to spread their message. We had—well—ourselves, assisted
by well-wishers and interested citizens. Scientists are typically untrained in the art of public relations
and ethically bound to be truthful, but often driven, with great passion, to try to inform the public
about their science.
Our launch couldn't have been better timed. Our inaugural post by Gavin Schmidt—and to date
our most popular and most often cited—addressed Michael Crichton's new science fiction (or, more
accurately, antiscience fiction) work, State of Fear . The topic had, as its central premise, Senator
Inhofe's worldview that climate change is an elaborate hoax. To be fair, that premise is no less
realistic than the prospect of making dinosaurs using frog DNA, and in that sense it was par for the
course for Crichton when it came to scientific authenticity. The topic attempted to mix a fictional
narrative with ostensible reviews of climate science, though the “science” was distorted beyond all
recognition. “Michael Crichton's State of Confusion” 37 quickly became the definitive debunking of
Crichton's book and was widely linked or reprinted across the Internet.
RealClimate went live just in time to respond to Senator Inhofe's floor speech at the opening
session of the U.S. Senate in 2005. 38 As we pointed out in our post, 39 Inhofe was still promoting
myths about the paleoclimate record but now had as his newest “expert” on the topic Crichton
himself, who had volunteered this morsel of fiction (among others) in his book: “We are also in the
midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a 400 year cold spell
known as the Little Ice Age.” Actual scientific studies, we pointed out in our piece, had come to the
opposite conclusion—that the cooling of the Little Ice Age was natural, while the recent warming
trend was not. 40
It was probably inevitable that Inhofe and Crichton would at some point directly join forces. The
coalescence took place at another Senate hearing, called by Inhofe in late September 2005. 41 In our
RealClimate post “Inhofe and Crichton: Together at Last!” we reviewed the various false or
misleading claims made in the hearing, such as the supposed “1970s global cooling” scare. During
the course of the hearing, Crichton even took a couple of swings at the hockey stick and me, for which
he was admonished by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). 42 Boxer then proceeded to place into the
Senate record my rebuttal of Crichton's erroneous claims, followed by Gavin's “Michael Crichton's
State of Confusion.” It was Inhofe, though, who summarized his own position best (if unintentionally)
when he concluded the hearing by promising to “sit back and look at [the issue of climate change] in a
non-scientific way.”
Our RealClimate efforts appear to have been appreciated by our peers. In February 2005, just a
couple months after we launched the site, I briefly mentioned our new effort while paying homage to
Stephen Schneider, the premier climate science communicator whom I and roughly two hundred other
scientists had traveled to Stanford University to honor on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. My
passing reference to RealClimate, much to my surprise—and delight—elicited a spontaneous,
enthusiastic round of applause from the august crowd assembled for this event. Since RealClimate
began, a number of other climate change blogs have emerged as well. They appear, in various ways,
to have been inspired by our initiative. Some maintain a parallel mission, 43 while others complement