Heads of the Hydra - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 129

National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where the authors asserted that their article established the
“inconvenient truth” that “Nature rules the climate: Human-produced greenhouse gases are not
responsible for global warming.” 32 The paper was promoted on Fox News and featured in Singer's
March 2008 NIPCC report that ABC News had characterized as “fabricated nonsense.” 33
Another head of the Hydra was a 2009 paper by John McLean, Chris de Freitas, and Bob Carter
published in the Journal of Geophysical Research . 34 In the innocuously titled “Influence of the
Southern Oscillation on Tropospheric Temperature,” the authors claimed that El Niño drove
essentially all variations in global temperature—a distinctly odd claim since almost nothing in
climate science has been studied more closely than the relationship between El Niño and global
climate. It was well known—and in fact had been demonstrated most recently in an article in
Nature 35 —that, while El Niño, along with volcanic eruptions, did explain a fair amount of the short-
term, year-to-year variability in global temperatures, it could not account for the warming trend. Had
McLean et al. somehow discovered something that had eluded the entire climate research community
for decades? The claim was indeed extraordinary. And the evidence? Not so much.
The study's principal findings were, yet again, the product of a surprisingly basic error. The
authors hadn't, as it turns out, actually analyzed the statistical relationship between El Niño and
global temperatures. They had instead analyzed the relationship between El Niño and the rate of
change in global temperatures. That, combined with some additional unwarranted processing of the
data, 36 ensured that in the end all McLean et al. had done was to confirm the well-known fact that El
Niño explains a fair share of the year-to-year fluctuations in global mean temperature. Their analysis
provided no basis for any conclusions regarding climate change. Most of these facts were pointed out
by various climate bloggers within a few days of the publication of the paper. It took nearly a year,
however, for a peer reviewed refutation to appear in the literature. 37
In the meantime, the authors once again generated substantial publicity for their claims. Climate
science “swiftboater” Marc Morano (see chapter 5 ) used his Climate Depot blog to hype the study. In
a press release boldly entitled “Nature, Not Man, Is Responsible for Recent Global Warming,” study
coauthor Bob Carter claimed that the findings left “little room for any warming driven by human
carbon dioxide emissions.” 38
The Hockey Fight Continues
The gaze of the Hydra remained largely focused, however, on the denialists' bête noir, the hockey
stick. Despite the fact that the NAS, the IPCC, and more than a dozen independent peer reviewed
scientific studies had now not only reaffirmed the key conclusions of our work, but in fact extended
them further back in time, the denialosphere was still fond of claiming that the hockey stick had been
“totally discredited” or “broken.” Most of the attacks represented some version of the myth that the
hockey stick was a statistical artifact, combined with a studied neglect of the numerous confirmatory
independent studies. Some of the attacks were new, however.
In late 2007, the home journal of climate change denial, Energy and Environment , published a
paper by Craig Loehle that purported to present a new two-thousand-year reconstruction of global
temperature. 39 By contrast with the hockey stick studies—and every other peer reviewed scientific
article on the subject—Loehle claimed that medieval warm period temperatures were warmer than