Heads of the Hydra - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 132

after all, and those records supported the conclusion of anomalous recent warmth. 56
McIntyre settled then on a more specific avenue of attack: our use of a small group of sediment
records from Lake Korttajarvi in central Finland. But this was quite inconsequential and, ironically,
we were the ones who had raised concerns about these particular data in the first place, not McIntyre.
We had included them for consideration only to be complete in our survey of proxy records in the
public domain. In the online supplementary information accompanying publication of our PNAS
article, we had both noted the potential problems with these records and showed that eliminating them
made absolutely no difference to the resulting reconstruction. 57 McIntyre had thus attempted to
fabricate yet another false controversy, in this case out of an issue that was noted first by us, and was
explicitly shown by us not to make any difference. Paleoclimatologist Tom Crowley perhaps
summarized it best: “McIntyre … never publishes an alternate reconstruction that he thinks is better
… because that involves taking a risk of him being criticized. He just nitpicks others. I don't know of
anyone else in science who … fails to do something constructive himself.” 58
Our own findings, of course, hardly existed in isolation. There was now an impressive array of
reconstructions, a veritable “hockey team,” 59 and contrarians such as Stephen McIntyre had in recent
years wasted no time in expanding their attacks to the ever-growing set of reconstructions. In addition
to the dozen reconstructions shown in the IPCC AR4 report, there were recent studies led by Martin
Juckes in the UK, 60 Darrell Kaufman in the United States, 61 and Fredrik Ljungqvist in Sweden, 62 each
using different data and methods, collectively suggesting that recent Northern Hemisphere warmth is
unprecedented not just for the past millennium, but likely for the past two.
And so both the climate wars and the hockey stick battle continued. It was increasingly unclear
that any amount of evidence or additional work would satisfy the critics. After all, the attacks against
the hockey stick fundamentally, as we have seen, were not really about the work itself. They were
part and parcel of—forgive the pun—a proxy war against the science and its icons being fought by, or
at least often funded by, powerful vested interests who found the scientific evidence for climate
change inconvenient for political, financial, or philosophical reasons.