Born in a War - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 1

Chapter 1
Born in a War
The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on climate.
—The contentious sentence in “Summary for Policy Makers,” IPCC Second Assessment Report (1995)
It is November 27, 1995, several years before my colleagues and I published our “hockey stick”
study. Bill Clinton has been president for nearly three years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average just
passed the 5,000 mark for the first time. The TV series E.R., created by novelist Michael Crichton, is
the top-rated show on television.
In Madrid, Spain, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is holding the final
plenary meeting for the Second Assessment Report, the purpose of which is to summarize the
consensus among scientists regarding the extent of humanity's impact on Earth's climate. At a nearly
identical latitude on the other side of the Atlantic, I am working on my Ph.D. dissertation in New
Haven, Connecticut. I am oblivious to what is taking place in Madrid; I'm just trying to finish up my
research in time to defend my dissertation the coming spring and begin a career as a professional
climate researcher.
My research at the time focused on the importance of natural variability—that is, the role of
nature, not man—in explaining changes in Earth's climate. The one scientific article I had submitted
for publication that touched on the topic of human-caused climate change would, ironically, a few
months later be hailed by those who contest the proposition that humans play a significant role in
observed climate changes. (That article simply demonstrated a relatively minor inconsistency
between theoretical climate model predictions and actual climate observations.) 1 I was especially
interested in the role that natural oscillations in the climate system might have played in observed
changes in climate during the modern observational era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My
first-ever article analyzing climate proxy records had just been published a week earlier. 2 In that
article, my coauthors and I showed that these natural oscillations persist over many centuries and
might be more important than many scientists had acknowledged in explaining certain modern climate
trends. This work, in another twist of irony, would also be celebrated by contrarians in the climate
change debate, who were ostensibly unaware that both natural and human influences on climate can
and almost certainly do coexist. I myself did not doubt that humans were changing the climate; the
extent of evidence was already significant. I had simply chosen to focus in my research on the issue of
natural climate variability.
Meanwhile, back in Madrid at the IPCC plenary, a fierce argument had broken out between the
scientists crafting the report and government delegates representing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and some
other major oil exporting nations that profit greatly from societal dependence on fossil fuel energy
and, according to the New York Times , had “made common cause with American industry lobbyists to