The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 137

As the contrarian attacks against climate science were ramping up during fall 2009, attention returned
once again to their most reliable target—the hockey stick. Only now, there wasn't just a lone hockey
stick but, as we have seen, a “hockey team” of well over a dozen independent reconstructions, all
pointing to the same conclusion—that the recent warming of the planet was indeed anomalous in a
long-term context. This didn't slow the denialists in their baseless attacks on every single
confirmatory study that was published.
When Science in early September 2009 published an article by Darrell Kaufman and his
colleagues showing the most dramatic hockey stick yet—a two-thousand-year reconstruction of Arctic
temperature changes 19 —Stephen McIntyre and his forces went on the attack on the Internet, 20
immediately trumpeting the false claim that the work was compromised by bad data, despite the fact
that whether or not the authors used the data in question made no difference to the result they
obtained. 21 A more vicious attack was reserved for later that month. The matter concerned a tree ring
temperature reconstruction for Russia's Yamal region that Keith Briffa and colleagues had published
some years earlier; it once again showed recent warmth to be anomalous in a two-thousand-year
context. At a time when Briffa was known to be seriously ill and not in a position to respond to any
allegations, McIntyre publicly accused him of having intentionally cherry-picked tree ring records to
get a particular result. 22 Moreover, he demanded that Briff a turn over all of the individual underlying
tree ring records in his possession. Yet correspondence later found between McIntyre and Briffa's
Russian colleagues (who had supplied the tree ring data in the first place) revealed 23 that they, not
Briffa, had chosen which tree ring records were appropriate for use in reconstructing temperatures
and that McIntyre had the data all along! 24
To support his “cherry-picking” allegation, McIntyre had produced his own composite
reconstruction—which happened to lack the prominent recent warming evident in Briffa's
reconstruction. How did he accomplish this? By deleting tree ring records of Briffa's he didn't seem
to like, and replacing them with other tree ring data he had found on the Internet, which were
inappropriate for use in a long-term temperature reconstruction—an example of why there should be a
healthy dose of skepticism with any such claims made by armchair “scientists.” 25
McIntyre and his supporters then used this manufactured scandal to generate a frenzy of climate
change disinformation, leading to headlines in the National Review and Daily Telegraph , premised
on the rather absurd proposition that the criticisms of the Briffa et al.'s Yamal tree ring analysis—
even if they were valid (which they weren't)—could somehow undermine all of climate science. As
my colleagues and I put it at the time, “Apparently everything we've done in our entire careers … all
of radiative physics, climate history, the instrumental record, modeling and satellite observations turn
out to be based on 12 trees in an obscure part of Siberia. Who knew?” 26 Most climate reconstructions
either didn't use the Yamal series in question anyway 27 or were undetectably altered if the Yamal
series was entirely eliminated from the pool of proxy data used. 28 A familiar pattern was emerging in
the ongoing attacks by climate change deniers. The issues they raised never actually undermined any
of the major conclusions of the work they were criticizing. Instead, the purpose seemed simply to cast
doubt among those who don't know better or don't have the time to get to the bottom of the matter in
question—to generate much heat, but little or no light.
This episode is a revealing case study in the anatomy of a climate change denial smear
campaign. 29 First, bloggers manufacture unfounded criticisms and accusations. Then their close allies
help spread them. McIntyre's colleague Ross McKitrick writes an op-ed piece in the right-wing