The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 139

follow some months later.
The assault against climate scientists intensified in 2009, especially as the December 2009
Copenhagen climate change summit approached, catching many scientists both bemused and
unprepared for the character attacks to which they would be subject. While contrarians were going
after Keith Briffa for his Yamal tree ring work in the latter half of 2009, they were also badgering
Phil Jones and his colleagues at CRU with an escalating barrage of FOIA demands—sixty of them in
one weekend alone. 39 One colleague, Eric Steig—a climate scientist at the University of Washington
specializing in polar climates (and fellow RealClimate blogger)—was bewildered by the blistering
attacks he was subject to following publication in January 2009 of a paper in Nature on which he was
lead author. 40
The paper (of which I was a coauthor) used a combination of data analysis and model simulation
results to conclude that Antarctica on the whole has warmed over the past half century. That
conclusion contradicts a favorite contrarian talking point: “if the globe is warming, how come
Antarctica is cooling?” 41 The short answer, according to Steig et al. (and several more recent
supporting studies), is that it isn't cooling; on the whole it is warming, particularly in the West
Antarctic region so critical to the stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. 42
The paper was immediately attacked by climate change deniers. Christopher Booker dismissed
the work in a commentary in the Telegraph whose very title, “Despite the Hot Air, the Antarctic Is
Not Warming Up,” was mistaken. 43 Booker imagined that one of his favorite targets—Michael Mann
—must be to blame: “The fact that Dr. Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all
part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone
from the BBC to Al Gore.” Somehow I—a favorite new boogeyman of Booker and denialist fellow
travelers—had been elevated to the principal scientist “behind” the new study, even though as fourth
author of six I played a minor role.
Of the accusations of malfeasance that were made against Steig on contrarian Internet sites,
which included blog postings with titles such as “Eric Steig Wears No Clothes” 44 and “Steig
Professes Ignorance,” 45 Steig commented: “[I]t is actually rather bizarre that so much effort has been
spent in trying to find fault with our Antarctic temperature paper. It appears this is a result of the
persistent belief that by embarrassing specific scientists, the entire edifice of 'global warming' will
fall.” 46
After Darrell Kaufman and his colleagues published their Science article in early September
2009 independently reaffirming the hockey stick pattern of temperature changes over the past two
thousand years (in this case, for the Arctic region), Kaufman, too, was taken aback by how
vituperative were the attacks of climate change deniers, and he commented on it in an op-ed piece in
his local newspaper, the Arizona Republic:
When our article, “Recent warming reverses long-term Arctic cooling,” was published, I
was shocked by the vicious reactions, including genuine hate mail. I was immediately cast
as one of a “team” of corrupt scientists that fabricates data to perpetuate the “global-
warming hoax,” with the goal of advancing its own research funding and the U.N.'s
political agenda. I was accused of withholding and “cherry picking” data to validate
predetermined conclusions. The study was “audited” by bloggers who found minor errors;