Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 153

attackers could bring down the IPCC, they reasoned, the basis for an endangerment finding and all
related calls for policy action would crumble. What more effective—if entirely cynical—way to
bring down the IPCC than to bring down its figurehead, Rajendra Pachauri. Pachauri has been under a
constant assault by climate change deniers ever since, with attacks becoming increasingly nasty and
disingenuous. 62 Think of this as the lions of the Serengeti picking off the zebras at the edge of the
herd.
Stefan Rahmstorf commented on the latest sequence of attacks by climate change deniers on
RealClimate: “after the Himalayan glacier story broke, [they] have sifted through the IPCC volumes
with a fine-toothed comb, hoping to find more embarrassing errors. They have actually found
precious little, but the little they did find was promptly hyped into Seagate, Africagate, Amazongate
and so on. This has some similarity to the CRU email theft.” 63
Again, unfortunately, it wasn't only the fringe media that took part in the attacks. Some of the
most critical commentary came from a Guardian writer in the United Kingdom. The Guardian had in
the past provided among the most accurate and responsible coverage of climate change in the UK
media. But a series of articles by Fred Pearce, previously of the New Scientist , mangled the facts,
distorting key details such as the chronology of events, to fit a preconceived narrative of conspiracy
and corruption. 64
One of the more egregious media distortions started with a BBC interview of Phil Jones in mid-
February 2010. The BBC queried Jones, “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been
no statistically significant global warming?” This was a trap planted by climate change deniers. 65 Its
origins probably lay in an e-mail from Richard Lindzen coaching climate change denier Anthony
Watts on how to cherry-pick starting dates to get the desired trend. 66 From the temperature graphic
shown earlier in this chapter, it is clear that the globe had warmed since 1995. But the precise amount
depended on the particular temperature compilation, with Jones's (CRU) record showing the least net
warming. As discussed in chapter 12 , establishing significance of trends over short periods of time is
difficult. Significance depends on how large the net trend over the time interval analyzed is by
comparison to the amplitude of the year-to-year fluctuations (from things like El Niño, volcanoes,
etc.). For increasingly short time intervals, the former becomes increasingly small compared to the
latter, and any trend, accordingly, becomes decreasingly significant. This was especially true if one
just happened to choose 1995 as the starting year.
You might call this episode “the cherry-pick heard 'round the world.” The goal was to get Jones
on record agreeing that the statement was technically true—which he did—while ignoring the caveats
and qualifications he raised 67 about how meaningless it is to talk about trends over short periods of
time, the curiously selective use of a 1995 starting date, and the fact that the CRU record was the one
that showed the least warming of the three major records. All too predictably, contrarian media
outlets immediately trumpeted news of Jones's response with outlandish characterizations such as
“World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists,” courtesy of the Times (the author, once again, being
Jonathan Leake), 68 and “Climategate U-turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits: There Has Been
No Global Warming Since 1995,” courtesy of the right-leaning Daily Mail. 69 The story was then
picked up in the United States by Fox News. 70
There is some irony revealed by this incident. One might even say that the critics were engaged
in an effort to, as one person put it, “hide the incline” in the global temperature series. 71 Some
observers noted the asymmetric standards of honesty: “The denial movement will happily accuse