Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.
—Rodney Dangerfield
The most critical development in the tale of the hockey stick—the prominent display of the MBH99
graph in the IPCC Third Assessment Report's Summary for Policy Makers in 2001—was beyond my
control. In hindsight, it would have been wiser for the authors of the summary to instead have shown
the other figure from our chapter which compared three different reconstructions that collectively
pointed to the same conclusion: that recent warmth was anomalous in a millennial context. The fact
that the MBH99 hockey stick alone had been featured in the policy makers' document would establish
it as a fundamental icon in the climate change debate. That alone was not a problem. However, sooner
or later such a prominent icon would find itself in the crosshairs of the assault against the scientific
case for human-caused climate change.
The MBH99 hockey stick was now thrust into the limelight. It was not only featured prominently
in the 2001 Summary for Policy Makers, but it would be displayed in public lectures by IPCC
chairman Sir John Houghton of the United Kingdom. It would appear in topics written about climate
change. There was even a campaign, at one point, to plaster the hockey stick on billboards around the
world—an idea that fortunately did not come to fruition. Vice President Al Gore cited our findings in
a number of his speeches on climate change during 1999. In late 1999, I was contacted by staff of the
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who wanted to make sure they understood key
details of MBH99. Bill Clinton, I was told, would be mentioning our study in his January 20, 2000,
State of the Union address.
There is a potential downside to one's scientific study becoming the focus of so much attention.
Many scientists enjoy almost nothing more than proving the other guy or gal wrong. The more
prominence a particular study or idea gets, the more tantalizing it is to best it in some way. Scientists,
of course, should be skeptical of any new claims, hypotheses, or theories and study them carefully.
Such scrutiny is an essential part of the self-correcting machinery of the scientific enterprise, as we
saw in the preceding chapter. Scientists are passionate about their work, and debates among them can
grow quite heated. However, in the case of controversial areas of science such as climate change (or
evolution, stem cell research, environmental contaminants, and so on), there is additional fuel that is
often thrown on the fire.
In such fields of science, scientific claims are subject not only to the potentially legitimate
criticisms of one's scientific colleagues. There are, in addition, attacks by those, whether in science
or (more likely) out, who are more interested in a political agenda than in scientific truth. As we have
seen, a whole disinformation industry has developed in recent decades with the purpose of
