Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
fellow researcher would attack our work based on such clearly erroneous claims. I was still
relatively young and naive.
More specious critiques would follow. S. Fred Singer mounted a campaign against our work a
year after the MBH99 millennial hockey stick was published. His organization (SEPP) organized a
press event on Capitol Hill in May 2000, prior to the official publication of the Third Assessment
Report. Singer used this event to assail the draft IPCC chapter on climate observations, referring
specifically to the conclusion that recent warmth appears anomalous in the context of the past
millennium. “We don't accept this. We challenge this,” exclaimed Singer at the event. Fair enough, but
the justification for this challenge was poor indeed. Singer invited Swedish paleoclimatologist
Wibjorn Karlen to make his case. In a refrain that climate change deniers would repeat over and over
as mantra, Karlen asserted that the hockey stick contained “neither a Medieval Warm Period nor a
contrarians really didn't like was that the medieval warm period, while rivaling mid-twentieth-
century warmth in our reconstruction, simply did not reach subsequent levels of warming.
More carefully orchestrated and promoted contrarian attacks were to come. It would become
increasingly clear to my colleagues and me that the intent of the attacks was to undermine not just the
IPCC, but all of climate science. The attacks would make their way into White House policy and onto
the floors of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. They would become increasingly
personal, aimed at singling out specific individuals, me in particular, as if the entire weight of the
scientific case for human-caused climate change rested on a handful of scientists.
