Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
proxy data we had used for the critical fifteenth-sixteenth-century period.
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The fact that their critique
rested on what could most charitably be described as a misunderstanding of the data used in our study
hardly mattered, though. For the time being, climate change deniers had everything they needed to do
immediate damage. They had a published study purporting to call into question the basis of the
scientific evidence for human-caused climate change, which they could promote with much fanfare
just before a key U.S. Senate vote on climate change policy. In terms of the impending vote, what
would it matter if the study were later shown to be based on a bogus analysis? Conservative media
outlets had enough time to publicize the claims before the October 30 vote, but there was not enough
time for an organized rebuttal on our part.
A press release entitled “Important Global Warming Study Audited—Numerous Errors Found;
New Research Reveals the UN IPCC Hockey Stick Theory of Climate Change Is Flawed” was
distributed to journalists on October 27 by Laura Braden Dlugacz
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on behalf of TechCentralStation,
an industry-funded Web site that was later singled out by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Jay
Rockefeller (DWV) in demanding that ExxonMobil “end any further financial assistance” to groups
“whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial
McKitrick claims appeared in
USA Today
—authored by Nick Schultz, editor of TechCentralStation.
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The previous evening, James Inhofe had gone on the attack, promoting these latest allegations in
a speech delivered on the Senate floor. One of the more unintentionally humorous moments in Inhofe's
diatribe came when he characterized me as being in charge of the IPCC. Honored as I was by this
instant promotion from a minor player (one of ten lead authors of one chapter of one of the three IPCC
working group reports) to IPCC chair, I was sure the news would come as a surprise to Sir John
Houghton of the United Kingdom, the actual IPCC chair at the time. When it came to Inhofe's attempts
to push the McIntyre and McKitrick critique, however, he was frankly ineffective. He misstated what
McIntyre and McKitrick had actually claimed, asserting that their reconstruction—with its spurious
fifteenth-century warmth—showed how warm the medieval warm period really was (the fifteenth
century falls in the heart of the Little Ice Age). The criticism of our work fell so flat that other
senators appear to have simply ignored it. Later in the floor debate, Olympia Snowe presented a chart
of the hockey stick as a key piece of evidence in support of the reality of human-caused climate
change. It was difficult not to be amused to find our work used by both sides of the debate that night.
Was this display nothing more than the usual political theater? Or did the attacks against our
work have a material impact on the final vote on the McCain-Lieberman bill? The final vote was 55-
43 against the bill, far closer than many had expected, and dramatically closer than the unanimous 95-
0 defeat of Senate support for the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
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A swing of just 7 nay votes would have
led to passage of the McCain-Lieberman bill. Were there seven or more positively predisposed U.S.
senators who were negatively swayed by the hoopla over the McIntyre and McKitrick claims? I'll
never know whether those claims made any difference one way or the other.
Aside from peddling the specious allegations of the McIntyre and McKitrick paper, the
USA
Today
op-ed claimed that “Mann never made his data available online, nor did many of the earlier
researchers whose data Mann relied upon for his research. That by itself raises questions about the
U.N. climate-change panel's scientific process.” We were able to prove to the
USA Today
editors that
the claim was in fact entirely false, pointing them to the location on our public Web site where the
data had clearly been available for years. The claim was retracted by
USA Today
, albeit in an
