Michael E. Mann - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

THE

HOCKEY
STICK

AND THE

CLIMATE
WARS

THE

HOCKEY
STICK

AND THE

CLIMATE
WARS

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES

Michael E. Mann

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK

This book

is dedicated to

Megan Dorothy Mann

and to

the memory of

Jonathan Clifford Mann

Contents

On the morning of November 17, 2009, I awoke to learn that my private e-mail correspondence with fellow scientists had been hacked from a climate research center at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and selectively posted on the Internet for all to see. Words and phrases had been cherry-picked from the thousands of e-mail messages, removed from their original context, and strung together in ways designed to malign me, my colleagues, and climate research itself. Sound bites intended to imply impropriety on our part were quickly disseminated over the Internet. Through a coordinated public relations campaign, groups affiliated with the fossil fuel industry and other climate change critics helped catapult these sound bites onto the pages of leading newspapers and onto television screens around the world. A cartoon video ridiculing me and falsely accusing me of hiding the decline in global temperature was released on YouTube and advertised through a sponsored link that appeared with any Google search of my name. The video eventually even made its way onto the CBS Nightly News . Pundits dubbed the wider issue of the hacked e-mails climategate, and numerous investigations were launched. Though our work was subsequently vindicated time and again, the whole episode was a humiliating oneunlike anything Id ever imagined happening. I had known that climate change critics were willing to do just about anything to try and discredit climate scientists like myself. But I was horrified by what they now had stooped to.

My thoughts turned to an event from a decade earlier. In August 1999, I attended a meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, as a lead author for an upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From my hotel room, I could see one of the worlds great wonders, Mount Kilimanjaro, with its magnificent ice cap lying just degrees from the equator. The ice cap, by the end of the twentieth century, had already shrunk to just a third of the area it covered in 1936 when Ernest Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but it was majestic all the same.