He described the climate scientist’s role as not only doing research but calling out disinformation, as he has done in public statements and testimony, and as a founder of the scientists’ blog RealClimate. He also took on The Washington Post editorial decision last December to let former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin write what he called “an entirely bogus op-ed” condemning human-caused climate change that “presented a very distorted view to the public” (Palin charged that “so-called climate change experts” were part of a “highly politicized scientific circle”). He got the paper to publish his own op-ed rebuttal nine days later.
In his scientific presentation at Yale, Mann reviewed the evidence bolstering human-caused climate change, including his own work on the “hockey stick” graph reconstructing global climate temperatures over the ages (it resembles a hockey stick with a long steady handle and a curved upswing in modern times reflecting human-caused temperature rises). Several lines of science have produced so much evidence of the human role in accelerating climate change that Mann joked that there’s enough now for “a hockey league.” He noted that global temperature was now “running the highest ever.”
There are, of course, still “legitimate uncertainties” in the science, including understanding and modeling the dynamics of other meteorological phenomena, such as El Nino and La Nina, and their impact on regional climate change, said Mann. But, he added, the “public discourse is still so far from the scientific discourse.” Some time ago, “I gave up on the notion that facts alone would carry the day,” he said. “We live in a world where you are now entitled to your own facts.”
A Science News blog by science writer Alexandra Witze offered a personal reflection on the frustrated Penn State scientist: “I’ve seen Mann in this frame of mind before; several years ago he testified in front of some of his staunchest critics at a National Academy of Sciences panel set up to review the hockey stick work. The jaw I saw clenched back then seemed not to have loosened, even when the audience was a group of friendly journalists rather than the aggressive panel questioners. (The final NAS report reaffirmed the basic science underlying the hockey stick reconstruction.)”
Ironically, Mann said that the partisan divide increased following former Vice President Al Gore’s embrace of climate change, his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary and his Nobel Prize, which increased public awareness but also “polarized the issue politically,” given Gore’s Democratic credentials and close run for the presidency against George W. Bush.
In contrast to Mann’s mix of science and politics, National Academy of Sciences president Ralph J. Cicerone’s talk to science writers here was a careful review of the science and impact of climate change in the low-key, even-handed style for which he is known. As one of the early leaders in climate research, Cicerone worked in the 1980s at the government’s National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder with the late, great science communicator Dr. Stephen Schneider, who died unexpectedly last July.
Asked in an interview about what he thought of media coverage over the past year, Cicerone was characteristically circumspect: “I don’t have any fault with the media coverage. The media was covering the news. That was no surprise.”
Looking ahead, given the politicized environment in Washington, Cicerone said he was counting on science media coverage of new evidence documenting the impact of climate change around the globe “to help clear the air.” He noted that ongoing measurements of surface temperature, ice, and sea level provide “consistent signals that the planet is warming…. We need to keep watching the data. We’re confronted with a long-term issue that isn’t going to go away. We need to keep the focus on this issue.”
Ed. Note: Russell is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, which organizes the New Horizons in Science briefings and a member of the National Academies’ Communication Awards judging committee.
Hi Christine,
Great that your in contact with Dr. Mann. I wonder if you could do me a favor? When you see him next can you ask for some data from his 1998 paper in Nature? Specifically it would be helpful to see the results of the 11 “experiments” referred to in the paper (referred to as MBH98), including: the NH temperature reconstruction (11 series from the start of each calculation step to 1980); and the residuals (11 series from the start of each calculation step to 1980). These are necessary to calculate the confidence intervals, and as you will appreciate without clear confidence intervals graphs are largely meaningless. Many thanks.
#1 Posted by Geoff, CJR on Thu 11 Nov 2010 at 11:36 PM
A roomful of journalists, and not one questioning a thing about Mann. If a strong press is a sign of a strong democracy, what is a weak press a sign of?
#2 Posted by Maurizio Morabito, CJR on Fri 12 Nov 2010 at 09:55 AM
Geoff,
All the data necessary to review, evaluate, and replicate Mann's work is publicly available at the Nature website. That M&M (whom you parrot) are not capable of doing so, it says more about their competence than it does about the quality of Mann's work.
#3 Posted by tonylurker, CJR on Fri 12 Nov 2010 at 04:43 PM
tonylurker, nice try. This is easily checked by anyone who would bother. That's what reporters used to do. If checked, people would find that there is not enough information available to replicate MBH98. Oh, and maybe Mike could publish his r**2 statistic. I wonder why he hasn't?
BTW, the UK House of Commons, upon investigating Climategate found:
"Climate science is a matter of global importance. On the basis of the science, governments across the world will be spending trillions of pounds on climate change mitigation. The quality of the science therefore has to be irreproachable. What this inquiry revealed was that climate scientists need to take steps to make available all the data that support their work and full methodological workings, including their computer codes."
All of the investiagtions have consistently faulted Mann for his lack of transparency. In fact, all of the reviews have concluded that Mann should turn over what he is hiding. Plain and simple.
#4 Posted by P R Guy, CJR on Fri 12 Nov 2010 at 07:35 PM
It is such a great climate report..I appreciate it....and I want to say thanks to you for this extremely assuredness report..Bodyquick
#5 Posted by Bodyquick, CJR on Sat 13 Nov 2010 at 05:28 AM
Ms. Russell: You are incorrect is stating that the NAS exonerated the hockey stick.
When asked by the panel if the NAS agreed with the Wegman assessment (which eviscerated Mann's paper), Dr. North said that yes, the NAS agreed with Wegman, and the points Wegman brought up.
#6 Posted by Les Johnson, CJR on Tue 16 Nov 2010 at 05:12 PM
Amen Les, any scientist or reporter (such as CJR?) will discover, the NAS corroborated the criticism's of M&M. As Dr. McKitrick recently posted on Nov. 8:
The NAS accepted the argument that bristlecones are unreliable for reconstructions and should be avoided, and they acknowledged that the
MBH results, as reproduced by Wahl and Ammann, did not achieve statistical significance. This was stated in the quote that I presented in my original response (NAS p. 91):
"Reconstructions that have poor validation statistics (i.e., low CE) will have correspondingly wide uncertainty bounds, and so can be seen to be unreliable in an objective way. Moreover, a CE statistic close to zero or negative suggests that the reconstruction is no better than the mean, and so its skill for time averages shorter than the validation period will be low. Some recent results reported in Table 1S of Wahl and Ammann (in press) indicate that their reconstruction, which uses the same procedure and full set of proxies used by Mann et al. (1999), gives CE values ranging from 0.103 to –0.215, depending on how far back in time the reconstruction is carried."
Consequently they did not find our work to be “largely spurious”, instead they reached the same conclusions: they just expressed them in an obscure and elliptical way.
And as the Nat Research Council's Wegman report (part of the NAS!!) stated:
(p. 47, emphasis added)
"In general, we find the criticisms by MM03, MM05a and MM05b to be valid and their arguments to be compelling. We were able to reproduce their results and offer both theoretical explanations (Appendix A) and simulations to verify that their observations were correct."
That supposed "journalists" would continue with this deception is galling and deeply troubling.
#7 Posted by AAvery, CJR on Wed 17 Nov 2010 at 10:07 AM