Climate researcher speaks out

Alexandra Witze in Science News: Like evolutionary science in times past, climate science is now the target of “an elaborate P.R. campaign” to discredit researchers and their findings, says one of the scientists at the heart of the battle.

Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College, is perhaps best known for his work on the “hockey stick” reconstruction of past climate. Like a piece of sports equipment turning up sharply at the end, this graph shows global surface temperatures remaining fairly constant for the last millennium, then sharply upticking over the past several decades. The reconstruction is not the strongest evidence for man-made global warming, Mann notes, but it became something of a poster child when it was featured in a summary for policy makers in the 2001 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

…After running through the evidence supporting human-caused climate change, Mann concluded that “there’s not just a hockey stick — there’s a hockey league.” Some scientific uncertainties do remain about climate change, such as the precise effects of clouds in a changing climate. “There are legitimate uncertainties,” Mann said, “but unfortunately the public discourse right now is so far from scientific discourse.”

…Clearly frustrated, Mann told the science reporters about how he saw the mainstream media as having abandoned their critical faculties in reporting the East Anglia story. Similar frustrations, he said, led him and a group of other climate experts to found the collective blog Realclimate.org several years ago, meant to bring timely and relevant climate information direct from scientists to the public….

John Tenniel's illustration of Alice in Wonderland captured the frustration and danger of trying to persuade a mad tea party to heed reason