Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 11:37:17 PM
Hockey stick graph took pride of place in IPCC report, despite doubts
Emails expose tension between desire for scrupulous honesty, and desire to tell simple story to tell the policymakers
Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 9 February 2010 14.00 GMT
In a unique experiment, The Guardian has published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia,
which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to
prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate
sceptics out of the scientific literature.
As well as
including new information about the emails, we will allow web users to
annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the
definitive account of the controversy. This is an attempt at a
collaborative route to getting at the truth.
...
It is a persuasive image. The "hockey stick" graph shows the average
global temperature over the past 1,000 years. For the first 900 years
there is little variation, like the shaft of an ice-hockey stick. Then,
in the 20th century, comes a sharp rise like the stick's blade.
The
IPCC put the graph in the summary of its 2001 assessment reports.
Although it was intended as an icon of global warming, the hockey stick
has become something else – a symbol of the conflict between mainstream
climate scientists and their critics. The contrarians have made it the
focus of their attacks for a decade, hoping that by demolishing the
hockey stick graph they can destroy the credibility of climate
scientists. And in the man who first drew the hockey stick, a young
paleoclimatologist called Professor Michael Mann of Penn State
University, they have found an angry, outspoken and sometimes
vulnerable foe.
Damagingly for the mainstreamers, the Guardian
has discovered that there was a vitriolic debate within the mainstream
science community in 1999, during preparation of the IPCC report, about
the validity of the graph. Mann and CRU's tree-ring specialist Dr Keith
Briffa are often portrayed by their enemies as co-conspirators, but the
CRU emails reveal that back then they were actually in competing camps.
Mann promoted his hockey stick. Briffa was very dubious, especially
about the prominence the IPCC wanted to give it.
The stakes were high. In the late 1990s, the heat was on to demonstrate the level of natural variability in climate change.
In 1996, I visited Briffa at his lab at the CRU. He told me: "Five
years ago, the climate modellers wanted nothing to do with the paleo
community [scientist studying past climate]. But now they realise they
need our data. We can help them define natural variability."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/hockey-stick-graph-ipcc-report
The rest of The Guardian's report on the stolen emails in Climategate are definitely worth reading. They published their entire investigation of Climategate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails