Year 3, Month 4, Day 17: Hockey Fights

Looks like Asheville, North Carolina had a visit from Dr. Michael Mann, and Katie Rose-Anderson writes it up for the Mountain Express:

If you chart global temperature changes in last 1,000 years or so, the resulting graph looks like a hockey stick.

Climatologist Michael Mann published that conclusion in 1998, and he’s still explaining what the data means and how a simple graph became a controversial icon in the debate over whether human-caused climate change is happening.

On April 3, he spoke at Warren Wilson College, offering about 60 attendees a glimpse into his new book, The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars. “I thought if I could write the book, I could explain why people discredit science,” said Mann. “We have to be more effective in presenting scientific truth.”

Since publishing the Hockey Stick in 1998, he has had his email hacked and picked apart for the purpose of incriminating and discrediting his studies; his family has received death threats, which was apparent at the presentation: A small security team escorted Mann.

Nobody should have to undergo what Mann’s had to undergo. Sent April 8:

Modern conservatism is nothing but a framework for rejecting inconvenient facts and the people who deliver them. Just ask Dr. Michael Mann, whose work has been attacked for years by powerful corporate interests. Over and over they’ve claimed that that his results are falsified, that he is guilty of academic malfeasance, that he has manipulated his results — and over and over Mann has been vindicated.

And has it made a bit of difference? Nope; the petrol-funded denialist industry cares more about its short-term bottom line than either the ethics of their egregious misrepresentations or the long-term survival of our species. For make no mistake, Mann’s research will be foundational for humanity’s struggle over the coming centuries, as we try to make sense of a world drastically transformed by a rapidly and chaotically changing climate. Conservatism’s anti-science stance must disqualify it from any status as a legitimate political philosophy.

Warren Senders