"A Disgrace to the Profession"

Mark Steyn's humor is built on his ability to connect widely differing subjects based on similarities that aren't obvious to ordinary mortals. He does this effortlessly and almost instantaneously when interviewed, and his books are generally a series of essays, or columns, that explore these subjects in greater detail. This book, a refutation of the climate mafia's kidnapping of science and the scientific process, demonstrates that Steyn has a remarkable ability to digest, organize and explain complex problems. The book also demonstrates the value of the Bill of Right's First Amendment, which so far has protected our right to express ourselves. The insanity of Mann's hockey stick has been with us since the late 1990's and it is easy to become disillusioned with science when one sees formerly respectable colleagues jumping onto the AGW bandwagon. A tiny bit of historical knowledge should have been sufficient to discredit the conclusions drawn by Mann. For example, as glaciers have melted in Greenland and in the Alps, we find evidence of prior structures (pathways, wells, graveyards) pointing to similar climatic conditions eight hundred to a thousand years ago. Likewise, in Norway wells have recently been found where the water at the bottom is still frozen. But this knowledge was thrown aside as once prestigious publications published article after article supporting the nonsense, and professional societies debased themselves by publicly endorsing the notion that the world was on the cusp of a catastrophe. When McIntyre and McKitrick published their devastating analysis of the errors inherent in Mann's methods, the whole thing was dismissed because they weren't part of the gang that had hijacked "climate science", despite the clarity and persuasiveness of their writing. The release of the ClimateGate emails should have writ the end of the charade, but it didn't. Now Steyn has applied his particular talents to the issue, and he has created a wonderful mosaic based on the remarks and writings of scientists from around the world to provide an entertaining, critical, and comprehensive overview of Mann's work. Some of the tiles in this mosaic are very small, just a few words, but their color provides just the right sort of highlight to put some other remarks in perspective. He has also distilled some of the silliness in Mann's methods into some easily understood criticisms, such as the paradox that the bristle cone tree "rings" (really splotches of living tissue attached to a largely inert trunk) from the White Mountains east of Lone Pine, Ca, do not predict North American climatic conditions, but they are used by Mann to predict Northern Hemisphere conditions. Or the fact that world climatic conditions for a fifty year period are represented by two cedar trees from the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. The power of the book comes from Steyn's ability to include remarks from well over a hundred "credentialed" scientists in a logical and fast moving way. It also provides an insight into the kind of preparation that underlies Steyn's humor. It must have required a lot of work. I purchased my first copy from Steyn's website, and I did that to help support his legal expenses which are related to a frivolous law suit that Michael Mann brought against Steyn in an attempt to silence his criticism. I purchased a Kindle version to give me a quicker way of finding material in the book.

Mark Steyn has written a wonderful new book on Dr. Michael Mann’s hockey stick and the controversy surrounding it. It is difficult to overstate the significance or impact of Mann’s Hockey Stick (Mann, Bradley, Hughes (23 April 1998), "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries" (PDF), Nature 392 (6678): 779–787, Figure 5, the paper is often abbreviated as “MBH”). The Hockey Stick appeared in Figure 1 of the Summary for Policymakers of the third IPCC Assessment Report (called “TAR” published in 2001) and it was prominently displayed in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” As the book clearly shows, both the graph and the movie have been thoroughly discredited by hundreds of scientists who have attempted and failed to reproduce Michael Mann’s hockey stick using his data and other proxy data. Further, MBH attempts to overturn hundreds of papers that describe a world-wide Medieval Warm Period from around 900 AD to 1300 AD. The chapter devoted to Dr. Deming discusses this. Professor Jonathon Jones of Oxford University: "The hockey stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence...the evidence is extraordinarily weak...its defenders were desperate to hide this fact...I'd always had an interest in pathological science, and it looked like I might have stumbled across a really good modern example...The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong." As 1973 Nobel Prize winner Professor Ivar Giaever said “Global Warming has become a new religion – because you can’t discuss it and that is not right.” Steyn’s book documents the problems with the hockey stick, its use by the IPCC without proper peer review or validation, and the attempt to cover up its problems. It does this artfully using the words of the scientists, both “alarmists” and “deniers” and those in between. The list of quoted scientists is huge and includes Mann’s co-authors and others who supported him even after the paper and his hockey stick were shown to be wrong and perhaps, fraudulent. So, the book shows that the hockey stick is dead to all scientists on all sides of the climate debate. What is the impact of this appalling chapter in the history of science? I think that Professor Judith Curry says it best: “With regards to climate science, IMO the key issue regarding academic freedom is this: no scientist should have to fall on their sword to follow the science where they see it leading or to challenge the consensus. I’ve fallen on my dagger (not the full sword), in that my challenge to the consensus has precluded any further professional recognition and a career as a university administrator. That said, I have tenure, and am senior enough to be able retire if things genuinely were to get awful for me. I am very very worried about younger scientists, and I hear from a number of them that have these concerns.” This is an outstanding and important book and I highly recommend it. I've written a more complete review, this is just an excerpt, for the rest of it, go to: https://andymaypetrophysicist.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/new-book-a-disgrace-to-the-profession-by-mark-steyn/

Mark Steyn is being sued by Michael Mann for saying bad things about him, and is in turn countersuing Michael Mann for saying bad things about him. The spectacle is profoundly silly, but also carries a certain threat to free speech, impelling the New York Times, the ACLU, and other defenders of free speech to submit amica curiae to the court in support of Steyn. By contrast, Mann has no amica curiae. What happened to all the scientists, scientific associations, popular journals (e.g. National Geographic), newspapers (the Guardian, not to mention the New York Times) that are on record as believing in human-caused global warming? This book provides the answer. More than 100 scientists, most of whom do indeed believe in global warming, are quoted, often at length, in opposing Mann's Hockey Stick, once the very symbol of impending disaster, shown prominently in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie, making the front cover of the IPCC third report (and repeated in about 6 different illustrations throughout the report) and just generally the iconic symbol of global warming. Mann himself proudly includes the creation of the graph in his CV, and equally proudly proclaimed himself to be a Nobel Prize winner (at least until rebuked by the Nobel Prize Foundation.) But the Hockey Stick has fallen on hard times, appears exactly nowhere in subsequent IPCC reports, and even Mann himself has since publlshed papers that appear to include the Little Ice Age, although still refusing to admit the global reality of the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings found Greenland to be indeed green for a few hundred years before descending into its present year-round snow and ice. For the full story of the Hockey Stick, the indispensable book is the Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford. That is a pretty exciting (to us climate junkies) detective story showing how a Canadian mining engineer, used to investigating claims of wonderful finds of oil, turned his attention to Mann's claim of wonderful data hidden in tree rings. A terrific read. This book is more limited, just a collection of quotes about the failure of the Hockey Stick from many different angles. However, it is impressive in the breadth and depth of the criticisms and the wide scientific experience of the authors, ranging from cloud physics to oceanographers to paleontologists to geologists. Although I follow the climate debate pretty closely, I was stunned to find such a large number of well-known scientists who had criticized the Hockey Stick (and/or its creator) in such explicit ways. But now I think I understand why nobody was willing to support Mann in his suit by submitting a friend of the court brief. The book is easy to read, well edited so that the remarks of the scientists are kept on topic. Very useful as a reference book for one side in the climate debate. Also good for those on the fence and for those who just love watching a good fight.

This is a very good book and one you will enjoy and likely find easy reading. At exactly 300 pages, you can nonetheless probably read it in one day. This is in part because the “documentation” (vita of those commenting; and footnotes, usually as URLs), while necessarily included, can be skipped over. The other reason is that Steyn (largely as annotating editor) has arranged the items into inviting bites, usually 2-3 pages. You just keep going following a loosely-perceived undercurrent of organization. Nice. It is certainly not a diatribe. Oh – did I mention that the comments (as I said, typically two pages) come from many people – something like 100 of them. Each item is typically a mix from the individual (like from Climategate, from a blog page, or from some talk or press interview) with a variable annotation from Steyn. Surprisingly to me, while I have followed the CAGW debate for a dozen years, probably 60% or these were new. Many of us delighted when an apparently isolated defection (usually against Michael Mann) occurred. Since general repercussions did not seem to follow these, perhaps we did not appreciate the anti-Mann aggregate – at least until Climategate offered some clearly-pointed examples. Reading this current book, it becomes quite clear how increasingly isolated Mann has become. Like many cases in science (and most everywhere), an over-promoted item regresses to the mean. Mann, began as “amateur hour” at best, totally contrived. For “the cause” he was useful. But he did not take legitimate criticism very well! He reminds us today very much more of a self-promoting politician than a scientist. His scientific nadir was likely his original manipulation of P.C. analysis to manufacture the “hockey stick”. His public relations nadir was likely his self-promotion to phony Nobel laureate! His professional-standing nadir has likely been his abrasive arrogance and associated intolerance of his “friends” who don’t genuflect to the boy-wonder. Taking a different direction, he could have been a credible player. Instead – a self-inflected “Disgrace to the Profession” as in the book title characterizes it so well. A valuable and enjoyable read. We know that Steyn can “zing” an adversary, but here he lets others (many Mann’s “friends”) do it. In consequence, should any reviewer want to contradict the book content, it is VERY hard to see where one would even start.

This book is big on quotes. And reading it reminds me of an exchange in that much-quoted movie, Tombstone. Wyatt Earp and his posse are tracking down the usual suspects when Wyatt gets pinned down in an ambush and instead of laying low stands up, calmly walks towards the bad guys and shoots all in sight. "You ever seen somethin' like that before?" says one member of Wyatt's crew. "Hell, I never even heard of something like that!" says another in response. I never heard of anything like this book. Michael Mann, hockey-stick inventor, is suing Steyn for libel as he stated that the hockey stick was a fraud. In response, while waiting for the trial, Steyn has published a book, not as one might expect defending his statement, but instead meticulously detailing 120 scientists' view of Mann and his hockey stick. And the views are uniformly negative. Together, they cast Mann as not just a fraud (hockey stick based on incomplete and deceptive data), but bad for science in general (vitriolic and vituperative in support of his stick). There are some very prestigious names here, many of which agree with Mann that the Earth is warming due to mankind's use of fossil fuels. In essence, Steyn has come out shooting armed with bullets provided by Mann's own peers and colleagues. An interesting sub-theme here in general is the overall casting of the AGW (anthroprogenic global warming) theory as somewhat untenable. The net result of reading a condensed review of critiques of Mann is that AGW is a very unsettled science. The critiques come from many and varied points of view, which together show both much internal disagreement among the scientific community, and much that is unknown of this massive dynamic chaotic system that is the Earth's atmosphere. A simple answer such as Man can override all other forces on the planet and dictate our climate may satisfy politicians like Canute's courtiers, but not any of us who believe science should be driven forward by data, observations and provable hypotheses. I am not sure where Mann will go after what is an overall succinct devastating published critique of his work. I would assume he will have to forego his lawsuit as the same evidence will be bought up in court and he would presumably lose. But Steyn is counter-suing. As Doc Holliday says about Wyatt in the movie, "he does not want revenge, he wants a reckoning." And so far he is also bringing hell with him.

For me this book was a page turner and a thrill to read. Once Amazon finally shipped my paperback to my part of Canada, I ripped through it in a couple of evenings, and probably would have done it in one sitting had my blissful home life permitted. While the book is in one sense “just” a collection of quotations, it is a collection very carefully organized into themes, with Steyn’s characteristic brand of caustic wit providing a guided tour and running commentary throughout. Steyn has taken a subject which ought by all rights to be dry, boring, and of no interest to anyone with a pulse—to wit, the origin, content, purpose, and total scientific invalidity of Michael E. Mann’s famous “Hockey Stick” graph—and turned it into an entertaining caper through PhD after PhD’s evisceration of Mann. This isn’t a book on CAGW, by the way. It’s a book on Mann, his stick, and its various progeny. It’s important to keep in mind that many scientists who strongly believe in the CAGW theory appear in this book, since the PhD’s quoted span the spectrum from CAGW proponent to lukewarmer to CAGW sceptic. They may believe in CAGW, but they don’t believe in Mann’s stick. The book is organized into 12 chapters, or themes (which I will not spoil for you) beginning with a mini-essay by Steyn and an enjoyable illustration by Josh. Each chapter has about 10 headline quotes from a scientist or group of scientists. Each scientist is introduced with an excerpted “headline” quote and a concise summary of his antecedents, and then the book produces the entire quotation in context and with citation to source, with lively commentary by Steyn and quotes from other scientists weaved in. As an example, in quote #113 a scientist baldly states that the Mann curve is not falsifiable and is not science. The scientist’s antecedents are these: “Director of the Institute of Geophysics in Paris and Professor of Geophysics at the Paris Diderot University. Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, and Member of the French Academy of Sciences. Former Director of Research at the French Ministry for National Education, Research and Technology. Former editorial advisor to the journal La Recherche.” Before my copy of the book arrived, there were a few poor reviews (one or two stars) by obvious trolls: Russell S., D. Howitzer, P. “Irrepressible Doomster” Ehrlich. Since I got the book and read it, a few more troll-y reviews have come in (dansat25, Whipple McWhatever). I would pay them no heed. You’ll recognize them first of all because they lack the “Verified Purchase” tag, meaning the writers took time out of their days to come to Amazon to slag the book despite having never bought it. And second because they are sorry grab-bags of vague allegations and attacks against the person, not the argument, e.g.: the quotes in the book are taken out of context (but not a single such quote cited); the book is for un-educated morons (he’s talking about you, dear reader); the people quoted are all old, and old people are senile (again, no evidence cited); the illustrations are by a guy from a part of England I don’t like (uh….); Neil Tyson says physics are real but Mark Steyn thinks they're fake, etc. Even were these troll-reviews more than assortments of vague accusations and ad hominem, they would miss the point of this book. Which, I think it's fair to say, is, unless you are a politician or a gangster, it simply should not be possible to find such a prodigious company, intimately familiar with your work or your character, who have so little good to say about either. The scientists quoted in this book don't tell us that AGW is real or fake, important or trivial. They simply tell us that Mann isn't much of a scientist. He's a political animal, just as Aristotle said he'd be, and a bit of a gangster, too. So I say, buy the book! You’ll definitely learn something, and unless you are just sick to death of the entire CAGW debate and in danger of vomiting if you hear anything more about it (a very valid position, I hasten to add!) then I think you’ll get your money's worth.

This book will not inform you very much on the science of climate change/global warming; it will, however, inform you on the DEBATE over climate change/global warming, and about many of the key players in the debate. Some of those players are legitimate scientists, but many are not. The central figure in this book is Michael Mann; the central theme is the "Hockey Stick" graphic that he and his colleagues conjured up for the Third Annual Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That particular graphic has become the most important icon of the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming... and it has been shown to be fraudulent. The graph has influenced the opinions of millions, or even billions, of people, and they have been misled. Whether they were misled by intent or by incompetence is subject to judgment. Also discussed are the internal machinations of the IPCC and the "Hockey Team" to bring that graphic to prominence, and the extreme personal attacks that they will mount against anyone who questions it. It all boils down to scientific integrity- or lack of it. It is sad that the author of this book found it necessary to compile the comments and opinions of 120 scientists- many of who are on the same side of the debate as Mann, to demonstrate that the "Hockey Stick" is junk. I don't say "junk science" because it is not science at all; it is propaganda. Much of the ammunition comes from the perpetrators themselves, via the emails disclosed in "Climategate," where a hacker obtained emails from a British university server. Regardless of which side of the climate debate you are on, the lack of scientific and professional integrity shown by the "Hockey Team" is appalling. Such unprofessional behavior, and blatant disregard for the Mertonian Norms of scientific research- communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism- damages not only the climate debate, but all scientific endeavors. This book makes it very clear that "global warming" has left the realm of science, and has become a religion. The acolytes of the religion are so zealous that they cannot engage in anything resembling scholarly discussion. Shouting down critics is not science- it is tyranny. The IPCC itself is not a scientific organization (it never has been)- it originated as a political one and has transitioned into a sectarian, religious one, following the religion of global warming. This book is very hard to read- the opinions and interviews are very repetitive, but I see that repetition as necessary to drive home the author's point- without that many dissenting views of Mann and the "Hockey Stick" graph, it would be subject to dismissal. Not many people will make it through to the end. It is a sad commentary on the state of science today, that such an important issue has become so contentious and divisive. The last of those Mertonian Norms- organized skepticism- is probably the most important, and the zealots of the religion will not tolerate it.

The final episode of Seinfeld involved a “Good Samaritan” court case that featured witness after witness testifying passionately about the moral misdemeanors perpetrated against them by the show’s protagonists: Elaine, George, Kramer, and Jerry. One segment simulated a TV newscast in which Geraldo’s onsite reporter summarized the testimony. The number of prosecution witnesses, she concluded, “just went on and on and on into the night.” That’s the feeling one gets reading the negative evidence Steyn has amassed in this work about the litigious climatologist and “hockey-stick” inventor, Michael Mann. Steyn’s book is, in fact, a series of relatively short “testimony” segments by scores of “witnesses” to the shoddy science and shocking intimidation tactics employed by Mann and colleagues. The book also indicts various science publications and organizations for malpractice, especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a bureaucracy headed till his resignation in 2015, following charges of sexual abuse, by Dr. Rajandra Pachauri, formerly “Indian Railways engineer at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi.” Steyn divides his work into 12 chapters which contain, in total, 120 testimony segments. Almost all focus on damning observations about Mann’s methods, conclusions, and harassment of dissenting scientists—many of whom are still in the anthropogenic global warming camp. Thus, the book isn’t a broadside against apocalyptic climate change per se but rather a barrage against Michael Mann, the inventor of global warming’s most effective propaganda icon—the “hockey stick” diagram of global temperature. (Note: The diagrammatic “hockey stick” is lying flat with only the blade projecting upward to represent an unprecedented temperature rise in the last century.) To obtain this ominous shape that Al Gore and the IPCC seized upon with orgasmic enthusiasm, Mann obliterated two mainstays of traditional climate science: the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the opinion of many eminent scientists this feat was accomplished by employing dubious statistical analysis, by using and even manipulating scanty tree-ring evidence, and by tacking on actual thermometer readings for recent times to tree-ring proxy data that was largely employed to erase significant climate variations in the past. These methodological shenanigans resulted in the apocalyptic headline that summarized the Mann-dominated IPCC report of 2001, namely, that 1998 was “likely” the warmest year in the warmest decade in the warmest century of the past 1,000 years—a headline gobbled up by lazy and politically-motivated climate journalists. Probably 5% of Steyn’s extended “brief” against Mann, et al. consists of extended resumes of Mann’s critics—a procedure designed to show that scholars like MIT’s Richard Lindzen, NASA’s Roy Spencer, and renowned physicist Freeman Dyson are, indeed, expert witnesses and not the scientific JV team. Here’s a sample of those critiques: “The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell’s Ministry of Information” (Dr. William Happer, Physics, Princeton); “The blade of the hockey-stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques” (Dr. David Legates, U. of Delaware, Climatologist); “The behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession” (Dr. Henrick Tennekes, former Director of Research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute); “The work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies” (Dr. David Deming, Geophysicist, U. of Oklahoma); “That was a mistake and it made tree-ring people angry” (Dr. Gordon Jacoby, pioneer in dendrochronology); “Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data… Yet that’s exactly what he did” (Dr. Philip Stott, Biogeography, U. of London). The damning critiques go on and on and on—in detail. The above comments are only chapter headings, and the individual resumes all include a large number of professional achievements. Another swath of Steyn’s evidence concerns the University of East Anglia Climate Research emails that were hacked into and published in 2009, resulting in the “Climategate” scandal. These communications give credence to the claim that there is or was a “Big Climate” mafia headed by Michael Mann—a group as eager to protect its fame and grant-producing turf as Michael Corleone was to defend his crime syndicate. Fortunately, Mann and company “only” employ stigma, blackballing, and control of peer-reviews to achieve their objectives. Two cases in point: In 2014 Dr. Judith Curry, former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology observed that her “challenge to the [climate change] consensus has precluded any further professional recognition.” She also mentioned that she worries about younger scientists without tenure protection. That same year the 79-year-old distinguished professor Lennart Bengtsson was forced by “enormous group pressure” to resign “for the sake of [his] health and safety” from the advisory board of a think tank that promoted rational skepticism about global warming. As a closing bonus, Steyn explains the origin of the “97% of all scientists” mantra that Mann and President Obama confidently throw around whenever the “settled science” of climate change is at issue. Short story shorter: 97% comes from a survey conducted for a thesis by a University of Illinois graduate student who, having received 3,146 responses to a two-question online questionnaire sent to 10,257 earth scientists, eventually identified 77 “experts” of which 75 (97%) were found to agree with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. There’s no word as yet on the identity and views of the other 10,180. One might ask why Steyn is so hell bent on exposing Michael Mann rather than broadly addressing the issue of climate change—and why he structures his book so that it reads like the sequential testimony of a hundred different witnesses, interspersed with witty Steyn asides? The answer is that Steyn, National Review, et al. are being sued for defamation by the aforementioned Dr. Mann. In other words, true to form, Mann is using intimidation to silence critics. Specifically, the legal case concerns a National Review blog post dated July 15, 2012, in which Steyn quotes aerospace engineer Rand Simberg’s negative comments about the Penn State hockey-stick inventor, including the remark that Mann has become “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.” Steyn proceeds in a mere 147 words to distance himself somewhat from Simberg’s metaphor, to identify Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent ‘hockey-stick’ graph,” and to note that the same college President who “declined to find one of its star names [Paterno] guilty of any wrongdoing” and who was forced to resign over the Sandusky scandal also oversaw the exculpatory investigation of Mann after the “Climategate” emails were made public. The fact that this speech-suppressing defamation suit in the D.C. courts has been going on for years without media outrage clearly shows that Steyn's derogatory book title applies to American journalists and courts as much as to the now-greatly-diminished Penn State climatologist.

I have read all of Mark Steyn's books, and in my opinion he's the best writer in the world today. This is a devastating takedown of Dr Michael Mann's infamous 'Hockey Stick Graph' which is probably the biggest single component in the case made by the IPCC and Al Gore amongst others that catastrophic AGW is real and happening. If you have any interest in the Global Warming debate then this book is an absolute must read. Mark has collected the thoughts of the world's most eminent climate experts and scientists (most of whom do believe in AGW, so don't be afraid to pick this book up if you think it's going to be biased) on the hard science behind this graph, so it's not a case of Mark framing the debate one way or another, but presenting clearly the whole picture. I work in a scientific field, and often use statistical models to process raw data, which use filters and gating to try and remove noise and weighting to privilege certain data sets based on their perceived reliability, before the model gets to process the data and then, only if the model is good, (or close to reality if you like) will it be able to solve, and the errors being flagged will not exceed what is deemed acceptable - for there are always errors. A model is a statistical tool to reduce noise in data. The key elements here is the quality of the model and the quality AND quantity of the data - of course the better all of these are then the smaller the errors will be (statistically) and you can get a clearer picture of what you are looking at, that corresponds to the reality of the observations.... BUT even then the model will only solve for where you have programmed it to take you (usually because that is what you thought corresponded closest to reality) The model is not real - only a facsimile of a reality that you have already decided upon - the proof of the pudding is in how well you can match reality. If reality does not apply, then you can make any model take you anywhere with any data. I think in Michael Mann's case, and indeed much of the models used by the IPCC they do not correspond to reality and that is their only fault, because any other parameter is of course subjective. (They give too much weighting to CO2 and its effect on the climate and also the amount of data AND its quality is not high in my personal opinion) Well - that's my two pence worth. The mind-blowingly brilliant scientists in this book (some of whom are doing brilliant work that staggers me, science CAN in fact be amazing) that Mark presents, IN THEIR OWN UNEDITED WORDS, are worth taking seriously. Let the science speak at last, because the IPCC and State sponsored organisations who have hijacked the debate for political and personal reasons have held centre stage too long. (Yes, yes, I realise that in the socialist world, actions are not correlated with consequences and anything is possible! Forward!) Thank you Mark Steyn, Prize Fighter for the Truth. Undefeated. I hope you will get your day in court and Dr Mann will stop wasting your time so you can get more books out. I can't wait for the next one.

Le contexte: Michael Mann, auteur de la courbe en crosse de hockey, a attaqué l'auteur de ce livre, Mark Steyn, (et le National Review, Rand Simberg, et le Competitive Enterprise Institute) pour diffamation pour avoir dit (ou publié/laissé être publié) que la courbe était frauduleuse. À partir de là, les péripéties juridiques sont bien complexes mais Mark Steyn a contrattaqué car il veut que Michael Mann témoigne, sous serment, à propos de son travail. L'enjeu: pour Steyn, c'est la liberté d'expression. Mais face au délai du processus juridique (maintenant 5 ans), il a cherché à creuser dans les raisons qui font que Michael Mann est seul alors que lui a reçu le support de nombreuses personnes et journaux. Le résultat: ce livre qui regroupe de nombreux témoignages de scientifiques à propos de la courbe en crosse de hockey. Quiconque a gratté sous la surface de la question climatique est forcément arrivé aux fameux ClimateGates. Le premier étant connu pour la phrase devenue célèbre de 'hide the decline' (cacher le déclin). Derrière cet emblème, il ne faut néanmoins pas chercher longtemps pour trouver des affirmations prononcées par Mann et ces collègues qui montrent combien, à cette époque du moins, les incertitudes étaient grandes et certaines démarches absolument non scientifiques et non éthiques. Les témoignages regroupés par Steyn sont tellement nombreux que ce livre est le volume 1; un second viendra peut-être avec le temps. Mais d'ores et déjà, le contenu est extraordinaire. Je ne vais pas tout spoiler mais laissez-moi vous donner quelques notions "croustillantes": À la sortie du papier de Mann, la courbe en crosse de hockey était déjà ce qu'elle est aujourd'hui: une anomalie. Plus d'une centaine de papiers en climatologie avaient identifié via de nombreuses méthodes indépendantes l'existence d'une période chaude au Moyen-Âge suivie d'un petit âge glaciaire. Tout ça disparaît dans la courbe de Mann. Pour les températures aux époques sans thermomètres, Mann s'est appuyé sur un proxy dont les spécialistes sont unanimes pour dire qu'il est une bonne représentation des niveaux de CO2 mais pas de la température. Mann l'a tout de même utilisé pour dériver des températures. Les données de ce proxy sont limités au continent nord américain. De proche en proche, la courbe est dite représentative de la température de l'hémisphère nord puis de la planète toute entière. Un professeur en Allemagne, à Berlin, a voulu en savoir plus. Il a assigné à une de ses thésardes de répliquer le travail de Mann. Elle est revenue quasi les mains vides. Quasi car elle a tout de même acquis la certitude qu'il n'était pas possible de répliquer le travail de Mann. Pour cause, ce dernier a mis 7 ans avant de partager le détail de ses données et méthodes. Et vous avez ce genre de choses tout le long du livre. Tout le long. Cela va faire 2 ans que je suis la question climatique et son évolution et j'ai plongé de multiples fois dans les évènements passés. Mais l'ampleur de la fraude caractérisée de la courbe en crosse de hockey m'avait complètement échappé. Je crois qu'elle échappe à tous ceux et celles qui ne sont pas des spécialistes. D'où la question fondamentale de Steyn: comment est-il possible que cette courbe soit devenue un emblème dans les rapports du GIEC, le film d'Al Gore et les médias en général quand les spécialistes avaient connaissance d'autant de problèmes, dans les données, dans les méthodes, dans les conclusions et au final dans la démarche elle-même?

A must read for all climate activists

Mark Steyn's collection of anecdotes & critiques of Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph is a compelling commentary on the unscientific nature of much of the presentations of the climate alarmists. Should be in your library.

This book builds on the great book by A.W. Montford (which also destroys Michael Mann's ridiculous "hocket stick" hoax). The hockey stick is one cornerstone of the gigantic "climate change scam". It is interesting that the climate change zealots NEVER argue the facts when confronted. Instead they start insults, defamation, censorship, firings etc. Thus further discrediting themselves. Anyway .... read the book.