July 27, 2018
 
Dear Friends and Family,
 
This is segment 8 of the Climate Change Series.  It is the second of the two skeptic counterpoints to Dr. Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick.  The excerpts used in the counterpoint all come from A Disgrace to the Profession which contains 120 different viewpoints on the Hockey Stick.  The viewpoints were compiled and edited by Mark Steyn.  To provide some background on why Steyn put the book together, the following are excerpts from his introduction to the book. 
 
In 2012, Michael E. Mann sued me and various other parties in the District of Columbia Superior Court for “Defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”  He was obliged to withdraw the false claim to be a Nobel Prize recipient, but not the defamation charge over my description of his hockey stick as “fraudulent.”  [Note: In 2007 a Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to the IPCC and Al Gore “for their efforts to build-up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made Climate Change.”  Mann claimed he was a recipient of the Prize because of his Lead Author work (one of many lead authors) for the IPCC].
 
Two years after Mann launched the suit, the American Civil Liberties Union, The Washington Post, NBC News and The Los Angeles Times all filed amici briefs opposed to Michael Mann and his assault on free speech.  They did this not because they have any great love for me, but because their antipathy was outweighed by their appreciation of the First Amendment – and an understanding of the damage a Mann victory would have on it. On the other hand, ever since this tedious suit was launched by Mann, his supporters had insisted it was not about free speech at all.  Instead, as they see it, it’s about science, finally fighting back against a sustained assault by “deniers.”
 
Mann insisted he was doing it for science.  In court his argument was a straight-forward appeal to authority:  Why, all these eminent, acronymic bodies from the EPA and NSF and NOAA even unto HMG in London have proved all the criticisms of Mann are false and without merit.  So, I certainly expected them to file briefs on his behalf.  And yet, the deadline came and passed, and not a single amicus brief was filed on behalf of Mann.  So, Michael Mann is taking a stand for science.  But evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for Mann.  The world’s scientists he claimed to be taking a stand for had fallen deathly silent. 
 
And so, I started wondering what in fact do all these scientists think of Mann and his methods.  Initially, I assumed it would be just the usual contrarians, the “skeptics”, the “deniers”.  But then I discovered that around the world there are many, many scientists who, broadly believe in “anthropogenic global warming” but do not believe in Mann.  We wound up with far more material than we could ever fit in one book, so this is Volume One, which I intended to confine to a nice round number of 100 scientists – ten scientists on ten aspects of Mann and his work – but it grew to twelve aspects, and we squeezed in a few more scientists. 
 
I would like to win the defamation case – because losing it would be the worst setback for free speech in America in the half-century since “New York Times” vs. Sullivan.  But as important a goal for me is lifting the climate of fear that Mann and his fellow enforcers have imposed on a critical field of science and in the broader sphere of public policy. 
 
In the developing of the segment, I narrowed the scientists to 36 and extracted excerpts from those contributors.  In doing so, I opted for selections I thought were the most important in an overall sense; in doing so I paid little attention to Steyn’s twelve aspect categorization.
 
The excerpts for this segment are quite lengthy and there is no follow-on PDF attachment.  I elected to insert a larger text than normal to provide you the reader a sense of the character of the climate change deniers, their logic, their scientific validity, as well as their perspective on a bedrock piece of scientific evidence that is key to the Advocates position.
 
In the next two segments we are going to depart from the science of Climate Change and focus on the politics of Climate Change.  Segment 9 will be a political advocate point of view and segment 10 will be a skeptic political counterpoint.
 
Happy Learning,
Harley  

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CLIMATE CHANGE – SEGMENT 8
THE HOCKEY STICK, SECOND COUNTERPOINT – EXCERPTS

NOTE:  All excerpts in this segment are from "A Disgrace to the Profession" (2015) which contains 120 perspectives on The Hockey Stick by scientists throughout the world – compiled and edited by Mark Steyn.

Dr. Madhav Khandekar, climatologist with Environment Canada:  The hockey stick was a graph constructed by some scientists about ten years ago.  What it was meant to show was that the earth's temperature from about 1080 till about 1850 remained essentially constant and then it started to shoot up. Lots of problems have been found in the graph.  The most glaring effort in the hockey stick was that it did not show the Little Ice Age, which was significant.  It did not show the Medieval Warm Period from the 6th to 12th century, which was also significant.  These were errors in the use of tree-ring data and also other errors.  So today, most scientists dismiss the hockey stick.  They do not consider the hockey stick graph to be a correct representation of the global mean temperature. 

Dr. William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a member of the US Government's group of independent scientific advisors:  The existence of climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim all climate change is due to man and that man can control it.  When I first saw the celebrated "hockey stick curve," in the Third Assessment of the IPCC, I could hardly believe my eyes.  Both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years, when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick.  The hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near.  The hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis.  There really was a Little Ice Age and a Medieval Warm Period that was as warm or warmer than today.

Dr. David R. Legates, former Director of the Center of Climatic Research at the University of Delaware:  According to the IPCC (2001) and many other studies, the earth warmed only one degree F. during the twentieth century.  However, that contrasts sharply with the most recent reconstruction by Mann, which shows warming over the last century of 1.5 degrees F. -- a temperature rise more the 50% larger than the IPCC claims.  Mann's warming estimate has grown substantially over the last couple of ears, apparently to accommodate his continuing claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last two millennia, but we found that the blade of the hockey stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann or other common statistical techniques.  Since reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and the blade does not represent the observed climate record, it is unreliable. 

Dr. Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at the Open University's Center from Research in Computing in the United Kingdom:  One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls.  This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations of a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability.  This does not seem to happen in climate research.  Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs – even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements.  An example is Professor Mann's initial refusal to give up the code that was used to construct the 1999 “hockey stick" model that demonstrated that human-made global warming is a unique artefact of the last few decades.  I believe that, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them, then you are not a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.  The curve by Mann (1998, 1999) 'miraculous' indeed did away in one fell swoop with the MWP and the LIA … We are certainly no longer moving in the realms of science here.  

Dr. Hendrick Tennekes, Former Director of Research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute:  We only understand 10% of the climate issue.  That is not enough to wreck the world economy with Kyoto-like measures.  The IPCC review process is fatally flawed; the IPCC willfully ignores the paradigm shift by the foremost meteorologist of the 20th century, Edward Lorenz; the behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession, Hans von Storch and Steve McIntyre have shown the courage of their convictions. 

Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government of New Zealand:  With respect to Michael E. Mann and his work:

1. Unsupported Claims:  The IPCC made the single most dramatic assertion in the history of the global-warming movement:  The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.  It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year.  The only evidence offered in support of this statement was Michael Mann’s hockey stick.  Does it, indeed support such a claim?  Not according to many of the scientists in these pages.
2. Hidden Biases:  Mann began with a hypothesis that the global temperature record had been pretty stable for 900 years and then in the 20th century it soared up and out of the roof.  And so, he looked for “things which confirm the hypothesis’: As Mann put it, “one set of tree-ring records: was “of critical importance: in conjuring his stick.  So, his hypothesis that it looks like a hockey stick is confirmed only because a tree ring that produces a hockey-stick shape is given 390 times the weight of a tree ring that does not.  That tells you nothing about what the temperature was in the 15th century, but it lot about Mann’s biases. Furthermore, the scientists who actually collected the tree-ring data that Mann cannibalized insist they’re primarily and indicator of CO2 fertilization, not temperature.
3. Lack or reproducibility:  The real problem in this case, in my view, is that Michael Mann does not disclose his data, except for a small trusted coterie.  Mann declined – for years – to release the elements needed to reproduce his stick.
4. Inadequate peer review:  Nature never asked for any and, when it fell to others to demonstrate the flaws of the stick, the journal declined to share their findings with its readers.  The unsupported claims, hidden biases, lack of reproducibility, and inadequate peer review of Mann have surely harmed “public trust in science”.  

Dr. Michael Fox, Nuclear Scientist & Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University:  The overall message was that after about a 900-year period of constant temperatures, the global temperatures rose sharply upward beginning around 1900.  This is often assumed to be the beginning of significant man-made CO2 emissions.  This is incorrect.  The hockey stick graph has been featured prominently and globally in a major scientific journal.  It has been given pivotal importance in several of the IPCC assessment reports, and featured prominently in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which now is discredited too.  It is useful to list some of the approval processes which led to this global deception.  The authors, scientists themselves, obviously approved of their own creation.  The peer reviewers assigned by the science journal approved of it, the editors of the science journal who reviewed, checked and approved it, and the reviewers of the IPCC reports, the editors of the IPCC documents.  The producers of Gore’s documentary approved it, presumably Mr. Gore himself, and the thousands of school teachers around the world who required millions of students to view and analyze it.  The extent of global fear inspired by the educational systems around the world in incalculable.  All of them played a role in creating and/or spreading the deceptions.  It has shaken the pillars of institutional science to its foundation and undermined the public trust science once had.  We are either dealing with willful scientific deceptions or woeful and lazy scientific mediocrity from PhDs themselves. 

Dr. Richard Muller, Professor Emeritus and Founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project at the University of California at Berkeley:  If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick.  Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions.  A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one – if we know it is broken.  It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow.  When we discover a mistake, we admit it. 

Dr. Jeffrey E Foss Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature (2009):  The hockey stick is what’s known as a “proxy reconstruction”.  There’s only two things wrong with it – the proxies and the reconstruction.  First, the proxies:  What is a proxy?  Well, it’s something like an ocean coral or an ice core or some lake sediment from which one can “reconstruct” the temperature history.  In Mann’s case, it was mostly tree rings.  Much of the world isn’t terribly forested, and most of the parts that are can’t tell you the temperature for 1143.  For a shot at that, you need a thousand-year-old tree, and there are only a few of those around, here and there – in Siberia, in parts of Canada, in California.  This was the first mistake: His proxy reconstruction uses the wrong proxy.  The size of the tree ring is determined by everything that affects all aspects of plant development.  These are: soil nutrients and structure; light variations; carbon dioxide; competition from other trees; predators; age; rainfall; pervious developmental activity as well as temperature.  Temperature, for which it supposedly acts as a proxy, is just one contributor amongst many.  And then he further refined the process:  Having chosen the wrong proxy – trees – he took the additional precaution of using the wrong kind of tree.  Those ones in the American west, for example are bristlecone pines.  They’re certainly old.  There’s a bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains that has been precisely dated – 5,064 years old in 2015.  Unfortunately, the guys who know bristlecones – including the very scientist who collected the data Mann used – say they’re unreliable as thermometers.  Those California bristlecones are sensitive to higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, regardless of whether the temperature’s going up or down.  Mann knew this.  Yet, even when you decide to apply the wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet repealing the Medieval Warm Period is harder that you think.  So, Mann additionally decided to apply the wrong weighting to his wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet – by giving tree-ring data that produced a hockey-stick curve over 300 times the value of tree-ring data that didn’t.  Wrong proxy, wrong tree, wrong location … But what else do we need?  Ah, yes, the wrong method.

Dr. Istvan E. Marko, Chairman of the European Chemical Society and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Catholic University of Louvain:  The famous “Hockey-stick” curve, known as the Mann curve and presented six times by the IPCC in its penultimate report, is the result among other things of a mistake in the statistical calculations and an incorrect choice of temperature indicators, i.e. proxies.  The lack of scientific rigor has totally discredited the curve and it was withdrawn, without explanation, from subsequent IPCC reports.

Dr. Robert M. Carter Flacks for Alarmists: The Courier Mail September 6, 2009:  Why do we have leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.  He started the countdown in 2009, by the way.  The 96 months is up in July 2017.  One the other hand, it gives us an extra 18 months on January 2016, which is the official final store-wide clearance date for Al Gore’s 2006 prediction of the end of the world.  This sort of thing was once reserved for amiable lunatics with sandwich boards passing out leaflets on the street.  What made it suddenly respectable for princes and presidents?  Answer:  The declaration by the IPCC that this is the hottest year of the hottest decade of the hottest century since hotness began.  And who provided the underlying “science” for that?  Mann.

Dr. Tony Brown, Professor of Physical Geography and GeoData Research Director at the University of Southampton’s Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory:  The hockey stick remains a potent icon to this day. However, the gradual decline in temperatures over the centuries that it depicts cannot be detected, nor that lack of variability of the climate over the same time scales.  The sharp uptick in temperatures from the start of the 20th century is a likely artifact of computer modeling through over complex statistical interpretation of inadequate proxies.  Modern warming needs to be put into its context with the patterns of considerable natural climate variability that can be observed from the past. 

Dr. Craig D. Idso, Founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.  Idso tree-ring studies are part of the data that make up Mann’s original hockey sticks:  The data revealed three important pieces of information: (1) the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were both warmer than the Current Warm Period has been to date, (2) the “beginning of the end” of the Little Ice Age was somewhere in the vicinity of 1830, and (3) the Current Warm Period peaked somewhere in the vicinity of 1940.  All of these observations are at odds with what is portrayed in the thousand-year Northern Hemispheric hockey-stick temperature history of Mann wherein (1) the Current Warm Period is depicted as the warmest such era of the past two millennia, (2) recovery from the Little ice Age does not begin until after 1910, and (3) the Current Warm Period experience its highest temperatures in the latter art of the 20th century’s final decade. 

Dr. Gordon Jacoby, Founder of the Tree-Ring Laboratory of the Lamont-Dohery Earth Observatory.  Founder of tree labs in Mongolia and Russia, and sampler of trees in Alaska, Siberia, Thailand, and Australia:  Reconstructing past temperatures from proxy data is fraught with danger.  Tree ring records, the biggest component of the hockey stick record, sometimes reflect rain or drought rather than temperature.  Mann has a series from central China that we believe is more a moisture signal than a temperature signal … He included it because he had a gap.  A large data set he used from bristlecone pines in the American west has attracted similar attention. 

Dr. Jon Claerbout, Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at Stanford:  The hockey stick is so called because it divides neatly into two parts: a long flat “handle” for the nine centuries followed by a 20th century “blade” that shoots straight up.  The takeaway – the one that Mann, Al Gore, and the IPCC marketed to such effect – is that the earth was hotter in the late 20th century than at any time in the previous millennium.  But the science underpinning the graph is also made up of two elements:  actual recorded temperatures, and proxies – or temperatures derived from tree rings.  So what matters is how these two elements are “spliced” together.  If, for example, the hockey stick simply used tree rings for the flat handle and temperature readings for the vertical blade, it would perhaps be a bit too crude even for the alarmists.  If tree rings are such a reliable guide to the 11th, 13th, and 16th centuries, surely they’re also accurate for the 20th century.  So why not just do a straight tree-ring graph of the last millennium?  Because, as eventually emerged in 2014, when you update the tree rings, the hockey stick collapses – as Mann knew along.  He folded in the real-world temperature data because, by the mid-20th century, the proxies don’t tell the story than Mann wanted to sell, and certainly don’t produce anything that looks like a hockey stick.  The hockey stick thus requires you to believe that: (a) The tree rings are reliable proxies in the pre-thermometer era; (b) They remain reliable in the age of thermometers as long as both the thermometer and the tree ring are going up; (c) If the thermometer’s going up but the tree ring’s going down, then it’s the thermometer that’s accurate and the tree ring that’s junk.

Dr. James V. Zidek, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistices at the University of British Columbia:  Were there any statisticians on the IPCC panel itself? Answer: Hardly any.  How such an expensive project was launched and collected so much data without having statisticians on board is a mystery.

Dr.Ian Jolliffe, Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Aberdeen:  I am by no means a climate change denier.  My strong impressive is that the evidence rests on much, much more than the hockey stick.  It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics.

Dr. Gordon J. Fulks in a speech to the Oregon Chapter of the Amerian Meteorological Society, January 25, 2012:  Mann’s hockey stick showed that there was no such thing as “global warming” until the Industrial Revolution took off. So, in Mannworld 100% of “global warming” is anthropogenic.  How did the IPCC come to promote an “outlier” by an obscure individual of no previous distinction as the consensus of the world’s scientists? As Professor John Christy, a former IPCC “Lead Author” himself told the US Congress, Lead Authors are nominated by their countries but ultimately selected by a somewhat inscrutable IPCC bureaucracy.  They are supposed to represent “the highest level of expertise in particular fields” and in practice have “virtually total control of the material” – which means there is a strong temptation to “cite their own work heavily and neglect or belittle contradictory evidence”.  In most areas of life, “this would be called a conflict of interest”, but not at the IPCC.  Enter Mann.

Dr. G. Cornelis van Kooten, Senior Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate:  Scientists manipulated paleoclimatic data the peer-review process to make the case that average global temperatures had been stable for a thousand years or more …Despite efforts to block access to data and attempts to prevent critics from publishing their research, the “hockey stick” story has now been thoroughly discredited.  There is no scientific basis to support this view of the world.  Today’s temperatures are no different than those experienced in the past two millennia. 

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University:  Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author, working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past thousand years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.   

Dr. Barry Cooke in an email to Dr. Maryanne Newton of Cornell University (2006):  An even closer colleague and co-author of Mann’s first two hockey sticks, Malcolm Bradley was also concerned about “uncertainties”: All of our attempts so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. Therefore, I accept that everything we are doing is preliminary, and should be treated with considerable caution.  Mann didn’t need these complications and wasn’t interested in them.  The point of his work was to bolster the IPCC’s takeaway:  This is the hottest year of the hottest decade of the hottest century since centuries were invented – and he didn’t want any dithering about “uncertainties” getting in his way. 

Dr. Eugene I. Gordon, Former Director of the Lightwaves Devices Laboratory of Bell Labs:  I do not know what gives with these guys.  I don’t think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid.  I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics.  Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

Dr. John Mitchell, Chief Scientist at the United Kingdom and Chair of the Working Group on Climate Modeling:  Note: Dr. Mitchell is said to be the most cited scientist in the world on the subject of global warming.  In June, 2006 he emailed some colleagues regarding questions that “need to be addressed” about the hockey stick.  I had a quick look at the comments on the hockey stick and include below the questions I think need to be addressed which I hope will help the discussions.  I do believe we need a clear answer to the skeptics.

1. There needs to be a clear statement of why the instrumental and proxy data are shown on the same graph.  The issue of why we don’t show the proxy data for the last few decades (they don’t show continued warming) but assume they are valid for early warm periods needs to be explained.
2. There are number of methodological issues which need a clear response.
   • The role of bristlecone pine data.  Is it reliable? Is it necessary to include this data to arrive at the conclusion that recent warmth is unprecedented?
   • Is the PCA approach robust?  Are the results statistically significant?  It seems to me that in the case of MBH the answer to each is no.  It is not clear how robust and significant the more recent approaches are. 

Dr. Mojib Latif in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:  Dr. Latif was one of many scientists stunned by the glimpse behind the climate curtain – and he’s no denier.  As he once told National Public Radio, “If my name was not Mojib Latif, my name would be Global Warming.”  Nonetheless, he was shocked by what the Climategate emails disclosed about some of the leading figures in climate science.  On November 23, 2009 The Wall Street Journal reported:

Mojib Latic, a climate researcher at Germany’s Leibniz Institute of marine Sciences, said he found it hard to believe that climate scientists were trying to squelch dissent.

Dr. Peter Chylek, Researcher for Space and Remote Sensing Sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory:  To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years).  Some people were so eager to prove this point that it became more important that scientific integrity.  The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be the result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning fossil fuels.  The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans, It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability.  Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.  The damage has been done.  The public trust in climate science has been eroded.  So what comes next?  Let us stop making unjustified claims and exaggerated projections about the future even if the editors of some eminent journals are just waiting to publish them.  Let us admit that our understanding of the climate is less perfect than we have tried to make the public believe.  Let us drastically modify or temporarily discontinue the IPCC.  Only open discussion and intense searching of all possibilities will let us regain the public’s trust and move forward.

Dr. Zabigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation:  Indeed, these researchers are guilty of brazen fraud, bringing us into a trap, which has dire consequences.  For many years they have been incredibly confident, ignoring any criticism of their arguments.  But they had the overwhelming support of the United Nations, and specifically the IPCC, the United Nations group charged with examining the impact of human activities on climate change, which takes the lead in all this confusion.  This illustrates how credulous the public and politicians have been for decades.  They were falsely made to believe that they were well informed, with 90% certainty and full scientific consensus.  This will free science and the public from the gloomy climatic phantom, save the world from global economic disaster, and allow us to enjoy the golden gift of nature:  our Modern Warm Period. 
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Dr. Peter Bloomfield, Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University and the statistician on the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences hockey stick investigation:  Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate.  We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.  Note: Four years later, David Hand, President of the Royal Statistical Society, would observe that the hockey stick had used “inappropriate methods”.  Michael E. Mann responded as follows:

I would note that our ’98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health.  In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof. Hand.

Dr. Michael Kelly, Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge:  I take real exception to having simulation runs describes as experiments (without at least the qualification of “computer” experiments).  It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data.  This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real “real data” might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models!  That is turning centuries of science on its head.  Note: In February 2012, Professor Kelly wrote to The Times in London.

The interpretation of the observational science has been consistently over-egged to produce alarm.  All real-world data over the past 20 years has shown the climate models to be exaggerating the likely impacts – if the models cannot account for the near term, why should I trust them in the long term?

Dr. Paul Matthews, Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Nottingham:  Taken together the papers leave no doubt that the results presented are spurious and misleading.  The paper should be withdrawn immediately.  The fact that such an obviously flawed paper was published raises serious questions about the authors, the quality of the refereeing process and the handling of the paper by the editors of Science.

Dr. Philippe de Larminat, Former head of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research:  In the next IPCC report, the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age mysteriously reappeared.  This suggests that the IPCC knew that the “hockey stick” was invalid. This is a withering condemnation of the IPCC.  The ‘hockey stick” was used as the backdrop for announcements about human induced climate changed.  It is still used by Al Gore, and it is still used in talks, on websites and in publications by those claiming that the world is getting warmer due to human activities.  Were any of those people who view this graphic told that the data before 1421 AD was based on just one lonely alpine pine tree?
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Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, former head of Stockholm University’s Deparment of Paleogeophysics and former Chairman of the International Union for Quatenary Research’s Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution:  Note: This was written in London’s Spectator in 2011. 

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3 mm per year.  When I criticized this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration.  “We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.”  As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt.   ​

From Professor Freeman Dyson’s paper “Climate Disasters, Safe Nukes and Other Myths (2009):  A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation.  Every model has to be compared to the real world and, if you can’t do that, then don’t believe the model.  Mann’s hockey stick has corrupted almost everything it touched, starting with the journal Nature, which has been damaged by its publication of Mann and by its refusal to acknowledge its error by publishing the short comment McIntyre & McKitrick submitted; the IPCC, which catapulted the hockey stick to global celebrity; the school teachers who inflicted this cartoon on their young charges; the Climatic Research Unit, founded by a truly great climatologist Hubert Lamb, whose life’s work his successors trashed – and from within a building named after him – in order to hitch themselves to Mann’s coattails.

Dr. Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor at the University of Auckland’s School of Environment:  Mann’s hockey-stick is an oversimplification.  It is nothing more than a mathematical construct vigorously promoted in the IPCC’s 2001 report to affirm the notion that temperature changes of the 20th century were unprecedented.  The validity of this has been soundly challenged, and sufficient evidence exists to disprove it. 

Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., Emeritus Professor at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science:  Mike is misleading in his defense of multi-decadal climate models predictions as a robust scientific tool to forecast changes in climate statistics decades from now.  Mike does not properly distinguish between the types of modeling.  With multi-decadal climate predictions, they can only realistically be tested from past climate conditions, unless we wait for the coming decades to pass.  Even in the hindcast mode, however, the global climate models have failed to predict changes in the statistics of regional climate.  Mike is in error.  With the prediction of climate change, even with coarse metrics such as the magnitude of global warming as diagnosed by changes in the heat content of the climate system, these global average forecasts are on the verge of failing.  With respect to the prediction of multi-decadal changes in regional climate statistics, which are needed by the impact community, these models have failed so far to show any skill. Mike missed the point that this knowledge of physics does not then result in skillful global and regional predictions of changes in climate statistics.  The climate system is much more that just changes in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases.  Mike is misunderstanding “the way models are used’.  He is confusing tested and verified model prediction with unverified model results.

Referee for Geophysical Research Letters,  Review of “Hockey Sticks, Principal Components, and Spurious Significance” (2005):  When someone criticizes Mann’s science, the first response is generally that the criticism is invalid because the critic is “not a scientist”.  If it turns out he is a scientist, then it’s still dismissable because he’s not a climate scientist.  And, if it transpires that he is indeed a climate scientist, he’s not the right kind of climate scientist – which is to say he may know a lot about ocean currents or cloud formation, but he’s not a big-picture planet-wide millennial-reconstructionist climate scientist like Mann.  Climate science has changed over the years.  A couple of generations back, it was a branch of physical geography.  Today it’s computer modeling.  When Mann got into the game, paleoclimatology was a backwater, sneered at by the modelers.  Mann’s genius was to move in and turn paleoclimatology into computer modeling for all space and all time.  There are peer-reviewed studies by over 750 scientists from over 450 institutions in over 40 countries that have found a Medieval Warm Period of between 0.1 degrees and 3.2 degrees centigrade warmer than today in every corner of the globe. Everywhere they look for it, they find it.  But when it’s all processed into Mike’s worldwide paleoproxypalooza, it vanishes every time – and don’t you dare question it, because Mike’s whole is always greater than the sum of everybody else’s parts.
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Dr. Donald Mikulecky, Professor Emeritus for the Study of Biological Complexity at Virginia Commonwealth University:  THE OTHER 97% CONSENSUS.  Dr. Mikulecky’s readers were invited to respond to a poll in the left-wing website The Daily Kos offering the following options:
Michael Mann:

1. Did not choose to become a symbol
2. Has been attacked in the same ways that the president and John Kerry were
3. Is an outstanding scientist and human being
4. All of the above
5. Is distorting evidence to prove his point
6. Should be fired from the University.

The results:

1. Did not choose to become a symbol – 10 Votes
2. Has been attacked the same ways that the president and John Kerry were – 3 Votes
3. Is an outstanding scientist and human being – 8 Votes
4. All of the above – 36 Votes    
5. Is distorting evidence to prove his point – 2,341 Votes
6. Should be fired from the university – 819 Votes

So, 97% of Daily Kos 2413 readers think Mann is dishonest.  We have a consensus.
                                                                   
There is no unabbreviated version for the above.