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White to move and mate in two #547 - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars [1]

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Date: 2024-08-11  

What is most fascinating to me is that the science the right is attacking Mann over — principally, the 1998 hockey stick study and its 1999 extension, as prominently exhibited in 2001 by the IPCC — is relatively old news. Indeed, and as Mann himself explains in the book, "attacks against the hockey stick… were not really about the work itself." That work has been supported by other researchers — there is now a veritable "hockey team," Mann notes — and anyways, the case for human caused global warming never depended on the validity of the hockey stick alone. It was always just one part of a far broader body of evidence.

Thus, conservatives who fixated on Mann, and continue to do so, tell us through their own actions that this is not really about scientific inquiry at all. If it was, then they'd be doing something quite different from giving Mann one star Amazon reviews.

But of course, climate researchers have been making observations like these for years. It hasn't mattered nearly as much as it should, though, because they've often lacked the communication skills to get their point across. If anything, their scientific training has tended to hobble them in a brass knuckles fight such as this one. And that, to me, is where Mann's new book matters the most: It shows that he has developed the communication skills to match his unquestionable scientific talent--and moreover, that he has done so because the right forced him to.

That's why Mann is such an inspiring example for all who care about the climate issue — and why his book is required reading. From the early "hockey stick" battles all the way up through "ClimateGate" and the Ken Cuccinelli inquiry, Mann didn't give an inch. He didn't back down; to the contrary, he showed what toughness actually means. And in the process, from the founding of RealClimate.org in 2004 up through the publication of this book, he evolved into a passionate communicator and advocate. Having had him on my podcast Point of Inquiry and heard him lecture, I can assure you that many scientists should take a lesson from him.

Through all this, Mann emerged as a charismatic example of what we should all strive for in the face of ideological adversity and unfair attacks. Mann himself has a powerful analogy for all of this in the book, one that shows just how much he has developed as a communicator and an advocate. He calls it the "Serengeti Strategy," based on what he saw on a vacation in Africa:

"Among the most striking and curious scenes I saw that day were groups of zebras standing back to back, forming a continuous wall of vertical stripes. "Why do they do this?" an IPCC colleague asked the tour guide. "To confuse the lions," he explained. Predators, in what I call the "Serengeti strategy," look for the most vulnerable animals at the edge of a herd. But they have difficulty picking out an individual zebra to attack when it is seamlessly incorporated into the larger group, lost in this case in a continuous wall of stripes. Only later would I understand the profound lesson this scene from nature had to offer me and my fellow climate scientists in the years to come."

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