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The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: The Book Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Doesn’t Want You to Read

You can help fight the denier attacks on Michael Mann by buying his book, reading it, and then reviewing it at Amazon.com.

The most vindicated climate scientist in America, Michael Mann, has published an excellent new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. How much do the climate science disinformers want to discourage you from reading it? I’ve reported that the deniers immediately launched an attack on the book and on the positive reviews on Amazon.com.

Now Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has decided that rather than just ignoring the book, they would have it ‘reviewed’ by their leading anti-science and anti-scientist editorial page writer, Anne Jolis.

I say “anti-science” because, as recently as Septmber, Jolis wrote an entire ‘opinion’ piece on “The Other Climate Theory: Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.” Yes, she was pushing the long-debunked “cosmic ray” theory of climate change based on a CERN paper — months after its lead author explained that the paper “actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.” Multiple peer-reviewed papers make clear that cosmic rays aren’t driving significant climatic change.

I say “anti-scientist” because, as forest science expert Simon Lewis wrote here in a 2010 debunking of another one of Jolis’s masterpieces of misinformation:

I asked Peter Cox what he thought about the WSJ article. He was surprised that he was featured in a climate science bashing editorial. While his quotes were correctly transcribed Prof. Cox was not told that the article was about attacking climate science. The same journalist tried the same sleight-of-hand with me over a potential Amazongate article. So memo to scientists. If Anne Jolis of the WSJ contacts you, watch out, or you could find yourself being tricked into starring in an article about scientists not being open and honest.

It’s safe to say that if you ask Jolis to write review of a book on climate science, you know what you’re going to get. And, indeed, the review reveals that Jolis remains a one-trick pony.

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Here she is with what I suppose she considers a devastating example of hypocrisy but which is an unintentional revelation of her own biases:

Yet for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)

Seriously.

To be clear, there is no equation between Mann and Michaels. Michaels makes crap up on climate for a living and deserves to be called on it. As Skeptical Science has detailed, Patrick Michaels is a “Serial Deleter of Inconvenient Data.“

As they show in 3 different instance, “Michaels has deleted the data which contradict his constant arguments that the planet will warm less than most climate scientists expect, and thus that global warming is nothing to worry about.” NASA’s James Hansen said Michaels’ distortion of his work was “treading close to scientific fraud.“ You can find many more debunkings of Michaels online and here.

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Jolis may think it needs explanation why fossil fuel funding would call into question a scientist’s repeated attempts to spreads pro-pollution disinformation, but it’s rather obvious to everyone else.

In contradistinction to the discredited and endlessly debunked Pat Michaels, Michael Mann is one the most vindicated climate scientist in America. The final independent vindication noted,that his work “from the beginning of his career, has been recognized as outstanding” and it “clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field.”

Mann’s “Hockey Stick” work has also been utterly and repeatedly vindicated:

  • The Hockey Stick was affirmed in a major review by the uber-prestigious National Academy of Scientists (in media-speak, the highest scientific “court” in the land) — seeNAS Report and here. The news story in the journal Nature (subs. req’d) on the NAS panel was headlined: “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph“!

What’s most laughable about this review is the final sentence:

Mr. Mann closes “The Hockey Stick” with a passionate call for more scientists to join him “on the front lines of the climate wars.” “Scientific truth alone,” Mr. Mann writes, “is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion.” It would be “irresponsible,” he says, “for us to silently stand by while industry-funded climate change deniers succeed in confusing and distracting the public and dissuading our policy makers from taking appropriate actions.” These are unfortunate conclusions for a scientist-turned-climate-warrior whose greatest weakness has always been a low estimation of the public intellect.

Obviously she hasn’t read most of the book. Mann’s book, arguably his entire life’s work, assumes a high public intellect, one that can understand science and objectively make wise decisions. Heck, he even explains, at length, principal component analysis (PCA) — better than I’ve seen elsewhere.

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It is the anti-science and anti-scientist misinformers at Murdoch’s empire, including the Wall Street Journal, who assume their readers are so dumb as to not even be able to use Google to figure out who is on the side of science and who is on the side of ignorance.

Jolis’s review has the unintentionally ironic headline, “The Climate Kamikaze.” Kamikazes, of course, were suicide bombers. But Mann is no kamikaze: In fact, he has devoted his life to its informing the public about how to avoid humanity’s self-destruction, which requires action now to avert catastrophe.

It is Jolis and her employer who future generation will label kamikazes. As one Australian scientist put it, “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”