The Hockey Stick Reigns Supreme

I grew up in Minnesota to a Canadian father. In his 70s he would join us in puck shooting contests downstairs at my brother’s home. It was a contest between my dad, my brother, and my brothers two hockey playing sons and me. Grandpa beat us all.

When my dad passed, his hockey stick was at his funeral. I decided it should accompany him on his journey, so I made sure his stick was with him as they slid him into the crematorium. I could not stomach the idea of my dad missing a pickup game enroute. My whole family felt this was appropriate.

When the climate scientists used the term hockey stick to describe something going on with the earth’s climate, I did not know enough about global warming to be scientifically skeptical. I was just wondering if they had shown the proper respect.

If you recall, the graph that documents the earth’s average temperature was, and still often is, compared to a hockey stick. If you lay a hockey stick on the ground with the blade sticking up, it represents the average earth temperature. The straight and horizontal handle stretches along the ground representing the remarkable stable earth temperature going back from about 1950 deep into our past. The original stick went back only 1,000 years but today’s graphs go back 11,300 years.

The near vertical blade represents the dramatic and unprecedented rise in temperature we are experiencing today.

There was opposition to the original stick saying, “What about the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Climate Anomaly, the Dark Ages Cold Period, and the Little Ice Age?” The data reveals that, indeed, we have had dramatic regional heating and cooling but it also reveals that if one region warmed or cooled other regions cooled or warmed in balance so the average stayed level….until 1950.

Since 1950 we have been warming rapidly.

The original “hockey stick” graph was published in 1998. The hockey stick graphs use proxy data such as tree rings, coral bores, lake and ocean sediment layers, boreholes, glaciers, some written histories, and Antarctic and Greenland ice cores to create a temperature time-line. Since the climate community has mountains of supporting data making the hockey stick data unnecessary to prove global warming, why does it get any attention today?  A recent article in Science News about the hockey stick graph is titled, “Current Warming is Unprecedented”. The Scientific American article is more emphatic, “Climate Clincher, The Argument that Global Warming is part of a natural cycle is DEAD.”  (These articles are based on papers published in the reputable peer-reviewed science journals, “Nature” and “Nature Geoscience”.)

Maybe the science magazines want to remind us of the irresponsible coverage non-science organizations used to denigrate the work of reputable, now renowned, climate scientists. When the hockey stick graph first came out, it was looked at within the science community, skeptically. Respectful skepticism is in the great tradition of science.

Then something changed. Thieves hacked into the private e-mails of the scientists. Thousands of e-mails were cherry picked and deliberately restructured to fabricate misleading stories to make the scientists look shady. These fabrications from stolen e-mails were covered as fact by major television and cable news networks such as Fox.

Given the seriousness of Global Warming eight independent scientific committees were assembled to investigate the work done to create the climate hockey stick. They found NO merit to the accusations falsely manufactured from the stolen e-mails. All eight committees found no evidence that the science was shoddy or incomplete, nor did they find any misconduct by the scientists.

The e-mail thieves were completely successful because the news broadcasting stations made little effort to correct their irresponsible coverage. The doubt created by the coverage gave politicians like Republican Sarah Palin and James Inhofe ammunition to create doubt within the public climate discussion. Thus, good science and honorable scientists were stifled and sometimes attacked.  Many scientists such as Katherine Hayhoe have been subjected to vile threats. Michael Mann, one of the original hockey stick scientists, was put in the cross hairs of relentless vindictive shots of unsupportable accusations. He says the episode caused him to "endure countless verbal attacks upon my professional reputation, my honesty, my integrity, even my life and liberty".

By 2010 there were already 24 independent scientific papers whose findings supported the original hockey stick. The science was, is, and continues to be honorable and massively conclusive. The coverage and the reaction were dishonorable and irresponsible. We, as a society, were unable to tell fact from fiction, reputable discourse from lies. Perhaps that is what the science magazines are trying to tell us 20 years later.  

Now that I understand the graph, it is arguably the most important graph constructed in man’s short history.  The fact it is named, “The Hockey Stick”, is OK with me…I guess. I suspect my dad is pleased.