Dr. Michael Mann, the evil mastermind of the entire climate change plot against humanity, or distinguished scientist. Which is it? Thanks for that interesting introduction. It's now almost 14 years since the publication of Michael Mann's first investigation into global temperatures of the past. In 1998, Mann and his team tracked the data back for 600 years, then a year later, for a thousand, creating the signature image for the intergovernmental panel on climate change report in the year 2001, now known as the hockey stick. They seem to keep wanting to say that the entire theory of global climate change is based on the hockey stick. Is that correct? Most of the claim for man-caused global warming comes from what is known as the hockey stick curve. It's really somewhat breathtaking that anybody who's followed the science at all would think that our understanding and our recognition of the reality of human-caused climate change is based on my work alone. It's literally the conclusion of not just the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, but the academies of all of the major industrial nations. Rightly or wrongly, Mike Mann was identified as the enemy by the climate denial machine. This came to a head in 2005 when the scientists caught the attention of a Texas congressman by the name of Joe Barton. You say you don't know who Joe Barton is? Oh, but I think you do. Who could forget this classic moment in political history? I'm not speaking for anybody else, but I apologize. That's right. The same Joe Barton who offered the pathetic boot-looking apology to British petroleum that the American people would dare to hold them responsible for criminal and catastrophic insult to the Gulf of Mexico. Barton decided that he wanted to investigate our work as it turns out based on an editorial that appeared in the Wall Street Journal that attacked us in our work. The Front Page article on February 14, 2005, according to a former page one editor of the journal, Overviewed, was a public disservice. A mishmash of snide comments and unsupported assumptions. The piece reported to be authoritative while being in fact full of holes. The standard course when Congress wishes to examine a technical issue was set out by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. When he founded the National Academy of Science, a body of the most renowned and accomplished experts in every field meant to be a primary resource for citizens and policymakers. The story was in shows to ignore that route and instead handpick his own investigator choosing Dr. Edward Wegman, a statistician with no climate expertise and a background in defense-related data mining and intelligence work. Did Dr. Wegman have any background in climate science? Was he a climatologist? No he didn't. He was a statistician at George Mason University. In fact, one of Barton's colleagues, Republican Sherward Bollard, chairman of the science committee, did consult the National Academy of Science on man's work and invited Barton to join with him. Bollard's panel was an all-star team of renowned experts in the field and included even unnoted climate skeptic Dr. John Christie of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Barton declined to cooperate, so now there would be two competing studies. The National Academy panel published their findings in 2006. The Academy affirmed the work of Michael Mann and his team and the hockey stick graphs. Of the graphs, the panel concluded the basic conclusion of Mann et al was that the late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as the melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. Wegman's group predictably disagreed and in summer 2006 hearings were held before Barton's committee to air the differences. Yeah, well interestingly, Wegman report, aciduously avoided actually even asking the question of whether any of the criticisms that had been made against us by our detractors would actually change the result. Change our findings, change our conclusions. Every climate scientist who has performed a detailed reconstruction of the climate of the past 1,000 years using different proxy data and different statistical methods has come up with the same basic hockey stick pattern. Dr. Wegman's report argues that the hockey stick pattern derives from the statistical conventions used in our 1998-1999 studies. However, using alternative statistical conventions yields the same hockey stick pattern. The hockey stick pattern is intrinsic to the data. That was the conclusion of the National Academy. Page 116 of the National Academy report says the statistical convention my colleagues and I used quote does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric main temperature. Reconstructions performed without using principal component analysis are qualitatively similar to the original curves presented by man at all. What scientists have found is that the key conclusions of our original late 1990s work hold up quite well. It is in fact a robust conclusion that the recent warming appears to be anomalous. In fact, even farther back than we went in our original studies, more than 1,000 years back in time. Wegman's criticism focused on the minutia of statistical methods and a general accusation that peer review of climate research was not sound. His credibility suffered from his total lack of background in atmospheric science, a point not lost on journalist and attendants. And the limits of Wegman's expertise became painfully clear when he tried to answer a question from Illinois Democrat Jan Shakowski about the well-known mechanism by which carbon dioxide traps infrared radiation heat in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Where it sits in the atmospheric profile, I don't know. I'm not an atmospheric scientist to know that. But presumably, if the carbon dioxide is close to the surface of the earth, it's not reflecting a lot of infrared back. But you're not really qualified to comment on that. Well, what's really ironic to me is that in following up on the Wegman report, people started looking and poking into that. And it became clear over the last year or so due to some really diligent digging by some investigators that large parts of that report were lifted ironically from a textbook written by one of your collaborators, Ray Bravick. And in some cases quoted verbatim, and then in other cases subtly altered so as to achieve a certain result. Is that fair to say? Unfortunately, I think that is a fair description. Yeah. And once that came to light, in fact, the result was that the publisher of that paper felt that the only thing they could do was disavow it or withdraw it because it was so clearly deficient and defective. Yeah. I mean, so it turns out that that was the primary flaw that was most easily caught, that large chunks of the report. Ironically, it appeared to have been lifted from a textbook by Mike Koath, or Ray Bradley, and his own words. Our own words as a scientific team that published the hockey stick were being twisted in a way to try to attack us. And I think that's what was seen as most reprehensible, not just the plagiarism, but the way that some Ray Bradley's original words were actually tweaked and altered to make the science sound less solid and to imply that there's actually much greater uncertainty in this line of work than there actually is. Mike Mann's account of climate denialist attack on science and scientists is titled The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. This carefully footnoted and readable history is a great basic text to understand how humanity dithered and delayed in the face of the greatest environmental challenge of the age.