Climate: Professional Climate Change Deniers' Crusade Continues

Books such as Merchants of Doubt by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have detailed how front groups for the fossil-fuel industry have been waging an orchestrated, well-funded campaign against climate science and climate scientists for more than two decades.

So why the ongoing attacks against me [Michael Mann] by Cuccinelli and other groups and individuals doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry? Undoubtedly, it is because of the prominent role our now decade-old "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperature trends has played in public discourse on climate change. The graphic, which I helped to create while I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts, tells a simple story: that the warming of recent decades is unprecedented in at least a millennium. This has made it a compelling icon in the climate change debate. It has also made the graphic a compelling target for climate change deniers, who believe that they can discredit all climate science by undermining the credibility of this one graphic.

The problem for them, however, is that dozens of groups, using different statistical methods, different data sources, and so on, have all come to the same conclusion as our study: recent warming is anomalous in a long-term context. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 report extended the period of warming back even further to at least the past 1300 years.

Moreover, the case for human influence on climate change hardly rests on our palaeoclimate research, or even on the entire field of palaeoclimatology. It is based, instead, on multiple lines of evidence and, in particular, the match between modern observations and the predictions of simulations using climate models.

For more, see Professional Climate Change Deniers' Crusade Continues by Michael Mann, November 2, 2010 at NewScientist.