and told them to have “thick skins.” Barton’s staff also provided the group with reams of reading material—particularly troubling, considering that none of the statisticians, she said, had “any real expertise in paleoclimate reconstruction.” Wegman’s group also consulted McIntyre in its evaluation of Mann’s study, but it never reached out to Mann.
When it was released in July 2006, the Wegman report (PDF) essentially agreed with McIntyre, citing statistical problems with the hockey stick and accusing climate scientists of uncritically reinforcing each other’s work. Years later, Barton and other skeptics still tout the document as proof that the hockey stick is broken (even though GMU is currently investigating allegations that Wegman may have lifted portions of the report from a previously published book).
Meanwhile, about five months after Barton commissioned Wegman for the report, the House Committee on Science asked (PDF) the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a formal report on the hockey stick. The review concluded (PDF) that while some uncertainties “have been underestimated,” there was nevertheless “an array of evidence” supporting the main conclusion of Mann’s work.
* Clarification: The original Wall Street Journal article referred to a report by researcher Hans von Storch, not McIntyre’s specifically: “Reports such as [von Storch’s] helped to reopen the debate, even to outsiders.”
The fights over the hockey stick eventually faded from the headlines, but the data war raged on. McIntyre turned his attention to pursuing the data that climate scientists had drawn from to conclude that the planet is drastically warming. He was particularly interested in East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, keepers of one of the most complete sets of temperature records in the world. He asked the unit for raw data, but was rebuffed. “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone,” CRU head Phil Jones wrote to Mann in February 2005. He believed that if McIntyre found an error, no matter how minor, the skeptics would have a field day.
Jones’ fears were not off-base. In August 2007, McIntyre discovered an error in NASA’s calculation of how the average temperature for a given year varies from the historical average: US temperatures between 2000 and 2006 had been reported (PDF) as roughly a sixth of a degree higher than they actually were. Separately, NASA found during its regular updating that 1934 had pulled slightly ahead of 1998 as the hottest year on record to that point (2005 and 2010 have since superseded them). The story was all over the right-wing talk circuit. “The man-made global warming is inside NASA,” Rush Limbaugh declared. “The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data.”
McIntyre and others kept at it. In 2008, he sought raw data and email correspondence from Benjamin Santer, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Santer refused, arguing that the data were already publicly available. In a letter to a fellow scientist he vented that the time-consuming request was part of “a calculated strategy to divert my attention and focus away from research.” He called McIntyre “the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science,” continuing, “We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an ‘audit’ by Steven [sic] McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues.”
In September 2009, RealClimate, a blog launched by Mann and other scientists to fight back against skeptics, weighed in. Several of the blog’s contributors drafted a public statement about what they saw as a pattern: “An unverified accusation of malfeasance is made based on nothing, and it is instantly ‘telegraphed’ across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to anything ‘hockey-stick’ shaped and any and all scientists, even those not even tangentially related. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally