Progressive ideology has solidly controlled environmental science at least since the publication of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962. But, somehow, one of the environmental sciences — climatology — managed to escape ideological pollution for some years. This brief liberty for climatology likely occurred because the profession was populated with field scientists, who brought a real-world perspective that at least balanced out more theoretical and ideological views.
Today, though, progressivism has the upper hand here too, and it is dictating what is and is not acceptable, especially in the academic arena of atmospheric science. A good example of this can be found in “the Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines” by Dr. Michael E. Mann, a Penn State University professor and director of the university’s Earth System Science Center.
The book chronicles the emergence and fame of the “hockey-stick graph” that was so prominently displayed in the U.N.’s 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report summary document for policymakers.
The hockey-stick graph usurped the traditional, apolitical climate graph of Earth’s recent temperature changes. The traditional graph showed dramatic warming during a “medieval warm period” (about 950 to 1250 A.D.) and distinct cooling during a “little ice age” (about 1400 to 1850 A.D.). However, the hockey-stick shaped graph displayed temperatures over the past several hundred years fluctuating only a little from year to year (the relatively flat handle of the hockey stick) until the 1900s when the temperatures began to rise dramatically (the blade of the stick). This graph helped to convince many in government that human carbon emissions were behind an unprecedented increase in global temperatures and that drastic, immediate action was necessary to once again save the planet. The graph’s construction was challenged by scientists and statisticians who had a very different and also valid view of climate data selection and analysis.
Mann uses the book’s peer-reviewed science references to defend his data selection and graphing techniques, as well as many reasoned, passionate arguments. It will be frequently quoted to support the current status quo in the academic world of climate science. But the book still presents a limited perspective based on progressive groupthink.
Dr. Mann relies substantially on slanted sources such as Media Transparency (part of the Media Matters for America action network “dedicated to analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation”), DeSmogBlog.com, Sourcewatch.org, the Union of Concerned Scientists (a very politically active group), the Government Accountability Project, the Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Dr. Mann also seems to relish the pejorative phrase “climate change denier” to describe his challengers. As the professor himself observes in a recent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, the denier label is an attempt to “politically pigeonhole” those who are not convinced of his position on the merits. This is an ideological mode of argument, not a scientific one. Such rhetoric also betrays an inability on the author’s part to learn from his own unfortunate experience of others trying to silence his views.
The book’s unintentionally arrogant tone is perhaps a hint as to what irritates the masses about ex cathedra climate science proclamations. Furthermore, the book promises that a new Climate Science Rapid Response Team will be summoned to trample any threat to the institutional ideology posed by the many skeptical atmospheric scientists practicing in the real world.
These real-world meteorologists and climatologists know that the climate system is too complex for global outlooks into the decades ahead. They strongly suspect that man-made carbon dioxide is far less determinative of climate change than the academics say it is. After all, what really regulates climate in nature is water in all its forms — as solid in ice sheets, cloud crystals and snow; liquid in cloud droplets and oceans; and vapor in ambient air.
In the long run, vain progressive ideology is no match for natural forces.
Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist with more than 30 years of experience in the atmospheric-science field. He specializes in air-quality issues.
