Michael E. Mann – The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012)

Every single person who has ever criticized Michael Mann is a henchman of the fossil industry, except maybe a few people on the internet, who are just very stupid. (Also, McKitrick and McIntyre’s criticism of the hockey stick was based on an incorrect use of principal components analysis, the results have been verified a dozen times, with different data records and statistical methods, climate science doesn’t stand or fall on temperature proxies, and ClimateGate showed only that scientists are human, and sometimes use terminology that sounds scary to lay people.)

Recommended: Reluctantly. Mann is an easy person to dislike. He questions the financial motives of all his critics, then attacks them for using ad hominem arguments. Could somebody please explain to him what ad hominem means? But if you can overlook the paranoia and self pity, the science and science history parts are good. He is open about his uncertainty, and backs up his confidence with strong arguments. I’ve suspected that ClimateGate and the hockey stick controversy was exaggerated by the skeptics, and this book confirms that, and strengthens my respect for climate scientists like Mann. But his trench war style of rhetorics is a disaster. What, does he think this style has been so successful in American politics that it should now also be used to settle the climate debate? Does he think “Republicans are morons”-type arguments are the road to bipartisan agreements? Please lock him up in a laboratory, before he makes it worse.