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New Hockey Stick 1, Accra Climate Talks 0

The original authors of the famous hockey stick graph have taken another look at the reconstruction of temperatures over the past thousand years. The best summary of the new findings (and how they relate to both the old paper and the controversy) is at Real Climate. More links at the end of this post.

One journalist who didn’t connect the HS with its history was (thanks to the Knight Science Tracker) Louise Gray, the environment correspondent of the Telegraph. In many ways it’s, for whatever reasons the history is omitted, refreshing to read a story of this reconstruction that is not mired in a stifling debate.

Gray does quote Michael Mann on the tree ring controversy:

“Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study,” said Michael Mann, who led the research team at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. “Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record.”

But there’s no mention of the previous paper or the McIntyre criticisms and the papers that it spawned. Why not? More »

Tags: climate talks, hockey stick, UN, Yvo de Boer

Hockey Stick: the first climate change metaphor

In his Public Understanding of Science 2000 article ‘Knowledge, Ignorance and Popular Culture’, University of Toronto Professor Sheldon Ungar suggests the reason that public understanding and concern could coalesce around the ozone hole, where it has failed to do so for climate change, was in part due to two things: first, that the ozone hole argument found bridging metaphors from popular culture that were easily understood; and second, it engendered a ‘hot crisis’.

As Ungar suggests, these bridging metaphors for the ozone hole were simple and powerful:

The signal advantage of the ozone hole is that is can be encapsulated in a simple and widely familiar “penetration” metaphor. Stated succinctly, the hole leads to increased bombardment of the earth by lethal rays. The idea of rays penetrating a damaged ’shield’ meshes nicely with abiding and resonant cultural motifs, including Hollywood ‘affinities’, ranging from the Starship Enterprise to Star Wars.

Importantly, as Ungar notes, these metaphors are ‘pre-scientific’. That is, they’re kept simple, before they get into the scientific detail of the ways in which ‘ozone eater’ chemicals destroy the earth’s atmospheric protection.

In fact, these metaphors were so powerful, that both Ungar (2000) and Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003) found that many people simply considered climate change to be a sub-set problem of/caused by the ozone hole problem. In a saturated media, people hold onto the main themes and frameworks of science stories, and not much more, with which to take educated guesses at what’s going on in the world (Hargreaves et al, 2003). More »

Tags: climate change, controversy, global warming, hockey stick, MBH, McIntyre, media coverage, science