The Hockey Stick – May Change Your Mind About Climate Science

Far from being an irrelevancy, for me personally, the MBH hockey stick was absolutely vital in first extinguishing my scepticism then fiercely re-igniting it. When I first saw it, I was blown away by the clear evidence of unprecedented climate change, and I immediately told people I was no longer sceptical about climate change, a subject I had not been paying much attention to or writing about at that point, but had expressed some doubts about in print a few years before. That it had been published in Nature was good enough for me at the time. Aha, I thought, a smoking gun.

Then when I came across Steve’s work and realised how full of holes both the method and the data were, and that the IPCC was not interested in listening the criticisms, it made me doubly sceptical about not only paleo-climate data, but climate change theory generally, Nature magazine’s standards and — following the farcical enquiries — the British scientific establishment’s willingness to be bought. The hockey stick was by no means the only thing that caused me to change my mind twice, but it was the most salient.

Matt Ridley Posted May 28, 2012 at 6:38 AM | Permalink (via)