Press Release - Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines
"In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside."
—Publishers Weekly
"An important and disturbing account of the fossil-fuel industry’s well-funded public-relations campaign to sow doubt about the validity of the science of climate change...This blistering indictment of corporate-funded chicanery demands a wide audience."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
- In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the 'Hockey Stick’, a chart showing global temperature data over the past one thousand years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialisation and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.
- The Hockey Stick became a central icon in the 'climate wars’, and well-funded science deniers immediately attacked the chart and the scientists responsible for it. Yet the controversy has had little to do with the depicted temperature rise and much more with the perceived threat the graph posed to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect our environment and planet.
- Michael E Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the real story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He introduces key figures in the oil and energy industries, and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, bare-knuckled ways to cast doubt on the science. Mann concludes with an account of the 'Climategate' scandal, the 2009 hacking of climate scientists' emails. Throughout, Mann reveals the role of science deniers, abetted by an uninformed media, in once again diverting attention away from one of the central scientific and policy issues of our time.
Author: Michael E Mann is a member of the Penn State University faculty, holding joint positions in the Departments of Meteorology and Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (ESSI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). He is a cofounder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website, www.RealClimate.org. Along with other scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
“Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”(March, 2012 ISBN 9780231152549 Hbk A$42.95 NZ$61.00, Columbia University Press) is distributed in Australasia by Footprint Books. Please contact Jen Stokes for review copies or to interview the author (subject to availability) at jenst@footprint.com.au or on 02 9997 3973.
