Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Michael Mann's research in climate change is important, well respected in the scientific community, and it is well done. There is no valid reason to criticize the man for his science. The Hockey Stick Wars is actually quite well written, it is honest, well documented, straight forward, and conveys a number of different messages. One person might like the book better than another, but there is no valid reason to trash it, because it really is not a bad book. Nonetheless, you will see among the reviews written here on this site (unless our honorable proprietor at Amazon decide to clean it up) a frenzy of hate directed at Dr. Mann and his book, at science in general, and at the concept that we need to care about our planet. And that is, indeed, one of the messages of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars." I am a writer and a scientist and I write about global warming, and when I do, I receive some emails that threaten my family and myself (though those are comparatively rare) and many emails and comments on my blogs that are horribly obnoxious, accusatory, offensive, and always wrong. So do all of the people even marginally involved in climate science or related science journalism. And most of this is an attempt by climate change denialists to Hide the Incline (in temperatures) by making this into a war between two sides, one of which is based in good science and the other based in ... well, nothing substantial. Mann talks about the history of climate science, the problem of studying long term change in a noisy system like the Earth's climate, and about the emergence of the hockey stick as a fact of science. One of the big problems in climate science is that we have observed change over time with our best instruments for a very short period of time; Satellites go back a few decades, but enough of the right kind of satellites cover even less time, and what is really needed is a few centuries to answer basic questions about medium term variation, and many tens of thousands of years to answer questions about global evolution of climate. We do have data running back millions of years at a coarse level, several hundred thousands years at a very fine level, thanks to the paleoclimate record, and Mann talks about how this evidence has been brought to bear on the question of what will happen to climate over the next several decades. Mann does not shy away from the science in this book. In fact, I'd say that the reader has to pay attention, and benefits from tracking the footnotes as one goes along. Mann integrates the process of increasingly understanding the science with the process of developing policy and bringing the scientific findings to the public arena. He talks about science denialism and where climate science denialism comes from and how it relates to other forms of science denialism, and the relationship between the denialist phenomenon and changes in media and journalism over the last two decades. And, one of the most interesting chapters and the one you will want to read over again and tell your friends to read is "Climategate: The Real Story" in which Michael Mann lays out the events as they actually happened, and the meaning, or in some cases, lack of meaning of those events. It is a horrid, ugly story, and like a train wreck you will not be able to turn away. You will see the frenzy of hate that is science denialism described in Mann's book, you'll see it in the form of bogus reviews of his book, you'll even see it in the comments on any review that is positive. The denialists appear to have little else to do with their time but to make a nuisance of themselves, and sufficiently little respect for their fellow human to be able to restrain themselves. Read the book!