Global Warming’s Tree Ring Circus Brings Us The Costliest Show On Earth

If global warming isn’t the Greatest Show on Earth, it’s certainly the costliest and most bizarre.  An early act featuring a hockey stick –shaped graph published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 profoundly influenced world energy and environmental policies.

Based heavily upon data taken from tree growth rings on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, it indicated that world temperatures which had been stable for 900 years until the 20th century suddenly soared due to human fossil fuel-burning greenhouse gas emissions – at least that was the IPCC’s story.

Fallen Hot Aerialist Returns to Center Ring

Although science behind that hockey stick chart has now been thoroughly challenged, its creator, Dr. Michael Mann, is a harsh critic of skeptics who dare to question the existence of the crisis he has failed to prove. His January 15 New York Times Op/Ed column titled “If You See Something, Say Something” charges that despite an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that human-caused climate change is happening, a “virulent strain of anti-science infects the halls of Congress, the pages of a few leading newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist.”

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