Michael Mann Responds to the Wall Street Journal's Review of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars"

“Our national dialogue about climate change remains broken. The Journal‘s decision to publish Ms. Jolis’s review has done nothing to repair it.”—Michael Mann

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal‘s review of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, by Michael Mann, was not entirely positive. The Journal did however give Michael Mann the opportunity to respond to Anne Jolis’s review.

As Mann explains in his response, the Journal‘s review exemplifies much of what has gone wrong in the discussion about climate science in the United States. Rather than being treated as scientific data, Michael Mann and other scientists’ research is being treated as a polemic. As Mann explains:

Every national academy of science in the world, including our own, agrees that climate change is due to increased fossil fuel use. Only politicians and ideologues want to argue about basic, established science.

Ms. Jolis repeats criticisms of research I conducted that showed modern-day temperatures are unusually high (“the hockey stick”). My book explains that research, its critics and independent studies that have since validated and extended its original findings. But Ms. Jolis tries to dismiss these scientific discussions as “score-settling” and “sound bites.”