What have we done?

It was April 11, 2014, and the McGill University press release went online at 1:30 in the afternoon. Although I’d published many articles, they were on fundamental geoscience; the release summarized the first one that had significant social and political consequences. Its title, “Scaling Fluctuation Analysis and Statistical Hypothesis Testing of Anthropogenic Warming,” was arcane, but the release was clear enough: “Statistical analysis rules out natural- warming hypothesis with more than 99% certainty” (the article, published in Climate Dynamics, is hereafter referred to as CD). It had been fifteen months since the original submission went to peer review, but now the pace picked up dramatically. Within hours, the tone was set by the skeptic majordomo Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchely, who displayed his Oxbridge classics erudition by deliciously qualifying the paper as a “mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness.” Three days later, with the release getting 12,000 hits per day, the “Friends of Science” sent an aggressive missive to the McGill chancellor asking that it be removed from McGill’s site. The Calgary- based group with its Orwellian name was set up in 2002 to promote the theory that “The sun is the driver of climate change. Not you. Not CO2.” (Fig. 6.1). One could understand their thunder. Rather than trying to prove that the warming was anthropogenic— something that is impossible to do “beyond reasonable doubt”— the new paper closed the debate2 by doing something far simpler: by disproving the “Friends” Giant Natural Fluctuation (GNF) hypothesis. If we exclude either divine or extraterrestrial intervention, then the warming is natural or it is human; there is no third alternative. The skeptics were stuck. To add insult to injury, their prepackaged sermons on the inadequacies of computer models or their speculations about solar variability were irrelevant. Provoked by the media attention and several Op- Eds in the hours, days, and weeks that followed, in email, blogs, and Twitter, I was treated to a deluge of abuse: “atheist,” “Marxist,” “hippy name,” and so on— everything, it seemed, short of death threats.