Into the lion's den: respected climatologist survives attempted mauling unscathed
Climatologist Michael Mann is barely able to hide his incredulity as he fends off asinine attacks in Washington on March 29, 2017. Last week's Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in Washington should have been a sober discussion about the latest findings on climate change and the direction the U.S. should take towards mitigating the damage. Instead, it was about as productive as a World Wrestling Entertainment match. Lots of melodrama and smackdowns with no real winners, but one very real loser: the truth. At the bottom of the scrum was Michael Mann, a mild-mannered paleoclimatologist who works with proxy data to map historic temperatures. He and his colleagues produced a graph in 1998 that took the world by storm. It was dubbed the "hockey stick" graph because the sharp upward turn in the past century or so resembles the blade of a hockey stick. An extended version of the graph was incorporated into the Third Assessment Report by the UN's In