Malfeasance and Corruption

Mary Bolton was my 5th-grade teacher. As I recall, rather than a dress, Mrs. Bolton usually wore a skirt, many of them a shade of lighter gray lengthened to well belowthe knee. This was usually accompanied by a formal contrasting blouse. She always had perfectly coiffed, graying hair. Her lengthy teeth were slightly bucked, and the right front tooth, at its bottom, grew slightly over the top of the left.

Every day after lunch, she spent 30 minutes reading a book to us. I met Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, and the Wizard of Oz during that time. Mary Bolton would walk slowly around the classroom as she read. Most students were hypnotically mesmerized by her reading and typically whimpered and moaned for more when she stopped. As she was passing my area of the room, she would stealthily place a large brown envelope on my desk. It was relatively easy to maintain secrecy since I had the last desk in the first row of 6.

I would open the top of my desk just slightly and carefully slip the envelope into it. That evening I would open the envelope and shortly thereafter be reading either The Hockey News newspaper or Sports Illustrated – Hockey Edition. Mrs. Bolton was actually just the courier. It was her husband Tom that was sending the papers and the much-prized magazine - it was in color. At a gold mine, Tom was my father’s foreman. Tom Bolton had learned enough Finnish during his tenure at the mines that as a shift foreman he would supervise the Finns, many of whom were timber men – these were crews that used heavy timbers to buttress various underground diggings

Advancing into the 8th grade, I was happy to learn that Mary Bolton, who retired after teaching our 5th-grade class, had returned to teach us during the morning. The school’s principal taught us in the afternoon - he assured me more than once I wouldn’t amount to anything, although I believe it was said as a prod. While I didn’t expect further deliveries of hockey materials, Mary Bolton was just a good-hearted teacher and I confess my favorite including all of the instructors in both elementary and high school.

Unlike most school curriculums in the United States, at that time certainly, Canadian studies included world history, geography, and social studies. Mary Bolton spent a lot of time teaching about the Medieval Warm Period (WMP). She would tell us about the adventures of Vikings, show us pictures, paintings, and artifacts, and explain how much warmer Greenland and the area around Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic were during that specific epoch. Baffin Island is Canada’s largest Island at about 1.5 times the size of Montana. Baffin Island holds the territorial capital of Nunavut called Igaluit – it was called Frobisher Bay during my time in school.

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During the frigid and frosty winters of my youth in the north of Ontario, Canada warm periods seemed so wistful and full of fun.

Thus, it was quite a shock when in 1999 a professor from the University of Virginia released the results of a research study of temperatures using proxy data collected from tree rings, ice cores, corals, and lake sediments. The study concluded that the Medieval Warm Period was not a reality, never happened, and made its primary author and researcher an instant climate change celebrity. Because of the shape of the graph, it became known as the Hockey Stick Temperature Graph (HSTG). After using the MWP in their reports for previous years, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the year 2001 switched to the HSTG.

Until then climatologists, historians, and historical sociologists based on archeology, old tax documentation, books, paintings, artifacts, structures, and other items maintained that the Medieval Warm Period had temperatures higher than that of the present day. If it was all a lie then the climate change advocacy had a much stronger case for advancing their conviction of fossil fuels changing the climate.

Steve McIntyre, a Toronto, Ontario mathematician employed in the mining exploration industry was mystified by the numbers in the HSTG and contacted Professor Ross McKittrick of the University of Guelph. Questioning the mathematics behind the graph, the two together set to work and by 2003 fully discredited its validity. Further uncovered, was Mann’s trick which he bragged about in emails that became known as “Climategate” in 2009. From 1900 to current, McIntyre and McKittrick’s work illustrated that the temperatures from the proxies should have gone down, but Mann’s graph showed the temperatures going up. Mann’s trick was after using proxies for most of the graph, he concluded the graph with actual temperature measurements – essentially the resolve of corruptive and scandalous apples and oranges. In any case, request after request, including a Freedom of Information (FOIA) demand for Mann’s raw data, since the University of Virginia is a public institution, was met with continuous denials. Many articles chronicle the efforts of McIntyre and McKittrick, one of which I link here.

In a case of twisted irony, Michael Mann filed a defamation suit against two other Canadians - climatologist Tim Ball and author Mark Steyn. In both cases, Mann was asked to prove the defamation by providing the data for the HSTG. During that time Steyn doubled down on his criticism writing a book about Mann entitled, “A Disgrace to the Profession”. After years and years of neglecting the request for data, despite court orders to do so, both suits were dismissed. While the court ordered Mann to compensate Ball for legal fees, he never did and Tim Ball passed away this past September effectively broke.

This episode simply goes to show the malfeasance and corruption climate advocacy will go to win a political battle. It’s a shameless and audacious crime.

I dedicate this piece to the late Mary Bolton - a wonderful teacher, a fabulous human, and a stoic truth-teller.