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In the first IPCC Assessment Report, a simple schematic diagram of the last thousand years of temperature change was presented. It showed a clear Medieval Warm Period warmer than the late twentieth century, followed by the cooler centuries of the Little Ice Age, then a modest recovery.

That diagram was never claimed to be a formal multi-proxy statistical reconstruction with error bars. It was an expert synthesis, drawn largely from the work of Hubert Lamb and his colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit. Lamb had assembled the available evidence of the time — chronicles, grain prices, glacier advances and retreats, pollen records, early instrumental data and a limited number of proxy series — into a qualitative picture of climate history, especially for the British Isles and western Europe. It reflected the consensus among historical climatologists and geographers in the 1980s.

By the third IPCC Assessment Report, published a decade later, the picture had changed dramatically. The same Cambridge University Press imprint now featured the ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Pre-industrial centuries were flattened into a relatively level shaft; the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age largely disappeared; and the late-twentieth-century rise became a sharp, anomalous blade.

To be sure, the hockey stick is an entirely contrived, statistical multi-proxy product; it is an invention.

In my most recent Substack I explain how it has been successfully implanted, as a new myth, into our collective unconscious.  (You can read the long article by clicking here; all my Substack goes behind a paywall two weeks after it is published.)

Individual temperature proxies — tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores and the rest — never ever look like a hockey stick without remodelling. The distinctive shape emerges only after the data are combined through particular choices of standardisation, principal-component analysis and weighting, and on it goes etcetera, etcetera.

A clear illustration is the long bristlecone-pine ring-width series from the White Mountains of California. The same region supplied chronologies that formed part of the multi-proxy network used in the original Mann et al. reconstructions. Yet when the raw data are plotted as twenty-year averages (as Hubert Lamb himself published them in Climate, History and the Modern World, 1982), they show large multi-century swings, not a flat shaft ending in a sharp modern blade.

The growth-ring record itself contains substantial low-frequency variability. The hockey-stick form appears only after statistical processing that preferentially weights series showing a twentieth-century uptick, etcetera. Subsequent scrutiny has shown that the North American contribution to the original reconstruction was dominated by a small number of these bristlecone and foxtail series. When those series are down-weighted or removed, or when conventional centred, more variability reappears in the earlier centuries.

To be clear, it is all invented, it is junk science: the hockey stick picture that has been promoted by the IPCC over the years.  And, as I explain at my most recent Substack, most people don’t want to know this.  At least not within my culture where those of us who refuse to accept the lies are shamed endlessly whenever we venture into so-called polite society with this opinion.

We are expected to be silent on this issue, as I was told, most recently again by my little brother, that I am not to discuss these things with him.

To be clear I didn’t initiate any such discussion.  I heard from him long ago that he didn’t like me even talking about my rainfall forecasting, not even with Noel Shipp at my father’s eighty birthday.  He came over and told the both of us that the weather, I am paraphrasing, was not a topic for that day.   Of course my mother is partly to blame for all of this.  She has always favoured her sons, and still expects that their opinions on any number of topics be held in high regard even if it is nonsense.   Now she has thrown her lot in with my little brother, moving to Cairns, and tells me endlessly about how wonderful he is and how when any other member of the family visit, they stay with him, and what lovely barbecues he puts on. But not for me.  I have always been a ‘trouble’, and as I grow older it doesn’t matter if I keep my mouth firmly shut, the legacy of my naturally contrarian approach to most everything has only become a more distasteful memory to such people as we have all aged.

Once upon a time I accepted such requests for the most part, but still I was not invited to his barbecues or more recently to even have a cup of tea. But going forward I can see that this is a form of abuse and it means that the lies are never challenged, certainly not in front of the grandchildren.

Accepting that I am not to discuss such issues would, in effect, be conceding one or more of three things: that there is something shameful about the topic or about holding a dissenting view of it; that the subject is irrelevant to any serious conversation between adults; or that it is simply too difficult for meaningful discussion among family members who otherwise share a lifetime of experiences.

None of those concessions feels honest. The charts above — the 1990 schematic, the 2001 hockey stick, and the raw bristlecone series that fed into the latter — are public, peer-reviewed, and open to ordinary scrutiny. They do not require specialised credentials to examine side by side.

Yet the price of examining them, or of noting the methodological shift between the first two, has become social exclusion within my own family. That is how effectively a manufactured picture can operate: not by winning any technical argument, but by making dissent feel, to those who accept the picture, like a breach of ordinary civility.

For sure, I do not expect everyone to agree with me.

But as I spend hours listening to my mother, and others, over the years, on topics of marginal interest to me politely and turning over what they say to me with some curiosity, I now expect that they will afford me some time on this issue that is of such interest (and concern) to me.

Of the three reasons I suggest above, for preventing discussion of this topic, it is almost certainly the first — the implication of shame — that dominates.

Once a scientific question has been moralised, disagreement is no longer treated as a difference of evidence or interpretation; it is experienced as a character defect or a social offence.

The demand for silence therefore functions less as a practical request for family harmony and more as a requirement that the dissenting view be treated as something that ought to remain private.

That is my considered opinion.  And it accords with propaganda expert Walter Lippmann’s thesis: the simplified picture has acquired emotional charge; protecting it becomes more important than testing it, even among people who share decades of ordinary affection or not.

Agreeing to the condition that I not raise this issue of climate change because I hold a detested view (certainly it is not contested in public) would amount to accepting that charge of impropriety, which is precisely why the refusal to discuss feels so absolute to me.  And so, in the end, true to type I will not be shamed.  I will remain, as my mother has always characterised me: a trouble.

Psychology is clear that shame held internally is corrosive to mental health. For that reason, and as I do have a tendency to repeat myself, I will no longer keep private the attempts to shame me into silence on this subject.

Going forward I will share with readers on Substack, Facebook and at this blog those occasions when people attempt to impose that silence, and I will explain why I regard the tactic as wrong.

Indeed, my little brother, Jim Turnour, who is a former Labor politician and continues to have a public profile and holds positions of influence and responsibility within the Australian community, should be prepared to sit down with me at least once and hear what I have to say on this topic.  That he refuses to do this, well the shame going forward, I will suggest, is not with me, it is with him and every other person who attempts to close down reasonable discussion about such issues that are of increasing national importance.  For sure, they underpin most of the irrational policies resulting in the mandated energy transition and the associated trillion dollar Net Zero industry.