2. The Hockey Stick
Uncharted with Hannah Fry
BBC
4.8 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1998, the climate scientist Michael Mann published a simple graph shaped like an ice hockey stick: a long straight line which curves suddenly upward at the end. It was based on decades of intrepid work by scientists around the world. But the line held a stark warning. For Michael, notoriety, abuse and a global battle over the reality of climate change followed. Hannah Fry tells the remarkable story of the people behind the hockey stick: the scientists who scaled mountains and braved oceans in search of evidence, and the dramatic fallout when the world saw what they had found.
Episode Producer: Ilan Goodman Sound Design: Jon Nicholls Story Editor: John Yorke
A series for Radio 4 by BBC Science in Cardiff.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | I'm Hannah Fry, a mathematician who studies patterns in human behaviour. |
| 0:10.3 | And from BBC Radio 4, this is uncharted, tales of data and discovery. |
| 0:16.2 | This is a series about how numbers and graphs can help you to map the invisible, |
| 0:22.5 | about how plots can be rich with hidden depths and unheard stories, and about how sometimes if you know where to look, |
| 0:28.9 | there is mystery and drama and intrigue to be found, all concealed within a few simple lines on a page. |
| 0:42.3 | The year is 2009. A group of hackers have spotted a weakness in an unsuspecting server within the University of East Anglia. |
| 0:52.3 | While the oblivious academics were going about their business, |
| 0:56.9 | a treasure trove of their emails were being siphoned away, |
| 1:00.7 | leaked out from the university system, |
| 1:03.1 | and unleashed around the world via a clandestine Russian server. |
| 1:08.6 | Of the emails that were featured in the release, many of them were emails to me or from me. |
| 1:15.2 | And it became pretty obvious to me that I was probably the primary target. |
| 1:21.1 | That is the voice of Michael Mann, one of the scientists at the center of the scandal. |
| 1:26.8 | Back then, he was an associate professor of meteorology, |
| 1:30.3 | working on a case of international significance. |
| 1:33.9 | Soon enough, extracts of the stolen emails started to pop up in right-wing news websites. |
| 1:40.6 | And when looked at under the harsh glare of public scrutiny, |
| 1:44.1 | they revealed what appeared to be some quite damning evidence. and when looked at under the harsh glare of public scrutiny, |
| 1:48.1 | they revealed what appeared to be some quite damning evidence. |
| 1:52.3 | The headlines this morning, the UN says it will investigate claims that British experts manipulated scientific data about the effects of... |
| 1:56.3 | New developments today involving those hacked emails from Britain suggesting scientists are fudging data. |
... |
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