I was interested in variations in temperatures of the oceans over the past millennium. But there are no records of these changes so I had to find proxy measures: coral growth, ice cores and tree rings.

In the draft plan, we're looking at recycling 20 percent of our garbage by 2010.

There is no bird flu in commercial stocks.

The trouble is that the hockey stick graph become an icon and deniers reckoned if they could smash the icon, the whole concept of global warming would be destroyed with it.

Bring down Mike Mann and we can bring down the IPCC, they reckoned. It is a classic technique for the deniers movement, I have discovered, and I don't mean only those who reject the idea of global warming but those who insist that smoking doesn't cause cancer or that industrial pollution isn't linked to acid rain.

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works.

I was interested in variations in temperatures of the oceans over the past millennium. But there are no records of these changes so I had to find proxy measures: coral growth, ice cores and tree rings.