RIP Jerry Mahlman: Mann claimed that Mahlman coined the term "hockey stick" "to simply point how dramatic the 20th century warming is relative to the longer-term variability"; Revkin says that Mahlman saw global warming evidence as "subtle and complex"

Revkin:  Sad to learn Jerry Mahlman, great @NOAA climate...

Sad to learn Jerry Mahlman, great @NOAA climate scientist, communicator and human being, died 11/28 after long Alzheimer’s struggle.

He said this to me in 2000 about the challenge of acting on greenhouse-driven global warming:

The evidence is subtle and complex, and probably will be so for a long time to come, said Jerry D. Mahlman, who is retiring as director of the federal Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. ”This is going to be incremental forever,” he said.

ClimateGate email 3612

At 08:06 20/05/2004 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote: Hi Peter, Phil,
No, no, we have to set the record straight! It was Jerry Mahlman who coined the term, and in a complimentary (not insulting) way, several years ago. I think he used this term to simply point how dramatic the 20th century warming is relative to the longer-term variability.
We have to make sure we don't let the climate change denialists co-opt the term. It should be "re-claimed", so to speak...