As I noted in a recent article, the debate over climate science has come to resemble other angry battles in the nation’s culture wars. Much as one might dislike the idea of the earth’s future being decided in a shouting match, that seems to be the reality of the situation we are in.

Columbia University Press

That’s how Michael E. Mann puts it in a new book called “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.” Dr. Mann, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University, gives readers an inside look at a string of battles going back to 1999 in which he has played a central role. Many of these center on the famous “hockey stick,” a reconstruction by Dr. Mann and colleagues of the past thousand years of temperatures on the planet, relying on indicators like tree rings.

The graph of reconstructed temperatures is called a hockey stick because the right-hand side shows temperatures veering sharply upward in the last century. The paper and its graph, along with subsequent studies by Dr. Mann and several other scientists, suggest that this recent warming is anomalous, at least over the past millennium. Through no choice of Dr. Mann’s, the graph became a symbol of modern climate science when it was featured prominently in a 2001 report by a United Nations panel.

His book, published by Columbia University Press, is essentially about the drama that ensued after the paper was set upon by climate-change contrarians determined to undermine Dr. Mann’s conclusions. The tale features hearings in Congress, fevered denunciations of climate science as a “hoax,” stolen or leaked e-mails and one investigation after another after another. It also features mainstream scientists and leading scientific journals roused to defend Dr. Mann and the scientific method.

The book is secondarily about something else: the rise of the Internet as a vehicle for the spread of scientific misinformation. As it happens, the years when Dr. Mann was fighting these battles were also the years that public discourse of all kinds moved off the traditional news pages and into cyberspace. That offers enormous possibilities for the advancement of human knowledge, of course, but no informed reader will come away from Dr. Mann’s book feeling very happy about the way it has played out so far.

Associated PressMichael E. Mann

Important as the topic may be, I suspect this book will be more useful for insiders already familiar with the players and key events and less so for general readers. Anyone wanting a straightforward, elegantly written overview of the science might prefer Kerry Emanuel’s “What We Know About Climate Change,” which has the merit of being both complete and short. A reader seeking to understand climate politics in Washington might be better advised to pick up Eric Pooley’s “The Climate War.” (Dr. Mann, it turns out, was not the first to use martial language.)

Dr. Mann is focused instead on telling the tale of the hockey stick as he lived it. That is fair enough, but some of the discussion gets pretty arcane, as when he spends many pages on the details of the statistical arguments between him and his critics. It was probably necessary that he do so, but it will be tough going for a reader without much statistical background. Dr. Mann said he hoped that general readers would tackle the book and simply skip the parts they find too technical.

The Mann case exemplifies what to me is one of the central mysteries of climate contrarianism. Dr. Mann’s findings are but a small element in a vast body of scientific research suggesting that human society is running a serious risk with the planet. But many of the contrarians have been obsessed with the hockey stick for a decade, gnawing it over and over as a dog would a bone. They seem to think if they can disprove one small element of climate science, the whole edifice will collapse.

Unfortunately for our future, the findings of modern climate science are a great deal more robust than that. They do not depend on the validity of the hockey stick, as Dr. Mann himself makes clear. Even if they did, climate science would appear to be in pretty good shape: subsequent papers by other researchers with no stake in the original have confirmed his results. Investigations of Dr. Mann and other scientists have led pretty much nowhere, with the latest of them, by an attorney general in Virginia who is a climate contrarian, effectively shut down by that state’s Supreme Court last week.

Still, the climate wars go on, and perhaps they will for as long as the fossil-fuel industry sees political delay as being in its interests.

“The decades of delay in reducing carbon emissions have already incurred a very real cost to humanity and our environment,” Dr. Mann writes. “Each year that emissions reductions are delayed, it becomes increasingly difficult to stabilize CO2 concentrations below safe levels.”