Quotes of the Day: Michael Mann

10 February, 2012 by

Quote of the Day

Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann has a new book out, the title of which, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines“, hints at the valiant warrior for truth, battling against the evil enemy (sceptics). As we know, this is standard fare for alarmists, donning the mantle of victimhood at the drop of an FOI request.

But this quote takes the biscuit:

“Perhaps “climategate” was the moment when the climate change denial movement conceded the legitimate debate, choosing instead to double down on smear and disinformation, a tacit acceptance that an honest, science-based case for denying the reality of human-caused climate change and the threat it presents could no longer be made.”

Wow, this guy’s been hanging around with trees for too long. And this as well:

“In any case, there is no evidence that Jones actually deleted any e-mails. Nor is there any evidence of any impropriety in his e-mails.”

And they accuse the sceptics of being delusional… Thanks to Tom Nelson for the quotes.

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Mann's "dirty laundry" – first official email release from UVA

27 January, 2012 by

Dirty laundry finally being aired in public

If you have been reading the full collection of 5000+ Climategate 1 and 2 emails, not much of this will be new, however, the fact that an organisation has succeeded in obtaining the release of a selection of these emails through an FOI process must bode well for the release of the remainder.

From the press release:

The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”.

PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research.

In PE-22, Mann alludes to his “dirty laundry” which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results.

PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee — impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA — to “treat this email as confidential” though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author’s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann’s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA.

These emails, if honestly representative of the entire collection, do not make Virginians proud of having paid Mann’s salary.

“ATI, like Greenpeace and its peers, as well as the media, is committed to using transparency laws to make science and government policy open to the citizens who underwrite it, to the exclusion of properly exempt information such as proprietary material,” said Chris Horner, ATI’s Director of Litigation. “Universities are routinely asked to produce emails under FOIA, and most do so quickly. This has recently been proved true at another Virginia university when the media sought emails of a Mann critic. Why UVA wishes to boast of such outlier status within the academic community makes one ask, ‘what is it they are trying to hide?’” (source, where you can also download the emails)

What indeed. It looks increasingly likely that we will eventually find out.

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Zombie science: the Hockey Stick lives!

21 June, 2011 by

No matter how many times it’s killed off, it keeps coming back from the dead. Now it’s Mann-made sea level rise, to go with Mann-made temperature rise:

Return of “The Stick”

See Watts Up With That? for the full press release.

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Penn State whitewash clears Michael Mann

3 July, 2010 by

Squeaky clean?

Penn State knows how to look after its own. Avoiding difficult questions and clearing Michael Mann of anything. And this is just the latest in a string of so-called investigations into dodgy practices exposed by Climategate, all of which have, amazingly, found nothing wrong! How’s that for consistency?

The ABC gleefully reports:

American climate change scientist Michael Mann has been cleared of manipulating his research findings.

The allegations arose in the ‘climategate’ scandal which erupted when emails between Dr Mann and other scientists were taken [er, leaked, more likely] from a computer at the University of East Anglia in Britain and posted on the internet.

The Pennsylvania State University findings follow two other investigations in Britain effectively exonerating climate scientists accused of misconduct. [Whitewash, whitewash, whitewash]

Dr Mann’s data adjustment procedures in particular were called into question when private email messages between him other scientists were posted on the internet.

The Pennsylvania university received a number of complaints about its professor’s conduct and it launched two separate investigations in response.

They looked broadly at whether Dr Mann had falsified, suppressed or destroyed data, or deviated from accepted research practices.

In a surprising display of balance, however, the ABC also quotes a view critical of the investigation:

But John Roskam, executive director of the Melbourne-based free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, says questions still remain over Dr Mann’s research.

“This was not an independent review – this was effectively the university examining itself and the result is entirely predictable,” he said.

“The university was highly unlikely to be critical of one of its most high-profile academics who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants.”

Mr Roskam says the four separate ‘climategate’ inquiries – two in Britain and now two in the US – are all compromised.

“The reviews did not answer the questions about why data was missing; why data was not shared; why there hasn’t been a full and open, transparent process,” he said.

“Unfortunately many people still think that these reviews and processes are part of a general lack of transparency about the whole climate change debate.” (source)

And Marc Morano sums up the whole shabby affair:

This is not surprising that Mann’s own university circled the wagons and narrowed the focus of its own investigation to declare him ethical.

‘The fact that the investigation cited Mann’s ‘level of success in proposing research and obtaining funding’ as some sort of proof that he was meeting the ‘highest standards’, tells you that Mann is considered a sacred funding cash cow. At the height of his financial career, similar sentiments could have been said about Bernie Madoff.

Mann has become the posterboy of the corrupt and disgraced climate science echo chamber. No university whitewash investigation will change that simple reality.’ (source)

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Alarmists still desperate to link malaria to climate change

23 May, 2010 by

Annoying little insect … and a mosquito

And the latest attempt is likely to be by none other than (drum roll please) Professor Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann:

Many researchers have predicted that rising temperatures will cause malaria to expand its range and intensify in its current strongholds. But unlike usual models, which aim to predict how climate change will affect malaria in the future, researchers looked at how warming affected the disease throughout the last century.

They used a recent epidemiological map of the global distribution of the major malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and compared this with historical data on malaria’s prevalence in the 1900s.

The researchers — whose work was published in Nature yesterday (20 May) — found that despite global warming, the prevalence of malaria decreased, which they attribute to disease and mosquito control programmes.

Or so you would think. But Matthew Thomas thinks differently. Matthew Thomas said that the study “plays down the potential importance of climate [change]”.

Who is Matthew Thomas? He is a researcher at… Penn State. Matthew Thomas is a researcher… at Penn State… who has just won a $1.8 million grant to study the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases. Think he has a dog in this hunt?

Ask his co-investigator on the project. Michael Mann…

Where do we ask for a refund?

Read it here.

And more from John O’Sullivan here.

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US: Michael Mann received $500k economic stimulus funds

21 January, 2010 by

Given up counting tree rings - now counting dollars instead

<sarc> Gee, giving money to a discredited climate alarmist. That’s really going to help the US economy. </sarc> But that’s what happened, and the mainstream media resolutely ignored it (except for the ever-reliable WSJ):

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

With this in mind, NCPPR issued a press release Thursday asking for these funds to be returned:

In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

“It’s outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he’s under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury,” said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind’s activities are causing global warming. […]

The $541,184 grant is for three years and was initiated in June 2009.

And Mann’s university, Penn State was only last week granted a whopping $1.9 million in stimulus funds. As the NCPPR’s Deneen Borelli says:

It’s no wonder that Obama’s stimulus plan is failing to produce jobs. Taxpayer dollars aren’t being used in the ways most likely to spur job creation. The stimulus was not sold to the public as a way to reward a loyalist in the climate change debate. Nor was the stimulus sold as a way to promote the Obama Administration’s position on the global warming theory…As is often the case, political considerations corrupt the distribution of government funds.

Read it here. (h/t Tom S)

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UPDATED: CRU emails disclosed

20 November, 2009 by

Hadley Centre - what's been going on here?

Hadley Centre - what's been going on here?

Apparently a huge quantity of highly sensitive emails and data have been “hacked” from the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. I haven’t yet had a chance to consider any of them in detail. I am not publishing anything until we know more clearly what their precise legal status is.

However, I have read some of them and if they are real and not fake, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause.

Check out my other posts on this:

Also check out Anthony Watts’ post here.

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