May 11

Michael Mann, inventor of the global warming Hockey Stick, to give free lecture in Oregon tonight

By Klockarman Michael Mann, hockey stick No Comments »

Here in Oregon (where we’re thick with Warmers) Michael Mann probably figures that he will be welcomed as a planet redeeming hero.  But, there is a healthy and growing group of skeptics here who are more likely to welcome the can’t-take-a-joke, you-can-have-my-Hockey-Stick-when-you-pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-fingers kind of guy Mann really is with some very inconvenient questions.

Victoria Taft has details:

I’ll bet he figured that in Oregon no one would question his doomsaying climactic predictions—except people who’d actually kept pace with CLIMATE GATE of which Mr Mann was a key participant.

Michael Mann, a climatologist and a leading figure in research on climate change, will speak on “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming” Tuesday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium in Melrose Hall.

The free lecture is sponsored by the Jane Claire Dirks Edmunds Fund.

Mann’s recent book “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming” (2008) has been called a “straight-forward guide to how scientists, economists and engineers really understand the problem of global warming. The IPCC has been issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable to the general public who may still question the validity of climate change.”

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Apr 20

Can’t take a joke: Michael Mann, key Climategate figure and inventor of the Hockey Stick, threatens lawsuit over satirical YouTube video ‘Hide the Decline’

By Klockarman Climategate, Michael Mann, Minnesotans for Global Warming 2 Comments »

Michael Mann:

“Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Chronic doom peddler Paul Ehrlich pretty much told his fellow alarmists to “man up” when he said:

“Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”

But, when Ehrlich said that I really thought he meant attacking skeptical scientists on the science, not threatening a lawsuit over a joke video.

Man up, Mike!

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Feb 03

Penn State: ‘further investigation warranted’ into Climategate’s Michael Mann

By Klockarman Climategate, Michael Mann No Comments »

Nothing definitive from Penn State, but my take is that if they were going to sweep Michael Mann’s role in Climategate under the rug, they wouldn’t bother with continuing the investigation.

University Park, Pa. — An internal inquiry by Penn State into the research and scholarly activities of a well-known climate scientist will move into the investigatory stage, which is the next step in the University’s process for reviewing research conduct.

A University committee has concluded its inquiry into allegations of research impropriety that were leveled in November against Professor Michael Mann, after information contained in a collection of stolen e-mails was revealed. More than a thousand e-mails are reported to have been “hacked” from computer servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, one of the main repositories of information about climate change.

During the inquiry, all relevant e-mails pertaining to Mann or his work were reviewed, as well as related journal articles, reports and additional information. The committee followed a well-established University policy during the inquiry (http://guru.psu.edu/policies/ra10.html ).

In looking at four possible allegations of research misconduct, the committee determined that further investigation is warranted for one of those allegations. The recommended investigation will focus on determining if Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” A full report (http://www.research.psu.edu/orp) concerning the allegations and the findings of the inquiry committee has been submitted.

Hat tip: Matt Dempsey

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Jan 14

Shovel ready job? Shoveling BS earns Climategate’s Michael Mann $500,000 in Porkulus spending

By Klockarman Michael Mann, Porkulus 1 Comment »

Via The National Center of Public Policy Research:

Washington, DC – 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.

“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.  This misuse of stimulus money illustrates why tax cuts are a better way to stimulate the economy than letting the government decide where to spend taxpayer dollars.  As is often the case, political considerations corrupt the distribution of government funds,” said Deneen Borelli, a fellow with the National Center’s Project 21 black leadership network.

Hat tip: Christian (GORE LIED reader)

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Dec 30

Pot calls kettle black: In a letter to the WSJ, Michael Mann claims science journals should remain unpolluted by politics

By Klockarman Climategate, Michael Mann 3 Comments »

Michael Mann, of hockey stick fame and Mike’s Nature Trick” fame, has written a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal.  You’ll see below that The Journal’s editors note that Dr. Mann had just recently declined a request to explain his e-mail exchanges in the leaked Climategate e-mails, but he obviously can’t resist a chance to get preachy about the need to keep science journals unpolluted by politics.  Does he really think that people will take this letter seriously?

In his Dec. 18 op-ed “How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus,” Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.

That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.

And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.

Mr. Michaels and many climate science deniers have opted for the latter course of action. For example, presidential science adviser John Holdren notes that Mr. Michaels “has published little if anything of distinction . . . being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” This makes Mr. Michaels a perfect candidate for a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a decidedly poor submitter to a serious scientific journal.

Society relies upon the integrity of the scientific literature to inform sound policy. It is thus a serious offense to compromise the peer-review system in such a way as to allow anyone—including proponents of climate change science—to promote unsubstantiated claims and distortions.

The good news is that it is not happening today in relation to either climate scientists or the deniers of climate science. Men and women who have dedicated their lives to advancing science need not apologize for keeping their rigorous professional journals free of the pollution of what is purely politics.

Michael E. Mann

Professor, Meteorology Department

Penn State University

Director, Penn State Earth System Science Center

University Park, Pa.

Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, we invited Mr. Mann to write a feature explaining his email exchanges that were revealed as part of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s document disclosure. He declined.

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Sep 28

Man-made global warming? No. Mann-made global warming? Yes.

By Klockarman Michael Mann, Steve McIntyre, hockey stick No Comments »

As Anthony Watts says, “Ding-dong, the stick is dead.”  Watts provides a “nut-shell” explanation of long and tortured history of the notorious global warming hockey stick, and it’s demise:

1- In 1998 a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann. Then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.

The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.

See the graph http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/mann/manna_99.gif

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren’t telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the “hottest period in 1000 years”, which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed as the “Hockey Stick” and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous “elevator scene”.

2- Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann’s tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/

3- Years go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.

4- Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann’s co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 trees data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.

5- When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand picked to get the desired result.

These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_chronologies1.gif

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_merged.gif

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Nov 26

Meet the new hockey stick; same as the old hockey stick

By Klockarman Michael Mann, Steve McIntyre, hockey stick No Comments »
Of course, the headline is adapted from the lyrics of The Who’s “We Won’t Get Fooled Again”. And we won’t.

Climate Skeptic has the details:

Will there ever be a time when sane people are not having to deconstruct yet another repackaging of Mann’s hockey stick, like some endless whack-a-mole game? Mann is back with a new hockey stick and, blow me away with surprise, it looks a heck of a lot like the old hockey stick:

Willis Eschenbach, writing at Climate Audit…claims his methodology shows that two sets of proxies — the Tiljander sediments and the Southwestern US Pines (mainly the bristlecones) — drive the hockey stick shape. This is reminiscent of Steve McIntyre’s finding years ago that just a few proxies in the original MBH 1999 drove most of the hockey stick form. Interestingly, these two series are the very ones that have received the most independent criticism for their methodology and ability to act as a proxy. In particular, the Tiljander Lake sediment data is out and out corrupted, and it is incredible that they could get past a peer review process (just reinforcing my feeling that peer review passes shoddy work that reinforces the professions prejudices and stands in the way of quality work by mavericks challenging the consensus).

Anyway, with these proxies removed, less than a quarter of the total, the hockey stick disappears.

Climate Skeptic concludes:

If you still have any confidence at all in climate scientists, I urge you to read this discussion of the Tiljander sediments. Mann managed to make two enormous mistakes. One, he used a series that the authors of the series very specifically caution has been disturbed and is not a valid proxy for the last 200-300 years. And two, he inverts the whole series! instead of showing it decreasing in the last 200 years (again due to corruption the authors warned about) he shows it upside down, increasing in the last 200 years, which then helps him build his hockey stick on absolutely false data.

One might argue that this is just the indictment of one scientist, but everyone in the profession seems to rally around and defend this one scientist, and the flaws listed above have been public for a while and absolutely no one seems interested in demanding Mann correct his numbers. In fact, most climate scientists spend their time shooting the messenger (Steve McIntyre).

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