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featuresThe most hated climate scientist in the US fights backMichael Mann is taking a stand for science. By Neela Banerjee | Mar/Apr 2013
Neela Banerjee ’86 covers energy and the environment for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Washington, DC.  Mark OstowView full imageMark OstowView full image Michael Mann, Science, 14 July 2000This chart shows the data from Michael Mann’s 1999 paper, in which he graphed mean temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere in the centuries before thermometer records—using proxy data reconstructed from tree rings, corals, ice cores, and other sources. All temperatures are shown as variations from a baseline: the dotted line, which represents the mean temperature for 1961–90. The mean proxy temperature data are shown as a black line. The mean temperature data from thermometer records are shown as a red-and-white line. The blue shading is the approximate uncertainty range of the proxy data. View full imageMichael Mann, Science, 14 July 2000This chart shows the data from Michael Mann’s 1999 paper, in which he graphed mean temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere in the centuries before thermometer records—using proxy data reconstructed from tree rings, corals, ice cores, and other sources. All temperatures are shown as variations from a baseline: the dotted line, which represents the mean temperature for 1961–90. The mean proxy temperature data are shown as a black line. The mean temperature data from thermometer records are shown as a red-and-white line. The blue shading is the approximate uncertainty range of the proxy data. View full image IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.htmlThis 2007 chart, by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, combines Mann’s 1999 work with Northern Hemisphere proxy temperature data from eight subsequent papers by other scientists. Again, the temperatures are shown as variations from a baseline—the mean temperature for 1961–90. The orange shading shows the uncertainty range of all the proxy data; the darker the shading, the greater the overlap of the data. The mean temperature data from thermometer records are shown as a blue-and-white line. The updated version confirmed Mann’s findings: it still has the characteristic hockey stick shape. View full imageIPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.htmlThis 2007 chart, by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, combines Mann’s 1999 work with Northern Hemisphere proxy temperature data from eight subsequent papers by other scientists. Again, the temperatures are shown as variations from a baseline—the mean temperature for 1961–90. The orange shading shows the uncertainty range of all the proxy data; the darker the shading, the greater the overlap of the data. The mean temperature data from thermometer records are shown as a blue-and-white line. The updated version confirmed Mann’s findings: it still has the characteristic hockey stick shape. View full image National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration, Preliminary Data, ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/13Last year was the tenth warmest for the globe overall since records began in 1880. As this National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map of temperature percentiles shows, most of the world saw warmer than average temperatures in 2012. It was also a particularly hot year for the contiguous United States—the warmest in the 118 years since US records have been kept. Globally, the ten warmest years on record have all taken place since 1998. View full imageNational Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration, Preliminary Data, ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/13Last year was the tenth warmest for the globe overall since records began in 1880. As this National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map of temperature percentiles shows, most of the world saw warmer than average temperatures in 2012. It was also a particularly hot year for the contiguous United States—the warmest in the 118 years since US records have been kept. Globally, the ten warmest years on record have all taken place since 1998. View full imageState of the climate“Call me a converted skeptic,” declared Richard A. Muller in the New York Times last July. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California–Berkeley and a well-known critic of climate change science, had doubted “the very existence of global warming,” he wrote. But “last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: humans are almost entirely the cause.” Muller has joined an overwhelming majority of scientists worldwide who are convinced by the evidence that global warming is under way. The average global temperature of the Earth has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a change driven by increased emissions of heat-trapping gases—foremost among them carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The US National Academy of Sciences and the national academies of more than 30 other countries agree. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) concurs, as does the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Pentagon is preparing for the effects. Although local temperatures vary constantly and widely, the average global temperature is fairly stable, making 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit a significant increase. Even small increases in global temperature can affect forces such as winds and ocean currents, generating weather extremes. “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” according to the draft Third National Climate Assessment, issued in January by a federal advisory committee of scientists and other experts. The day-to-day and year-to-year fluctuations will continue, but overall, “summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer.” And a hotter climate loads the atmospheric dice to bring about more-extreme storms and other weather events, more often. The details of future weather patterns can be difficult to predict, as Hagit Affek, a Yale associate professor of geology and geophysics, has cautioned (“What We Know about the Climate,” July/August 2010). But she adds: “The general picture has never been more clear. Anthropogenic climate change is real; alleviating the cause is a pressing issue.” Last summer, when Louis J. Freeh’s commission came out with a withering report on Penn State’s failure to protect children from Jerry Sandusky, most commentators wrote about the effects on the school’s football program, or about child abuse. But a few drew a direct parallel between Sandusky and a Penn State meteorology and geosciences professor, Michael E. Mann ’98PhD. Mann has never been accused of child abuse. He studies, among other things, the way the climate has behaved for the last 2,000 years. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” The National Review Online’s Mark Steyn excerpted the post, weighed in approvingly, and took it to a bigger audience. Wrote Steyn, “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.” A few days later, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog post by Peter W. Wood, president of the nonprofit advocacy group the National Association of Scholars, comparing Penn State’s handling of the Sandusky affair to the university’s finding that allegations of scientific wrongdoing by Mann were unfounded. Given the inventively biting rhetoric of the political campaign against climate science, it’s not surprising that Mann was compared to Sandusky. What’s surprising is that invective at this level didn’t show up sooner. Michael Mann is the scientist whose research produced, in 1999, the iconic and alarming “hockey stick” graph of average annual temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past thousand years. He is also the US scientist most affected by the 2009 “E-mailgate,” when climate contrarians hacked into a group of scientists’ e-mails, took them out of context, and made them a cause célèbre. Mann recently wrote a book about his experiences, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Over the last 15 years, as his research has gained prominence, he has been called a liar, a charlatan, and a scumbag. His critics have demanded his arrest. Blogger Marc Morano called for Mann and other scientists to be publicly flogged. Morano’s former boss, Rush Limbaugh, said they should be drawn and quartered. Mann has found his office girded with police tape as a crime scene. He has received threats to himself and his family. He has been the focus of lawsuits seeking the public release of his e-mails. Mann is, arguably, the nation’s most hated climate scientist. “I’ve been at the center of these attacks more than most others,” he says. “I think the intention is to make an example of me.” Other climate scientists have faced attacks, too, including Benjamin Santer, a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, whose research showed the “human fingerprint” on the changing climate. But climate contrarians have a particular interest in Mann, Santer believes, because they think if they can bring him down, they can claim they dismantled the entire theory of climate change. “You go after the things that are important, that are iconic, that are visual, visceral, powerful, and easily interpretable,” Santer says, referring to Mann’s work and the hockey stick graph in particular. “And if you can’t attack the underlying science, you go after the scientist.” State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State, is what Hollywood imagines in a college town. Tucked into a leafy valley in central Pennsylvania, the Penn State campus is a mix of neo-classical buildings and boxy, modern ones. On a Saturday morning, Mann and I make our way to a coffee house on the edge of State College’s small, bustling downtown. We’re here because of a phone call I’d made to him two years earlier. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, it was clear Republicans would retake the US House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. Climate scientists worried that this meant another spate of hearings, similar to others under the GOP, in which their research would be misinterpreted and their attempts to answer cut off. Congressional hearings, as anyone who has been can attest to, are not about gathering information but about building an argument. I interviewed Mann for the first time, by phone. He was calm and careful in his responses, and at the end of the interview, I asked whether he ever got angry. Most people who talk regularly to the press don’t admit to basic emotions and will deflect such a question. Mann waited a beat, but then he said: “Yes, I get mad. Many of us do. You’ll be seeing more scientists speaking out.” Shortly afterwards, Mann put me in touch with colleagues who had just formed the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, an online ‘matchmaker’ for journalists and others seeking laymen’s explanations of climate phenomena and scientists specializing in the issues. At professional conferences and universities, panels and courses cropped up—their audiences often filled to overflowing—to teach scientists how to talk about their research in ways nonscientists would understand. Scientists and bloggers also formed a Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to help climatologists who face legal challenges from contrarian groups. Fighting back has made Mann, who is not very good at hiding his feelings, even more of a target. “He fights back hard,” says Santer. “For him, it’s not just retreating to your office and closing the door but trying to mobilize friends, colleagues, and fighting back legally. To draw a line in the sand and say, ‘You are wrong and you claim these untrue things about me and my research’—that takes guts.” Mann himself began his career, 20 years ago, more skeptical than some of his colleagues about what the evidence showed regarding the human impact on the climate. Now 47, bald and with flecks of gray in his goatee, he has become, as he puts it, an “accidental public figure.” Like most climatologists, Mann sought to “let the science speak for itself.” Anything else seemed like advocacy, which scientists largely eschew. “I started out as a scientist who didn’t really believe there was much of a role for a scientist to play in public policy,” he says, over coffee. “How my thinking has evolved has come through being a direct witness to these attacks. It’s awakened me to the war being waged against science and climate scientists by those with an axe to grind. And if scientists don’t push back, we’re ceding ground to those interests.” Pushing back, to Mann, would involve “advocating for the proposition that policy should be informed by an objective assessment of the science.” But to critics like Morano, Mann is a glaring example of someone whose politics have shaped his research and who is spearheading a massive effort to dupe the American people. “The ‘climate con’ to which I refer is a lavishly funded climate machine that is lobbying for laws and uses every bit of data or new study to proclaim ‘it’s worse than we thought’ or we must act now,” Morano wrote in an e-mail. “Man-made global warming fears are a grand political narrative, not science.” Morano, the communications director of the advocacy group CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow), has a BA in political science and has worked as a journalist and national television reporter and producer. He continued: “Mann is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with climate science today. He is a hardcore political activist, very thin skinned, does not take criticism well at all, and he surrounds himself within his own little world of supportive warmist activists.” Mann doesn’t like the word “skeptic” to describe Morano and others campaigning against him. He and other scientists point out that science encourages skepticism, asking pointed questions and looking for evidence again and again. “So much of climate denial comes from ideology,” Mann says, his voice hardening. “If you’re only voicing skepticism about science that goes against your ideology, then that’s not true skepticism.” Mann came to his own views on climate, he says, through his research. The second of three sons of a math professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and a stay-at-home mom, Mann studied physics and applied math at the University of California–Berkeley before coming to Yale in 1989 to earn a PhD in physics. From childhood, he had been interested in what he calls “big picture science”: questions related to the origins of the universe and fundamental theoretical physics questions. After finishing his coursework at Yale, he was on a track to study semiconductor devices. But they didn’t seem to address those questions. So he opened Yale’s course catalog and found that Barry Saltzman, in the department of geology and geophysics, was applying physics to understand the Earth’s climate. After meeting with Saltzman, Mann began work in geology and geophysics, and by the early 1990s, he was deep into paleoclimate research, the study of the planet’s climate in the geologic past. At the time, climate science “was just coming of age,” Mann has written. By the mid-1990s, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had determined through its review of the research that there was “a discernible human influence on climate.” The questions that climate scientists debated at the time were the scale of human influence and if it was indeed detectable. Saltzman was initially skeptical. Other eminent scientists, such as NASA’s James Hansen, had concluded the evidence was already in. “I was cautious,” Mann recalls. “I felt that Hansen was too far out on a limb.” Mann thought that scientists had perhaps not given enough consideration to the naturally occurring variability of the Earth’s climate over time—an argument that most climate contrarians now use. He began researching variability in the Northern Hemisphere over increasingly long periods of time: first a century, then from 1400 to the present, and finally, in the postdoctoral project that yielded the hockey stick, for the last millennium. Recorded temperature using thermometers extends back about 140 years. To gather climate information deeper in the past, climatologists work to reconstruct past temperatures by using so-called proxy data. Among these are tree rings (their size indicates growth rates, and trees grow faster in warmer weather), and the proportions of different oxygen isotopes (which are affected by temperature) in corals and ice cores. In 1999, Mann produced a paper with two other scientists; it relied on multiple kinds of proxy data to reconstruct climate in the past and to identify events that could have produced temperature anomalies, such as large volcanic eruptions. Published in Geophysical Research Letters and entitled “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures during the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations,” it came with many caveats. Still, the reconstruction of temperatures indicated an anomalous rise in temperature through the latter half of the twentieth century compared with previous centuries, and suggested that the 1990s “were likely the warmest decade and 1998 likely the warmest year of the millennium,” Mann writes. Mann has written that it was a colleague who first noted the graph’s resemblance to a hockey stick lying flat: the first 900 years of data form a squiggly but consistent line, akin to the stick’s handle, before temperatures shoot up at the beginning of the twentieth century, like the blade. The graph became an icon, summing up a millennium of climate history in a simple, easily grasped image. The study was featured prominently in a 2001 UN report, and since then, the reaction to it has been widespread and unrelenting among climate contrarians. Over the next decade, articles appeared periodically with the intention of pointing out fatal errors in Mann’s work, usually by scholars and organizations funded by fossil fuel companies. In the meantime, Mann says, more than a dozen other studies using different mixes and types of data, such as borehole temperatures in Antarctica, have validated his findings. The basic hockey stick pattern has been reproduced several times over, creating what Mann calls “a veritable hockey league” (see charts, above). “The hockey stick was the least interesting of the research we did,” he adds, with a small laugh; originally, it was the role played by events like volanic eruptions that drove the research. “You could take away the hockey stick, because so much research now points to the climate changing.” But climate contrarians in Congress began homing in on Mann during the Bush administration. In 2005, then-chair of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX), sent a letter to Mann, his coauthors, and two other scientists, informing them that he was launching an investigation into the hockey stick study because of “methodological flaws and data errors.” Despite an outcry from the scientific community, media, and Republicans such as Senator John McCain (R-AZ) that he was harassing scientists, Barton commissioned a report on Mann’s 1999 study. The report criticized the hockey stick paper—only to become mired later in allegations of plagiarism and misconduct. The brushfire that keeps flaring for Mann and other climatologists, however, is the E-mailgate scandal. On November 17, 2009, Mann awoke to find out that private correspondence he and other scientists had sent to the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom had been hacked and individual phrases disseminated in a way that implied they had falsified their findings. Climate contrarians focused on the words “trick” and “hide the decline”—which some said indicated that Mann had erased data that had shown a decline in twentieth-century temperatures. This was the smoking gun proving climate change was a hoax, critics asserted. The media, for their part, lapped it up. The reality is different. The e-mail with the words “trick” and “hide the decline” was sent by Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. It read, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The “trick” Jones was referring to was Mann’s decision to show two kinds of data on the same chart—data from temperature proxies (like the tree rings) and actual temperature data (from thermometers). This was a trick in the sense of a clever move, not a deception: all the data were labeled, so readers could see where the proxy data end and the temperature records begin. As for “hide the decline,” Jones wasn’t referring to declines in temperature; he was referring to a drop seen in certain types of tree-ring data after 1960. And he wasn’t referring to Mann’s work—but to that of another scientist, Keith Briffa of the University of East Anglia. Pre-1960, Briffa’s tree-ring density records track the temperature records. Post-1960, there is a decline in the response of certain trees to temperature (possibly due to pollution): the actual recorded temperatures are consistently higher than what the tree-ring data would predict. The temperature records are the more important and reliable data, so Briffa had to discard the tree-ring “decline” records. But the decline wasn’t hidden. It was clearly discussed and labeled in Briffa’s paper. And Mann’s paper didn’t rely on any of those data. Since then, a half dozen independent inquiries in the United States and United Kingdom have cleared the climatologists involved of scientific wrongdoing. As scientific consensus grew around the idea that climate change is happening and human activity is the main cause of it, the resistance to climate science turned sharper and marshaled millions of dollars behind it. Petrochemical interests have funded think tanks, politicians, and legal groups that seek to take apart the science and the scientists. Over the last several years, a growing core of scientists has pushed back. In 2010, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences issued a public letter that called “for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.” Mann was among the first to throw off the gloves—at Congressional hearings, in the media, on the Internet, and in court. His book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars explains his research and maps in detail the network of political and economic interests fighting climate science. He has intervened in litigation that was aimed at disclosing still more of his e-mails, and the cases so far have been resolved in his favor. He has also sued the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review for damages in connection with articles accusing him of fraud and comparing him to Jerry Sandusky. (The National Review responded with the headline “Get Lost.”) He takes to the airwaves, Twitter, and Facebook to weigh in on the latest important research published and the latest attack on science. Some of Mann’s allies have suggested that perhaps he should tone it down. It’s a suggestion he brushes off. “I would say calmly to them,” he says, “that they haven’t walked a mile in my moccasins.” He adds: “This isn’t just an academic discussion we’re having. There are real implications about the kind of world we are leaving for our children. It’s an ethical issue, and we ignore it at our peril.” In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sealed off Mann’s office after he got a letter with a mysterious white powder in it. The FBI lab found it was cornmeal. But it arrived amidst a regular flow of hate mail and death threats, including an e-mail that read, “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families.” The anonymity of the Internet lets such rage seep through. Face to face, Mann says he gets something else: people who come up to him in the supermarket, people he doesn’t even know, who tell him they want to thank him for his work. He takes even more hope from the next generation of scientists. “I think the idea that the attacks would have a chilling effect is backfiring,” he says. “I can’t count how many postdocs and students who have told me that they see public participation as part of their roles as scientists. And that’s something our generation didn’t have.”
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Thanks for fantastic article that I gave to my graduate architecture student at Roger Williams University as bonus reading for my Environmental Design Research class.
As carl Popper said ignorance is not the absence of knowing but the result of aggressively seeking it.
It appears some people writing in this blog are almost bragging about their ignorance with the name they chose to hide their true identity. I wonder, is blind greed the motivation behind this lust for ignorance?
It's really astonishing to read denial remarks like this: "Unfortunately the money is on the side of the global warmers, not the skeptics," which are such obvious lies.
Aside from that, I was absolutely thrilled to read this part of the article:
"...Post-1960, there is a decline in the response of certain trees to temperature (possibly due to pollution): the actual recorded temperatures are consistently higher than what the tree-ring data would predict..."
since other than many comments I have made I have never seen that connection made. Yay! Are we starting to understand that tropospheric ozone, which is highly toxic to vegetation, has been stunting tree growth - and the the background level is now so high that forests are dying all over the world at a rapidly accelerating rate?
We have to stop this burning fuel business before we lose, not only the magnificence of trees, but nuts, fruit, habitat, shade and rain among other things. Oh, and annual crop yield and quality are being significantly reduced as well, and we definitely need the food.
Many studies have been done about the poisonous effect of air pollution on plants, but almost no scientists ever relate it to tree death, never mind the loss of a significant CO2 sink.
Links to research here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/01/29/whispers-from-the-ghosting-trees/
So, about this "Full name" field -- who are all these people with the very funny-looking full names? Yale must have a very odd policy about names. I wonder if Yale verifies that the email addresses given are true?
Well, for those of you with the funny-looking "Full name" entries, I'd like to thank you for providing such useful information:
I’ve come up with a little game you can play to make it more
interesting. I call it Global Warming Sceptic Bingo! Just tick the
box when they use the argument next to it. Get four in a row and you
win!
Well to inform myself a little bit I, do look sometimes at the nature tv and other documentary’s available and they clearly indicate that ‘something more or less overwhelming serious’ is going on with our dear and only planet mother earth, this is not to say that statistics and algorithms are not important, but facts are facts:
- the dead animals in the dried out savannahs of Kenia and the flight to the megacity of Nairobi by the Masai tribe who lived there since centuries with their famous long horned cattle, which they cannot feed anymore due to lack of grasslands.
-the worlwide phenemenon of climate refugees and the flight from the rural areas to the cities and the creation of the megacities.
-the despair of the Inuit in Northern-Canada who are directly concerned with the melting down of the artic ice and less and less fish, seals, cariboos and wildlife.
-the forthcoming total extinction of the polar bears who are deprived of their sea-ice habitat (also less seals) and the ice plains due to the melting down of the arctic ice and the rise of the sea levels. They say now ‘only the big and fat polar bears can survive’, a bit longer may be.
-the decrease of food production worldwide and even the animals and fish are really becoming smaller and crimping. There is a lot of controversy about this item also but for sure in Afica, Asia en South-America there will be a significant decline of food production some predict already, may be they are wrong or misinformed…
-the global and worldwide retreat of the glaciers like the Alps in Europe, the tropical glacier Cordillera Blanca in Peru which provides now ±35% of the drinking water of Lima. The scarcity of drinking water will become for sure the major problem of the next generations.
-the well known pictures of the Chinese farmers deperately trying to plough on dried out and crack riddled lands.
-the streams and rivers are almost all confronted with a significant fall of the level, sometimes this can become even critical for some nuclear plants cooling systems…
-In Wiki they mention since 1850 ±47 retreating glaciers, ±5 (temporarily) growing glaciers due to local circumstances like the Perito Moreno in Patagonia/Argentina and ±9 totally disapeared, most of them in Europe and North-America.
-The ongoing word struggle between believers and non-believers is becoming a bit of global warming itself(!) and that’s really sad and a pitty, if there is a problem, it has to be adressed NOW may be, the rise the global temperature seems to be a fact. At Copenhagen they talked about +2°C, at Cancun they talked about +4°C.
-Now the big problem seems to be to explain that global tempreature rise does not exclude a mini ice time coming (200 year?) like now is ongoing…
-The well know politicians quote ‘we cannot change or lower the quality of our life and way of living’ is that really sustinable?
-Ecology is universal and more and more and everybody should be concerned, so: right + left together, forget once and for all about the misleading ‘political sauce’on top of ecology items.
-But may be the problem will at least start to solve itself, in Europe we see already much less traffic on the big tunpikes and highways due to the price rise of the gasoline and the ongoing crisis…,normally this must be positive for the climate.
-It’s a fact also that many so called 'greens' do a lot of harm to the real ecology by flat opportunism (think of the low energy bulbs with mercury additive now worldwide...)
-for example many political-greens (without generalization) who are only interested in open borders and say, ‘communist inspired’ mass immigrations (= votes), instead of promoting the economies in the homelands.
-In Europe they, the greens, are not really very interested in the climate and ecology at all, on the contrary, and they have much power in the EU-assembly on the other hand, as a matter of fact, they jus talk and talk, it takes years to pass anti plastic bills, as usual!
-Even a plastic bag prohibition act seems to be impossible to pass, let alone to address the gigantic plastic pollutions of the seas and oceans an the diminishing and dwindling maritime and fish life and stocks, also by inconsiderate overfishing.
-The lobby’s are playing their disastrous business for sure.
Thanks Professor Mann.
We struggle on!
Thanks to Mike Mann for all the work he does.
Thank you so much, Michael, for telling the truth about the climate. I am so sorry for what you've had to endure for your efforts.
reading this thread is like spending 20 minutes in a mad house! honestly- I've worked in the mental health services for years. The level of paranoia and weirdness among climate deniers is mental!
"Ignoramus, 1:47pm March 28 2013 | Ico_flag Flag as inappropriate
If you believe in AGW, you should support increased use of natural gas and the fracking to get it. By increasig its use of natrual gas, the US is reducing its CO2 emissions far more than the rest of the World.
If you oppose this it's a tell that you have a different agenda."
If fracked natural gas *replaces* coal (as in the coal stays in the ground), then fracking can help provide a transition to a low-carbon economy. But if the coal displaced by fracked natural gas is instead exported to be burned elsewhere, then the fracking is all for naught as far as climate-change goes.
I'll support fracking as long is it is accompanied with strong policies that *keep the displaced coal in the ground and control fugitive CH4 emissions* -- that is, policies to ensure that the promised climate benefits of fracking are actually realized.
That means a price on carbon via a tax that ramps up until CO2 levels in the atmosphere actually start declining, along with careful monitoring of fugitive CH4 emissions so that "problem" natural-gas operations can be identified and fixed.
I am embarrassed that my alma mater's leftist politics have overridden all common sense by publishing such a mindlessly supportive piece on a clearly proven fraud. It will be interesting to see if the other side is ever given any credible coverage on these pages.
If you believe in AGW, you should support increased use of natural gas and the fracking to get it. By increasig its use of natrual gas, the US is reducing its CO2 emissions far more than the rest of the World.
If you oppose this it's a tell that you have a different agenda.
Ignoramus said,
"Even direct measurements of temperature over the last several decades have upward bias as rural areas have been urbanized, so that man-made heat sources wind up near measuring stations."
Actually, this is not true at all. It turns out that the warm-bias due to urbanization in the global-average temperature record is so small that it is hardly detectable.
But you don't have to take my word for it, Ignoramus (and others here).
You can download and analyze the temperature data yourselves. In fact, if you have some programming skills, you can write your own simple global-average temperature program and generate your own rural-only, urban-only, or whatever, results from the temperature data.
You will find that rural and urban stations produce a nearly identical global-warming trend. You will also find if you crunch the raw and "homogenized" temperature data and compare your results, you will see that the raw and homogenized results are very similar. The adjustments made to temperature data largely cancel each other out when you look at global-scale averages.
But like I said, you don't have to take my word for any of this.
Download the killer global-temperature app at http://tinyurl.com/NASA-HANSEN4, follow the simple instructions to set it up and run it (very easy -- just a few mouse-clicks), and you will see for yourself how easy it is to confirm the global-temperature results published by climate-scientists.
It's a big download, unfortunately -- about 1GB (and for that I will apologize), but it is a complete "virtual machine" package of software and temperature data that is ready to use "out of the box". No setup or configuration required, aside from a few mouse-clicks per the easy instructions provided.
Its user-friendly Google Map user interface will let you "roll your own" results simply by clicking on temperature stations on a global map. You can also compare rural vs. urban results, and raw vs. homogenized results.
And you can compare your own results with the official NASA/Hansen global-temperature results -- you will be amazed at how easy it is to confirm the NASA/Hansen results with your own.
So don't be shy, Ignoramus -- give it a try. And after you do so, you will want to change your handle to something more like "Knowledgeable".
Once again, the link is http://tinyurl.com/NASA-HANSEN4
As noted in the article, Mann’s work relies on proxies such as tree rings, ice cores and coral to determine historic temperatures. Any proxy is just that -- a proxy -- and doesn’t provide direct measurement of temperature. Using proxies can be scientific. But issues arise when you start to believe that your data is more exact and has greater reliability than whatever measuring tools you have. That’s not scientific. Remember “cold fusion”? Back in 1988 two scientists thought they’d discovered a profound new energy source and got global attention for awhile. In actuality, their data was off.
There’s significant question about how exact proxy temperature data is, as the indirect measurements which proxies yield can be confounded by all sorts of extraneous factors. For example, there’s demonstrable variance between Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere tree rings which hasn’t been explained or accounted for. Even direct measurements of temperature over the last several decades have upward bias as rural areas have been urbanized, so that man-made heat sources wind up near measuring stations.
This has particular application to the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Not that long ago temperatures around 1200 may have been higher than they are now, and were certainly higher than they were in 1700. This strongly suggests that there are other drivers of climate change than AGW. Any honest science would say that this needs to be accounted for before you’d run models of future temperatures you’d insist are accurate predictors.
Unfortunately if you raise questions like these you’re a “paranoid angry bee” in the words of the most recent commenter, or simply a “denier,” which is code for heretic.
Fantastic article. I will make it required reading in my university classes. From the comments you can see that climate change deniers swarm like paranoid angry bees within the blogosphere, but be assured they are conspicuously absent from peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Scott,
Some questions and comments about your letter:
"East Anglia, anyone?" You're accusing scientists of dishonesty, citing the email scandal as evidence. Yet that email scandal was the product of manipulation, clearly explained in the article. Were you unconvinced? Are there examples of clear scientific dishonesty you can point to?
"An enormous list of reputable scientists don't buy the evidence." If that's so, that's worth knowing more about. Please write again and direct readers to those names so we can investigate--but please apply your skepticism to those folks as well.
"Climate change hysteria..." You're labeling concern about climate change as insanity, also a convenient way to dismiss an argument. The echo chamber you refer to is a problem, but it's a problem on all sides. Would you agree that concern about climate change (and pollution, and other environmental threats) are reasonable?
"And has anyone noticed how 'global warming' has become 'climate change?' This is a convenient semantic trick..." It's not a trick, as I understand it; it's an attempt to be more accurate in describing the phenomenon, which is thought to have wide-ranging effects beyond temperature rise. Calling it a "convenient semantic trick" is, itself, a convenient semantic trick: you're citing it as further evidence of scientific and journalistic dishonesty, which was not the intention. (While you may be right that some people are incorrectly attributing single events to climate change, scientists and journalists have been careful about this in my experience.)
In the end, you accuse environmentalists of alarmism to fund themselves and stay in business. Do you have evidence for that? Are you also skeptical of energy companies, who no doubt have something to lose from policy changes?
Are you skeptical of normal people like us? We might have something to lose from policy and lifestyle changes, and we might something to lose from the acknowledgment that our lifestyle might have accidental wide-ranging, harmful impacts.
Ultimately I agree with you that skepticism is better than blind faith--but skepticism applied unevenly seems biased and unhelpful to me. It should be applied to everyone including ourselves.
I have my own biases, some of which I'm aware of: I'm worried about environmental health, for the sake of wildlife but also for the safety of people, and I tend to pay attention to potential dangers and take precautions, even if there are worthy questions to be asked. That's how I make decisions about my own health and the wellbeing of my family. I don't think that's being hysterical; it's being concerned and trying to make sound decisions for the long-term good of myself and others.
"Brian is not wrong. Steven McIntyre showed that Dr Mann's statistical method produces hockey sticks regardless of the data. Even random data subjected to Dr Mann's 'method' produced a 'hockey stick'."
Brian *is* wrong -- and so is McIntyre, for several reasons.
1) The "red noise" that Mc generated was contaminated with "hockey-stick" signal. Mc used tree-ring data as a "template" for his synthetic noise. But when you use real data as a model for synthetic noise, you must first remove the signal. Otherwise your "noise" will be contaminated with signal components. And yes, I looked at Mc's code and confirmed that he did not filter the underlying hockey-stick from the tree-ring data before he used it as a noise model.
BTW, if you take the tree-ring data in question, zero-mean and variance-normalize it, and then just average the chronologies together, you will see the underlying hockey-stick signal.
2) Mc "cherry picked" the most hockey-stick-like results from a huge ensemble of trials. In fact, if you cherry-pick like Mc did, you will get hockey-sticks even from properly zero-centered principal-component computations.
3) The "hockey sticks" that Mc. did produce from random noise were *much* smaller than Mann's hockey-stick. All you have to do is look at the singular value magnitudes. No competent analyst would confuse a random-noise hockey-stick from one based on a genuine coherent signal.
Mc's "hockeys sticks from random noise" paper should have been retracted.
cb,
Brian is not wrong. Steven McIntyre showed that Dr Mann's statistical method produces hockey sticks regardless of the data. Even random data subjected to Dr Mann's 'method' produced a 'hockey stick'.
I'm fairly curious about the claim in the article, " He is also the US scientist most affected by the 2009 “E-mailgate,” when climate contrarians hacked into a group of scientists’ e-mails, took them out of context, and made them a cause célèbre.”
I'd like to see the evidence that shows that 'climate contrarians' (whatever they may be) specifically 'hacked' the server at East Anglia's CRU to obtain the emails. Since Neela Banerjee makes this unequivocal statement, there must be proof, and, since the author 'knows' that they were indeed 'climate contrarians', who they are in particluar. I'd like to see the names of those 'climate contrarians' exposed to the world.
Since I rather doubt that Neela Banerjee actually knows that the claim is true, the author might be a bit more circumspect in making these unsupported claims to enhance the coverage of Dr Mann.
I'd also point out that the 'iconic and alarming Hockey Stick' has long ago been discredited as a product of a combination of a questionable statistical method and 'cherry picking' of tree ring proxies.
Brian R is wrong:
Mann redid his calculations without the PCA step -- he got the same hockey stick.
He also redid his calculations without the proxies that his critics claimed were invalid) -- he got the same hockey stick.
From http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf (page 2):
"We therefore performed additional analyses as in Fig. S7, but instead compaired the reconstructions both with and without the above seven potentially problematic series, as shown in Fig. S8"
Now scroll down a bit further and look at figures S7 and S8. The problematic proxies that Mann's critics were screaming about didn't make much of difference in the final results. But Mann's critics could have figured that out for themselves if they were serious about checking his work -- all of Mann's data and code are available for free for anyone to download.
Mr. Christopher Childs lives in quite the cocoon. To say things like, " Mann's famous "hockey stick" remains innocent of the charges leveled against it...", shows he is willfully uninformed. The original Hockey Stick has been thoroughly discredited in the blogosphere and in peer reviewed published articles. The Hockey Stick was shown to an artifact of both the principle component analysis used in the statistics and the cherry picking proxies that were assigned significantly higher weights in the analysis than proxies that didn't show an up-tick in temperature. Mr. Mann did like this so much so he tried again but without the contentious strip bark(cherry picked) proxies. This time he replaced the strip bark proxies with lake sediment cores that were known to be increasingly contaminated by farming activities and bridge building activity starting in the mid to late 1800. Mr. Mann didn't account for the contamination of the cores and used the representations of collected data upsidedown from that of the original author.
Again Mr. Christopher Childs shows that he is so uninformed is would be laughable if it wasn't so sad with this, "..having most recently been validated once again -- and quite literally extended -- by the work of Oregon State's Shaun Marcott and his colleagues, whose study was recently published in _Science_. (That study has not been "dismantled" -- as one commenter would have it -- by anyone, nor is it likely to be.)". Please Mr. Childs keep to your cocoon and let the big boys/girls have an intelligent conversation without your misinformation and spin.
It is always convenient when you disagree with someone, and you can't present a cogent argument, to label them somehow. How about "climate deniers?" That will do nicely. Two little words, and the argument is over.
The fact is climate science is immensely complicated, and it's presided over by a precious few, particularly where historical data is concerned, and these few have not always been scientifically honest. East Anglia, anyone?
Climate change hysteria is an outwardly expanding echo chamber that starts with those few scientists, gets passed to academics like Jeffrey Sachs, who have no direct knowledge of it themselves, and then on to the troops worldwide, who only know what they hear. But they like it, because it fits nicely into their anti-U.S., anti-oil company, and just generally anti-capitalist world view. The interests of socialism have been carried further under the banner of environmentalism than any other.
The earth may, indeed, be getting warmer. This isn't such a shock since it's either been getting warmer or colder for several billion years. It got warmer during the so-hard-to-explain "medieval warming period," presumably without man-made Co2. It got WAY warmer as the ice age receded. I'm just guessing that emissions played no part in that one, either.
What is extremely controversial is the notion that it is we who are causing the current warming trend. An enormous list of reputable scientists don't buy the evidence. What we have is "correlation without causation," if you remember your stats 101. "Settled science," another favorite bromide, this is not.
And has anyone noticed how "global warming" has become "climate change?" This is a convenient semantic trick, because now every weather event, even a giant blizzard, is evidence of a problem. Someone cited Hurricane Sandy. Well, what about the Hurricane of 1938? This was far worse, as far as the NE is concerned.
The big problem with environmentalism is that it funds itself through alarmism. Every decade or so, a new crisis is pushed to the forefront. Recall how we were all going to run out of food by the mid 70s (see: Paul Ehrlich). Each Armageddon is projected to happen about 10-20 years out - soon enough to scare people, but far enough off so that people forget if you're wrong. Heck, by then, you've moved on to the next thing.
The answers are not known, but it is certain that a huge amount of skepticism, not blind faith, is appropriate.
Mann is almost single handedly responsible for making skeptics out of myself and most of the engineers that I know. On one side you have SM clearly explaining with code and data and on the other side we get nasty name calling , hiding of code data and methds, attempts to block publication, attempts to control the meda etc. blatent cherry picking, using data upside down and now from new kids, shifing data backward in time!
It is not rocket science and anybody with a little bit of stats and math background can clearly see who is right and who is wrong.
CAGW may be a problem, but until climate science cleans its own house and the scientists profiting from it stop defending the indefensible we will never know or be able to believe it.
I find this whole episode incredibly saddening because It implies we humans are as gullible as we have ever been and can expect more self manufactured calamities as we so often inflicted on ouselves in the past.
minarchist,
The fact is that climate change alarmism is killing people now. Currently, the United States burns 40-50% of its corn output as ethanol. Corn prices have risen from $3/bushel to over $8/bushel. Pressure by environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, and international agribusinesses drives the price of grain to levels where undeveloped nations are struggling to feed their populations. While farmers in the United States clear marginal land and drain aquifers, fifty percent of Guatemala's children are chronically malnourished. Thanks Greenpeace. To believe that current climate mandates have no cost is farcical.
" ... articles appeared periodically with the intention of pointing out fatal errors in Mann’s work, usually by scholars and organizations funded by fossil fuel companies .... "
And this is meant to insinuate what, exactly? Instead of casually tossing off a paper-thin guilt-by-association accusation that Mann has often repeated without subsequent proof to back it up, shouldn't an article of this caliber have tried to verify if the insinuation actually has any meat to it?
Steven Howard Johnson,
There is very little "intemperate language" contained in this comment section. In using this description, one could conclude that you are attempting to discredit and nullify perfectly legitimate comments with a mildly Ad hominem attack.
To me, this is a far worse offense than the use of "intemperate language" on this comment board.
There are many on this thread who not only disagree with Michael Mann but who use intemperate language to make their point. The Ninth Commandment says "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" and I think that principle has taken a bit of a beating here. I wonder if someone who disagrees with Mann in a more temperate and scientific way would be so good as to list articles from peer-reviewed scientific journals that disprove Mann's findings? Not books with propaganda as their motive. Peer-reviewed scientific articles. If Mann is as wrong as his critics say, surely there will be dozens of such articles. May we have the list?
L Melega,
Richard Mueller is not now nor has he ever been a skeptic on the subject of carbon dioxide-induced climate warming. He did savage Mann's work soon after the original MBH paper appeared in 1998 and never has recanted his criticism of the paper or subsequent work by Mann et al.
Several independent researchers, beginning with McIntyre and McKitrick have exhaustively presented the faults and fallacies in Mann's use of principle component analysis erroneously to develop his famous hokey stick.
No worker that I know of has ever been able to reproduce Mann's results using the techniques he claims to have used.
I cannot imagine why you think it important that the Koch foundation financed Mueller's work.
I can think of no aspect of the theory of CAGW which has not been falsified at this point and agree wholeheartedly with MIT's Richard Lindzen in his assessment of the global warming hysteria which pseudo-scientists like Mann have helped to create.
"The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating..."
But regardless of what one believes about the theory of man-made climate change, history will not be kind to Michael Mann. From James Delingpole:
"From obscure beginnings and with little discernible talent, Michael Mann has risen to become arguably the best loved comedy figure in the entire field of climate science, like Fatty Arbuckle, Pee Wee Herman and Coco the Clown rolled into one."
"He singlehandedly invented Mann-made global warming using his amazing Hockey Stick curve – the one programmed using the ingenious algorithm whereby, whatever information you fed into it – fudged paleoclimatological reconstructions, the latest football scores, tofu futures – it always came out in the same, scary-looking This Is The End Of The World And We've Got To Act Now By Pumping Gazillions More Money Into Climate Research shape."
"He gave us the phrase "Hide The Decline" – and starred in the hilarious song and video written in homage by a fan club called Minnesotans For Global Warming...."
Ironically, the last comedic chapter of Piltdown Mann's infamous career will be co-authored by himself in form of a lawsuit against NRO and Mark Steyn who pilloried the thin-skinned Mann along with Penn in a piece last July:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/309442/football-and-hockey-mark-steyn
"....If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change”, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his “investigation” by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke."
Delingpole continues:
"But of all the comedic pleasure this veritable Mickey Mouse among "climatologists" has given us so far, none comes even close to matching the joy and entertainment he will surely give us if he goes ahead with his court action against NRO and Steyn."
The lawsuit comes as a delight to those of us who have been watching this crowd of hucksters for years. The process of legal discovery will force into daylight even more of the evidence Mann and his colleagues have attempted to hide through years of deception, data manipulation and dodging of FOI requests. Mann's last act of hubris will likely be his final undoing.
Pass the popcorn.
It's fortunate that there was no Internet when Paul Revere was contemplating the likelihood of a British assault on the ingrates of Lexington, Concord, and environs. Had he posted online the notion that British troops were massing in Boston and were almost certainly poised to march out into the countryside to attack rebellious Colonials, a virtual army of vituperative Loyalists would surely have overwhelmed the comment section and reduced his arguments to -- in their minds -- intellectual rubble. He might have been sufficiently distressed to give up on the whole idea of a Ride.
The over-the-top animus felt toward Michael Mann by climate-change denialists like those in this massive thread is simply astonishing. Mann's famous "hockey stick" remains innocent of the charges leveled against it... having most recently been validated once again -- and quite literally extended -- by the work of Oregon State's Shaun Marcott and his colleagues, whose study was recently published in _Science_. (That study has not been "dismantled" -- as one commenter would have it -- by anyone, nor is it likely to be.)
For twenty-five years I've interpreted basic aspects of climate science for the public, first as the National Speaker for Greenpeace and later while serving regionally for other organizations involved in crafting energy-related legislation and in promoting renewable energy. The more time passes, the more I appreciate the willingness of scientists like Michael Mann to risk the disapprobation of the ill-willed and semi-informed in the cause of defending real science... and of attempting to save the ecosystems of this planet for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I do not know Mann (I do know his Penn State colleague Richard Alley slightly, and admire him for similar reasons), but I do know what he represents, and it is something Paul Revere would understand quite well. I doubt very much that Prof. Mann thinks of himself in heroic terms, but perhaps he will excuse me if I take a liberty on his behalf and regard him thus. While the ice melts, the oceans acidify, and the trolls howl, he and his kindred souls in the scientific realm doggedly pursue the truth, and try their best to warn the rest of us of the onrushing, ever more dramatic consequences of trapping ever more of the sun's energy inside the global greenhouse.
There's one truth for which I've never seen any denialist offer a real counter, let alone one worth the time it would take to write it. That truth is that if society does as the denialists prescribe -- continue energy-business-as-usual -- and they are wrong, then civilization as we know it is done, and millions will lose their lives to drought and storm and starvation and social chaos. If on the other hand society does as climate activists urge, and transforms its energy habits, the cost will be measured not in lives, but in dollars... dollars which will ultimately be returned to society by way of thousands upon thousands of jobs, of savings in healthcare costs related to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, of savings through energy efficiency, and of massive savings in fuel costs... because where solar and wind power are installed, the fuel is free. Forever.
And in fact that transformation is already underway. But it needs to happen far more swiftly, and the denialists and their obscenely wealthy fossil-fuel industry allies and funders have recklessly retarded its progress at the potential risk of everyone.
These days I begin almost any public commentary on climate with this statement: "The difference between me and a climate-change skeptic or denialist is that he wants me to be wrong, and I desperately want him to be right." No one in their right mind could actually feel happy to be right about model-based predictions implying the likely death of untold thousands of people from floods and drought, and decades -- or centuries -- of misery for untold thousands more. But the science -- the real science, as practiced by the likes of Mann and the ninety-seven percent of credentialed climatologists who accept that climate shift is happening and that we are almost certainly responsible for it -- does not support the denialists, and sadly, precious little of it even yields much encouragement for honest, serious skeptics.
My thanks to Ms. Bannerjee for writing the article, to YAM for publishing it, and most of all to Michael Mann and all the other likeminded members of the scientific community for the unselfish, tireless work they continue to do to help the world understand the existential threat posed to civilization by an anthropogenically-destabilized climate.
Even the reasonable comments in this thread are a bit behind the news and the full implications of Mann's work -- which, along with the rest of the science in the field, is now being demonstrated by phenomena like rapid decline of Arctic sea ice and the recent record breaking heat in Australia.
And that's just the start of an ongoing transformation of the planet, which is going to take a lot of thought and effort to adapt to, while at the same time we should work to limit further risks.
Sit in an urban planning meeting in NYC, post-Sandy, and you'll get a more vivid street-level view. I suggest, in service of lux et veritas, YAM co-produce a basic primer on climate with e360.yale.edu -- that would be helpful for all alumni.
As for how to think about what's next, here's a summary from the World Bank:
http://climatechange.worldbank.org/
Relevant suggestions from the Economist:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/global-warming
And a report from Pricewaterhouse:
http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/low-carbon-economy-index/assets/pwc-low-carbon-economy-index-2012.pdf
Lastly, it's interesting that this piece was published March 6, and yet the comment thread was successfully predicted on March 2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-stinks.html
How information and the internet work is also something to bear in mind.
What causes global warming is not rocket science. That some commentators continue to fabricate their own reality based on a few fringe scientists rather than understand the basic science and listen to the most reputable body of climate scientists on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is simply a testament to how strongly people want to deny and thus help obstruct addressing this carbon meteor.
This is their only relevance to the topic. The real relevance is shifting to a carbon free and sustainable civilization. Clean energy will ensure many more jobs, and is a growing industry in an otherwise stagnant economy. The Buffetts who understand this will prosper far more than these deniers, and will be the ones history remembers.
The other day came across the following quote about fossil fuel industry's public relations efforts. "[It is a] systematic, subtle, deliberate and unprincipled campaign of misinformation and propaganda, and if I may use the words -- of lies and falsehoods." Who is the speaker here? Is it Bill McKibben? James Hansen? Jay Inslee? Michael Mann. No, it's FDR -- these comments dating from the 1930's, when the coal utilities were fighting against those who would impose more government regulation on their industry. The more things change . . .
What, another propaganda piece from climate activist miky mann? He seems to do an interview almost every day with some gullible journalist with no understanding of science. His work has been completely discredited by expert academic statisticians Mcshane and Wyner, "We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature."
And check out what some of his colleagues said about him-
"Mike only likes these because they seem to match his idea of what went on in the last millennium, whereas he would savage them if they did not. Also--& I'm sure you agree--the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published."
As Mann's work continues to be replicated and confirmed, as in the recent Marcott study - the tea party brigade becomes ever more shrill. This comment thread is a good display of the pack-behavior seen whenever objective facts on the issue are presented. Mike Mann, Ben Santer, and the scientists who have stood by the truth, are heroes for the planet.
"The more carbon dioxide humanity pumps into the atmosphere, the greater the interference with the Earth's natural cooling system. Not as much infrared will escape into space in the future as escaped in the past, and the retained energy will indeed warm the Earth. By an increasing amount, as CO2 levels rise."
Agreed. But now let's be rational. By how much? AGW postulates that CO2 is a big driver based on models that assume positive feedback. But a model isn't proof. CO2 is a trace gas. To have so large an effect CO2 would have to have truly remarkable thermodynamic properties. The atmosphere is a complex system -- many other variables have to be accounted for. We have had much higher levels of CO2 in the air and the Earth didn't boil over. In fact it got colder. I prefer the atmosphere of today, else I'd be writing this under 5,000 feet of ice.
Knocking down trees to make way for heat-absorbing asphalt roads could have as much effect as man-made CO2 in increasing the Earth's temperature. Where's my Nobel prize?
Any comments about the Berkley study, which, I believe, was at least in part, funded by Koch, and headed by a former critic of Mann's hockey stick? As I understand it, once they crunched the data, eliminating the problems people had claimed existed in Mann's graph, they got another hockey stick?
As a Yale alum I admire Dr. Mann for his scientific rigor and courage. The amounting mass of evidence confirms and reinforces his findings. The recent Harvard-OSU study confirms the findings in the 'hockey-stick' and show that the earth is now warming at an unprecedented rate. Global average monthly temperatures further demonstrate the power of the signal created by human action: we have now experienced 336 months in a row of global average temperatures above the twentieth century norm. However, jYudging from the comments, one would think that we had just experienced 336 months in a row of global average temperatures colder than the 20th century norm.
Excellent article. You can see from some of the responses by science deniers below that Mann is 100% correct on the concerted effort to 'play the man' by organised climate change denial. The science is pretty much settled, multiple lines of evidence, material research in the field, very strong data from modelling and the increasing evidence of the weirdness of our weather patterns.
Alec Rawls's comment is simply incorrect. It is completely untrue that Mann "truncated the proxy records, REPLACING available proxy data with instrumental data." The MBH99 hockey stick included BOTH sets of data, in different colors and clearly labeled.
Using flagrantly false "facts" is no way to have an adult discussion.
In addition to what Steven Howard Johnson writes, the relative atmospheric concentration of the 14C isotope (when accounting for 14C added due to nuclear testing a.k.a. the "bomb effect") has become increasingly dilute. This is a signature of the 14C depleted isotope ratio of fossil fuels (since they have had millions of years underground for their initial supply of 14C to radioactively decay) and directly links their burning to the bulk of the increases in atmospheric CO2.
Here's what we know. For the Earth to maintain a steady average temperature over time, it has to radiate just as much energy back into space as it receives from the sun. We also know: the Earth radiates energy back into space in the infrared spectrum, from about 3 micron wavelength IR to 50 micron wavelength IR. We also know that CO2 molecules are opaque to 15 micron IR and a couple other wavelengths. And we know that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from 280 parts per million, prior to the industrial revolution, to about 315 PPM in 1958, to about 392 PPM today. And we know CO2 is rising above its pre-industrial norm by 7% a decade.
There's a lot of angry rhetoric on this thread. But none of it goes to the central issue. The more carbon dioxide humanity pumps into the atmosphere, the greater the interference with the Earth's natural cooling system. Not as much infrared will escape into space in the future as escaped in the past, and the retained energy will indeed warm the Earth. By an increasing amount, as CO2 levels rise.
It's too bad that naysayers can overwhelm anyone who is interested in a real dialogue. As Mann says in the article, the Hockey Stick doesn't matter any more. I remember when the naysayers were convinced that the satellite data disproved warming. Then it was revealed that a computational error in determining the decay of the satellites' orbits had masked a real warming trend. And then the warming became great enough that none of the original objections mattered at all.
I remember when we argued about whether the Northwest passage was passable. Someone argued that it had been done in the early 1900's, neglecting to point out that it took a freighter two and a half years to do so. The sports boats now do it in a couple of weeks.
But this shouldn't be about recent warming. The greenhouse impact only became distinguishable from the orbital mechanical influences in the late 1970's. What this should be about is that scientists first measured the infrared blocking properties of greenhouse gases over 154 years ago. They determined that the amount of warming would be significant in the 1930's, and they associated rising CO2 with ocean pH change in the 1950's. The problem then was that they projected the contemporary fossil fuel use to determine that atmospheric CO2 would double in about 450 years. Because of the rise of fossil fuel use and the other GHG's we're going to pass that mark later this decade.
The greatest irony here is that economics are going to solve the problem, whether or not the deniers ever learn to look beyond their circular arguments. Renewable energy is cheaper than new fossil fuels today, and energy efficiency is cheaper than using old fossil fuels. New renewables have surpassed new fossil fuels in total energy delivered both in the U.S. and globally for two years running now.
This is an excellent article. I won't take the time to debunk more of the claims. Ironically if you read the climateaudit "hide the decline" link provided by one commentor on March 20th, the climateaudit article debunks itself. You just have to know enough about tree rings to know that there are many sets and many different attemtps to synthesize them, to understand why one which didn't fit the actual modern temperature record might be discarded.
A note on the claim that Mann's work has been 'independently' replicated. If co-authors and students of Mann are excluded, I'm not aware of any independent confirmation of his work, which is a outlier study that rose to great prominence. However, it needs to be kept in mind that the key claim made by Mann's work was that it is warmer now than it was during the medieval warm period. The IPCC proxy studies cited in the last assessment report either don't cover the same time period, or actually disagree with Mann's work. Or in other words, studies produced by Mann's research team do support Mann's claims. Actual independent studies, to date, do not. One possible exception is the new Marcott paper. However that appears to be a particularly bad study that was dismantled days after publication.
This article is wrong on "Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline." Neela says that there was nothing deceptive about Mann's plotting of both proxy temperature data and instrumental temperature data on the same graph, but she neglects to mention that Mann did not just include both. He truncated the proxy records, REPLACING available proxy data with instrumental data.
The effect was to "hide the decline" in the proxy records at a time when the instrumental record showed rising temperatures. In other words, "the decline" proved that Mann's temperature proxies are actually no good as proxies. Instead of moving with instrumentally observed temperatures, they move opposite to instrumentally observed temperatures, making his entire analysis trash.
Briffa comes in only because it was Briffa's proxy reconstruction that was most egregiously truncated by Mann, who lopped Briffa's data off in 1940. Briffa's data continues (at a steep decline) for another 40 years. You can read about it at Climate Audit:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/
Mann hid data that indicated that his entire study was garbage. Seriously bad behavior, and Penn State whitewashed it, similarly to the way they looked the other way on Sandusky, and for similar reasons. Exposing the bad behavior of someone who was a high profile rainmaker for the university would weaken the rainmaker's effectiveness for the university and would reflect badly on the university. Now Neela, at Yale, is doing the same thing, though the motivation is a little more obscure.
Why the whitewash of what Mann did? Is Neela trying to protect establishment climatology as a whole (certainly the main position at Yale)? More likely she never bothered to look into the basic facts of the case and simply doesn't know what Mann actually did. Seriously bad journalism.
A thorough review on our circumstances is here, in a 24 min video from John Beddington, the senior science advisor to the UK.
http://youtu.be/c7tw9e9MoD4
In calm tones worthy of a sleepy morning talk at Hogwarts, he pretty much nails it. Get ready for an exciting ride. Notable moments: at 10:50, you get to see the UK National Risk Report, and you don't have to join MI5 to see it. From 17:40 on, he lays it on the line.
If you'd like to know what you can do, there's an excellent video from Saul Griffith, MIT PhD and Google-funded inventor, which serves as both a comprehensive explanation and a personal response:
http://vimeo.com/7081438
If you'd like to try your hand at solving the world's problems in game form, see 'Experiment 2' at John Sterman's link:
http://scripts.mit.edu/~jsterman/climate/master/
Take a deep breath before trying it.
Richard Reiss '81
The article would serve as a model for any popstar-struck teenager wanting to write a piece about the object of their affections, but it jars more than just a little here. The comments appearing below it are evidence that others were also shocked by seeing writing exhibiting so little penetration that it amounts to a dereliction of intellectual duty.
The gross and irresponsible exaggeration of our grasp of climate dynamics, and in particular of the role of rising CO2 levels, has been helped by poor quality work getting published without adequate review. It took outsiders, for example, to expose the severe flaws of the Mann et al 'hockey-stick' (see Montford's book, mentioned in a comment above, for an excellent account of this ).
This exaggeration has led to a great deal of harm to date, most especially through food prices going up thanks to bio-fuels, and its promotion has enjoyed a remarkable level of deference from journalists. There are signs that this is beginning to change. Thank goodness. It may prevent us seeing another puff-piece on climate published here.
the models are always immediately wrong.
in hindsight, after being adjusted, the models are right.
this isn't science.
Michael Mann got more than $2.4 million in grant money paid for out of the Stimulus bill, which was sold to the public as a way to create jobs by funding "shovel ready" projects. I couldn't have made that up if I tried.
What about the dozen or more published temperature reconstructions that have the same general findings as Mann's hockey stick while using various statistical methodologies? (see the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report)
This article is a disgrace. Calling it one sided is way too tame a criticism. That it uncritically toes the AGW crisis line is bad enough, but it throws out unsupported allegations of wrongdoing against those who criticize with cause the work of some of the climate scientists. It repeats false statement after false statement. I've known about the Medieval Warm Period since 1977, when it was called the Little Optimum. There are hundreds of proxy studies which show that it was real, warmer than today and world wide. Mr. Mann's work made it disappear. He's wrong, as many other people have said. Rather than show their accurate criticism, you dismiss anyone who disagrees as corrupt, greedy and the most laughable claim of all, funded by some vast but as yet uncovered fossil fuel industry. Really and truly a disgrace.
No, Mann is taking a stand AGAINST science, for propaganda in its place.
But the bigger problem is that even if everything he claims is true, he and his cohorts have not made the public policy case for crippling controls on energy use as being worth the cost--fully implement Kyoto and by the middle of the 21st century you would be delaying temperature rise by only a few months, according to the IPCC reports. The whole logic of CO2 politics is almost nonexistent except as an excuse to use the government to enrich some at teh expense of the many. Mann's prevarications would not mean so much if there weren't people like Al Gore who would use them to enrich themselves and cripple our children's futures.
No commenter has yet mentioned the book "The Hockey Stick Illusion" by A.W. Montford, http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Illusion-Climategate/dp/1906768358 - indispensable for those interested in Steve McIntyre's thorough analysis of Mann's shoddy hockey stick. It begs the question: if this is the way the "climate scientists" do science, why should we believe anything they report? Judy Curry's blog, Climate Etc., is also indispensable - for those who have hope that science can survive.
So what exactly is a "climate contrarian"? Somebody who doesn't believe in climate?
I have to say the comments section here is excellent. Usually comments are just people screaming, but all of these retorts to the alleged journalism in the article are measured in tone, and actually in aggregate include more information than the article. It's a tribute to Yale's readership.
This celebration of Mann and his obvious faux science is just an embarrassment.
But shoddy propaganda of this sort need not necessarily reflect poorly on Yale. The magazine for alum from my own alma mater, MIT, isn't worth reading, either, but the school itself remains another matter entirely.
It IS a shame that science must be defended. But it must be defended against the kind of sham "science" practiced by Mann and his ilk, and against the uncritical support his shabby claims receive from organs like this one, that used to have intellectual integrity.
The "war on climate science" the author mentions in a typical cheap shot, is being waged by the likes of Mann, who will tolerate no criticism of his data or models, who hides data that do not support his claims, exaggerates high or low (hide the decline,) lies and attacks his critics' reputations rather than ever addressing their criticisms. None of that is science. All of it is a "war" on the credibility of an area of science that has been destroyed by quaks like Mann.
Of course an organ of Yale would parrot the bien pensent party line and defend him.
The writer of this article loses credibility from the outset. This is transparently a puff PR piece for Mann, not an act of legitimate journalism. There is no effort here to scrutinize the claims and counterclaims, or to offer a fair hearing to those who disagree with Mann. It's so typical of "climate science" and the journalistic culture of sycophancy that surrounds it.
Crappy article, but without it, a great comment section would have been impossible. So that's something.
A much better photo to accompany this article would be one of Dr. Mann's fake Nobel Prize certificate. Also, the title should also be adjusted to "ridiculed" instead of "hated".
"Petrochemical interests have funded think tanks, politicians, and legal groups that seek to take apart the science and the scientists."
Not a terrible article, other than twice delegitimizing the other side by questioning their funding while failing to point out the billions of research dollars available to supporters. We would be better off if we could have more reasonable discussions, but Mann's allies are equally to blame in that regard.
Isn't "hide the decline" actually more damaging to Mann's/Briffa's work when you take it in the full context? If tree ring data don't correlate with temperature records after 1960, it brings up the question of how reliably can they be used as a proxy for temperature records at all, does it not?
If actual temperatures were higher than what tree rings would predict, doesn't that imply that, if such a divergence could also have occurred at some other time in the past, we may not have such an accurate picture of the climate in the past and the current warm temperatures could actually be not so unprecedented? Glossing over the divergence by saying "possibly due to pollution" seems to imply that things may not be so clear. What other inconsistencies might exist with, say, ice core sampling?? There may well be good answers to all of these questions, but they only come up because of that "hide the decline" email in the first place.
If we had just listened to Michael Mann 20 years ago Manhattan wouldn't be under water today.
Ms. Bannerje,
Have you read CEI and National Review's response to Mann's suit? Pretty sure that is a hypothetical question because based on this article it is self evident that you have not. CEI and NR have sought a Motion to Dismiss based on DC's Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) Law. You should read the Memorandum in Support and reevaluate this article. It seems clear that you have swallowed the Mann story line whole. Mann is the hero of his own life story.
Check it out here: http://cei.org/sites/default/files/Mann%20anti%20SLAPP%20motion.pdf
Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick showed that the biggest error was in the statistical calculations - Mann's algorythms created hockey sticks 99% of the time on random noise (see page 10)
Read "What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About"
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
Mann was not being compared to Sandusky... Penn State was being compared to Penn State.
Mann has been vilified because his math doesn't scan and because the dog ate his data.
Preposterous deceitful Yale propaganda.
I only got to the description of the incident now known as 'Climategate', with its gross mis-characterization of what actually happened.
- The information was not "hacked". It was collated, as best anyone can tell, in response to the British Equivalent of a 'Freedom of Information' request. While, apparently, the subjects of the request were quibbling about releasing it or shredding it and claiming the information didn't exist. While this was going on, persons unknown with full inside access to the data file and one of the University FTP servers placed the file in a publicly visible (readable/downloadable) folder on the server, and to everbody's surprise or chagrin, someone actually did so. Downloaded the file. Legally.
Screaming like little children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, crumbs all over, and chocolate on their faces, the best the people exposed could come up with, rather than explain their chicanery, was "we were hacked!" Wah.
After reviewing Mann's claims, that basically he could determine a single variable out of many, provided he used a limited enough sample set to match his assumptions, which are just about as scientific in nature as phrenology has really been of service to only two human beings on the planet - Al Gore, who got a Nobel Prize using Mann's 'work product' to scare people in to following him like a beloved Cassandra, and of course, Mann himself.
For the record, personally, I'm not skeptical one bit. I'm absolutely certain that children being educated a hundred years or so from now will be greatly amused or dismayed by the outright human buffoonery resulting from the charade underway, much in the same way we were amused or dismayed as youngsters upon learning of the belief that old women on the edge of town with cats were witches.
Do not submit this report for grading in any Journalism class. Bias runs rampant. A very poor showing. You besmirch the name of Yale.
Science must always be defended. Mann doesn't seem to be able to defend the "Hockey stick" which brought him to national prominence so he has passed into ad hominem and farce.
Science is the art of disbelief. If you can't prove it and your findings are not repeatable then whatever you have presented is not to believed. Mann's work has passed from nonrepeatable to disproven. Mann's reaction is not to resort his data and show how his findings were correct but to brand skeptics as "deniers." His minions show up with question begging such as "ALL MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS agree that global warming is occurring." Self evident when mainstream is defined as believers.
When scientists pass from using the scientific method to outright advocacy it is time to look extremely skeptically at all of their work and wonder what role the government has in funding their advocacy. Man has crossed this threshold. It is time for scientists to take back this discussion from hacks like Al Gore and pseudoscientific advocates like Mann.
Dr. Mann absoulutely refuses to appear in any fair, moderated debate to defend his climate conjectures or his preposterous Hockey Stick chart. Any honest scientist would be happy to defend their position. But not Mann, who always hides out from debates with well known scientific skeptics, such as Dr Richard Lindzen of M.I.T..
Mann's Hockey Stick has been so thoroughly debunked that the journal Nature was forced to issue a rare Correction — something that no journal wants to do, because a Correction indicates a lack of adequate peer review vetting.
The conjecture that human CO2 emissions cause global warming is currently being falsified by Planet Earth. There has been no global warming for sixteen (16) years now, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. That very inconvenient fact has thrown the climate alarmist crowd into fits of consternation, because Earth herself is debunking Mannian nonsense.
It turns out that honest scientific skeptics were right all along: any putative effect from human CO2 emissions is so small that it is not even measurable. A minuscule amount of warming may be occurring, but with no verifiable measurements, AGW remains a conjecture. Honest scientists would accept that fact after 16 years of no global warming, and admit that their original conjecture was faulty.
But there is too much federal grant money riding on the "climate crisis" gravy train, so rather than follow the Scientific Method, scientists keep quiet in hopes of continuing grants.
I wish that were not so. But the fact is that money has corrupted scientists: more than $100 BILLION in federal grants have been paid out since year 2000 to 'study climate change'. With so much loot at stake, who is going to tell the truth, and point out that there is nothing unusual or unprecedented occurring? Everything being observed now has happened in the past, and to a greater degree. But admitting that fact risks derailing the grant gravy train. Can't have that now, can we? Besides, the taxpayers can afford it.
"The analysis of measurements of the current spectra determined by satellite and surface instruments make it quite clear that the earth's surface is warmed much more by atmospheric carbon dioxide than by the sun."
This is a comment from an AGW supporter above. How wrong can someone be?
Years ago, I decided that Yale was second rate. Luckily for my ego, this piece certainly didn't cause me to change my mind.
I knew what I was in for when the author claimed climate skeptics hacked into UEA e-mails. The truth is we don't know who gained access to what the researchers in question had tried to keep private despite many FOIA filings, but every indication is that it was someone on the inside who played whistle blower.
Must everything simply be a whitewashing of history for the political purposes of the left?
But I do think it is rather rich that this attempt at rehabilitation comes out after the latest attempt at creating a hockey stick like graph of future temperatures has been found to be, certainly in my estimation, fraudulent. What was done to the data there, with some points being moved hundreds of years in one direction or another and others discarded without cause, would simply require a Nobel level of incompetence to arrive at unwillingly and unknowingly.
The last batch of e-mails released from Climategate make it very clear what the consensus is about Mann's infamous hockey stick. These same people were publicly saying exactly the opposite of what they were indicating in their private communications. What are we to make of the credibility of such people? What could possibly be their motivation for doing such a thing?
The state of journalism in this country is as politicized and as deep in decline as our science is. It is a pity, but this is what happens when academia is one large political indoctrination camp for one political party, there is no diversity of opinion allowed and other factors are deemed more important than the pursuit of the truth.
There is a good and important article to be written about all of these things. But this one isn't it. I wish Neela well enough that I hope she lives a long and happy life... long enough to see the foolishness of what she has written and to regret being so easily used.
After having been proved to have committed academic fraud, can he still be called as "scientist"?
I don't think so.
More self-serving refusal to address the facts from Mann.
Hey, I take exception to the notion that it is SCIENCE that must be defended! I'm a scientist, and I start by looking at the evidence. If a scientist is conducting ad hominem attacks and hiding declines, then I look to a possible cause - in this case, perhaps the "scientist" is not as confident of his position as he claims. I don't even need to read his science! There are only so many hours in the day!
These people finally got caught out and now they are trying to resurrect their reputations
Even if Mann's research were flawless-- which I am thoroughly convinced is not the case-- it is nonetheless true that the Global Warming issue is being used as a Trojan horse.
The Watermelon Left (green outside, red inside) typified by the likes of Van Jones and RFK Jr. has little real interest or skill in climatology, but a very great interest in coercive social engineering, astronomically high taxes, the perpetual aggrandizement of government, and the abandonment of free-market capitalism in favor of rent-seeking, grant-chasing, and cronyism.
These people are not just enemies of the American way of life. They are easily the most evil people in the world, if you consider the number of poor people their anti-human policies are killing by jacking up the price of food and energy. I hope to live to see them behind bars.
Calling this hagiography to Mann reporting would be like calling Gasland a public service message.
I don't think the billions spent on climate research is dwarfed by the opposition. When you claim a problem to exist, money comes available to study it. When you claim no problem exists, no money is sought. This sets up a bias to produce results convenient to continue the money flow and maintain careers that have really failed to disprove the null hypothesis. Absent that, little credence can be lent to an alternative hypothesis.
It's disturbing there has been so much manipulation of the data along with secrecy on methods and models.
The Navier Stokes differential equations describe fluid flow with changes in temperature and density. They are non-linear, chaotic with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. That means no finite set of past data is sufficient to predict distant futures. The effort to predict distant future atmosphere temperatures from past data is meaningless. This has been known since Edward Lorenz's paper in 1963
"Deterministic Aperiodic Flow".
Oh, and the Sun temperatures can also be described, but not predicted in part by the Navier Stokes equations. The Sun is much much bigger than the earth, and small changes in the sun can cause large changes in the Earth atmosphere.
Wait, you mean to say the Mann is actually going to start practicing real science?
"climate contrarians hacked into"
Um...I'm not sure that the person responsible for Climategate (not E-mailgate) was ever discovered. Thus, how could it be possible to ascertain his/her political take on the issue? Could be the person was a global warming advocate, but had a stronger allegiance to the truth getting out. That's just as valid, with the facts as are publicly known, as what the author of the article called him/her/them.
Chip Neville,
Using an off-the-rails radical like George Monbiot as your key reference in this discussion is simply not helpful. This idea of a Big Tobacco/Big Oil (did you forget Big Pharma?) - Republican/Conservative conspiracy is a liberal/left wing fantasy construct that is required in order to disparage the character of those with whom they disagree.
Dr. Mann has demonstrated that he and his AGW cronies are not simply disinterested scientists but global warming crusaders cloaked in scientific garb. Based upon the hacked emails referenced in this article, Dr. Mann et. al. refuse to make available the data behind their AGW "findings," conspired to censor opposing research in scientific journals, coordinated research in order to be consistent with each other, etc. Taken in, or out, of context, these emails referencing this type of scurrilous activity by Dr. Mann are incredibly damning to his crusade and fatally damaged his credibility.
The amount of money that "Big Oil" spent to sponsor American Geophysical Union's annual meeting is dwarfed by the money spent to promote Dr. Mann's AGW industry. It is every government and bureaucrat's dream to be able to tax and regulate carbon, which enables them to basically control a major portion of our lives and to raise billions of carbon-tax revenues to further expand their control.
People don't have a problem with Dr. Mann's science per se. They do have a major problem when supposedly "neutral" scientists subvert such science in the name of crusading for an emotionally-driven cause.
The subtitle "Michael Mann is taking a stand for science" is laughably at odds with the content of the article. It would have been nice if Ms. Banerjee had included scientists (not political bloggers) as a counterpoint to Mann's assertions. Those in opposition are not so hard to find...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Ostensibly an account of scurrilous attacks against "science" by right-wing extremists, but in reality, those waging war on science are precisely Mann and his fellow IPCC collaborators. Nice that the girl sourced her article by interviewing the very perpetrator of malfeasance, that has had to be repaired through severe walk-backs of his now discredited "hockey stick" by responsible scientists. I won't even go into the lies and who is really the purveyors. All in all, so very Yalie of you.
Stick to the science and you will find that AGW is a real concern but that Michael Mann has fudged the data...and that's being charitable to Mann.
Desertfile,
It is not a shame that science must be defended. You would rather science be accepted on blind faith? The fact is, Mann has been discredited. They hid data, they manipulated data, and they data mined proxies to fit their funding. I'm not surprised that this puff piece was written by someone who works for the LA Times and lives in DC. DC is the source of the funding for this pseudo science as government aims to grow the beast with carbon taxes, and the LA times is filled with environmental extremists who drink the kool aide.
Here is what one real scientist has had to say:
The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
http://www2.ljworld.com/weblogs/science-becoming-religion/2010/oct/9/physics-professor-emetitu/
The most important of the paleoclimate reconstructions produced by Dr Mann and colleagues was published in the prominent journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA" on Sept. 2, 2008 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105). An expanded version of this work appeared in the US's #1 science journal, "Science," on Nov. 27, 2009 (doi: 10.1126/science.1177303). Both articles are heavily cited in the peer-reviewed literature and the general press.
The "hockey stick" shape of the reconstructions in these two articles is entirely dependent on the inclusion of a single data set: measurements of sediment cores from Lake Korttajarvi in Southern Finland that were reported by geologist Mia Tiljander in 2003 (doi: 10.1111/j.1502-3885.2003.tb01236.x).
If the "Tiljander proxies" are excluded, none of the analytical procedures in Mann et al (PNAS, 2008) or Mann et al (Science, 2009) return a hockey-stick shape with statistical significance.
Three points to consider. (1) Tiljander noted that her dataset was unsuitable for use as a climate proxy after about 1720, since land-use changes and water pollution overwhelmed any climate signals in the 19th and 20th centuries.
(2) The PNAS and the Science papers used two of the Tiljander proxies in an inverted (upside-down) orientation, with respect to the interpretation that Tiljander gave to them. This ad hoc decision was likely the result of ignorance and carelessness on the part of Dr Mann and his coauthors.
(3) In interviews, at his blog, and in his book, Dr Mann "neither confirms nor denies" the interpretations I have presented in this comment.
It seems that the author of this Yale Alumni Magazine article, Neela Banerjee, didn't know enough to recognize the relevance of this matter to her thesis, and thus to solicit Dr Mann's views. That's too bad.
I see what he did there, tried to claim he had come from a sceptical position originally and that it was the science that turned him into a believer(sorry had to say it because the name calling started with climate contrarian). Guess what, I also came from his position of sceptic and was eventually swayed to believe by the science I was feed via gore. I then looked at the actual data and over time had to become sceptical again. This is not flip flopping, I was dealing with what ever info was put in front of me at the time and adjusting for what I believe to be fact. Mann should try it. The MWP was global and hotter than now, so there. No cooling for at least 16 years min, so there. The planet is in a net greening or a positive LAI(leaf area index), plants are loving the extra co2, so there. The Argo ocean temps show no warming, so there. The so called acidification of the oceans uses the word acid to scare, really it is still base and will be well with in the thresholds for sea life so there. The IPCC SREX report says probably hasn't been nor will be extreme weather outside the norms, so there. http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/ na na nananan you bloody AGW ninkumpoops, I'm a layman so like to resort to names sometimes ;P
You forgot to mention Steve McIntyre:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/13/centre-of-the-storm/
Update to my comments re Larry Logan and others below: See these articles in the New York Times and Wired Magazine:
"In Search of Energy Miracles," by Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 11, 2013 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/science/in-search-of-energy-miracles.html
This is a description of Chinese thorium Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) initiative and Bill Gates traveling wave reactor (TWR) effort, with an analysis of the best public strategy to follow in developing new energy sources to wean us off of fossil fuels. If you want this country to be importing needed nuclear technology from China in 20 years, just keep on denying climate change and blocking research on new energy technologies.
"China Takes Lead in Race for Clean Nuclear Power," by Richard Martin, Wired Magazine, February 1, 2011 at
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/
This is a more thorough description of the Chinese thorium Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) initiative.
This is a response to Larry Logan. Obviously, I disagree with his assessment of Michael Mann and mainstream climate science. But his list of extreme weather events which haven't increased in frequency is correct. In fact, it is still a topic of dispute among MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS as to whether global warming will eventually produce more extreme weather events, like more hurricanes. The point is that ALL MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS agree that global warming is occurring, that it is caused by excess carbon dioxide and -- new! hot off the press -- black carbon (soot) emissions. All mainstream climate scientists agree that the bell curve of temperatures has been shifted towards hotter events, that is there are many more extremely hot days than there used to be, and many fewer extremely cold days. But they disagree as to whether this trend will eventually produce more hurricanes and tornadoes.
Finally, Judith Curry, whom he criticizes for "marginalizing" Richard A. Muller's methodology in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, is a coauthor of Muller's on several recent papers from that project. However, she disagrees with one of his recent papers. Mr. Logan, you need to stop reading blogs and start reading some of the scientific papers. Muller's and Curry's are good ones to begin with.
Micheal Mann is a great climate scientist, and both Yale and Penn State can be proud of him. Unlike a number of your commenters, I actually know something about climate science. (Truth in advertising: I make no claims to actual professional knowledge; I have never done stuff like contributing to a climate model or doing a paleoclimate study.) But I would prefer to talk about the politics. As far back as 1998, the New York Times reported that a group of "Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science." And guess where they met? The Washington Office of the American Petroleum Institute. In fact, there is extensive documentary evidence that the informal coalition of "big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations" had deep links with the tobacco companies and their "Doubt is our product" campaign, which attempted to convince the public that the evidence against smoking was based on shaky science. George Monbiot has documented this, and you can find a summary plus references to Monbiot's writings in a piece I wrote on global warming for my Yale classes 50th reunion, posted on the Yale class of 1962's website at http://www.alumninet.yale.edu/classes/yc1962/50page2.html#hot. You can also find there an explanation of the science behind global warming. And kudos to Bill Everett above for a nice short summary of the science.
By the way, I went back to some of the original documents and verified that what Monbiot says is true. It is not a paranoid left wing conspiracy theory; there is extensive documentary evidence. And the publicly available "Washington Roundtable" seminars of the usually conservative Marshall Institute provide more documentation. You can find a good discussion in my web piece.
The role of greenhouse gases in determining the climate of a planet with an atmosphere has been an area of scientific study for almost two centuries. The spectrum of radiant energy entering the earth system from space (predominantly from the sun) is measured by satellites. The spectrum of radiant energy leaving the earth system is measured by satellites. The spectrum of radiant energy reaching the earth's surface is measured by instruments on the surface. Analyzing energy spectra has long been a standard procedure in science going back to the days of Isaac Newton. The analysis of measurements of the current spectra determined by satellite and surface instruments make it quite clear that the earth's surface is warmed much more by atmospheric carbon dioxide than by the sun.
No one with any experience of complex systems can regard the human transfer of thousands of gigatons of carbon from the lithosphere into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide without great concern for the major shift that would undoubtedly occur in the earth's climate. A similar transfer of lithospheric carbon to atmospheric carbon occurred about 50 million years ago. Humans are currently doing over a few hundred years what Nature did over a few thousand years way back then. Back then ocean surface temperatures went over 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Understanding that land temperatures vary much more than ocean surface temperatures (the difference between a continental climate and a maritime climate illustrates this point), I don't want to leave a world to my children and grandchildren that is on the fast track to a repetition of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
What did the police find? Not this, however he is just a victim of a changing climate."when climate contrarians hacked into a group of scientists’ e-mails, took them out of context, and made them a cause célèbre". Hey "Eco Righter", how do you fuel your Prius or Volt? Ever hear of Wegman?
Desertphile,
With even a minuscule of research by the article's writer, it would be evident that Mann has been thoroughly discredited from a scientific point of view. The 'hockey stick' is in shambles. Mann's research has been well shown to be 'cooked.'
His most recent presentation to the AGU didn't show any data beyond 2005, even though the data is readily available. Why not? The OBSERVED (not modeled) data doesn't support him.
Mann is not defending science. He is defending Mann. You merely have to do more research on his actions.
The shift has already occurring away from Mann and in emails his fellow scientists feel he's been a lightening rod for all that is wrong with AGW. But you must understand that Mann has built a 'machine' of PR, and universities that use him as a rain maker for millions in grants aren't excited about piercing the image.
Yale's own department has become somewhat of a joke, similar to pronouncements as with Dr. Affek, as above. (Why was Muller interviewed? He has been marginalized for his methodoly by even 'neutral' scientists such as Judith Curry.) Mann probably sent the writer to interview Santer -- but Santer has NOT found the missing fingerprint and Santer was shown in Climategate emails to be a similar hard-knuckler who threatens editors and others.
The article is very disappointing from lack of deeper research. And note:
§ US floods have not increased over a century or longer (same globally).
§ US hurricane landfall frequency or intensity have not increased (in US for over a century or longer).
§ US intense hurricane landfalls are currently in the longest drought (7 years+) ever documented.
§ US tornadoes, especially the strongest ones, have not increased since at least 1950.
§ US drought has decreased since the middle of the past century.
§ US East Cost Winter Storms show no trends.
§ Disaster losses normalized for societal changes show no residual trends(US, other regions or globally).
Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, Colorado State
Obviously a one-sided article presenting Mann's point of view. Unfortunately the money is on the side of the global warmers, not the skeptics. The real story is that skeptics with little or no money have put the brakes on climate hysteria. The idea that fossil fuel money is fueling skepticism is just plain false. The oil companies give money to the climate alarmists. A few years ago Exxon was the biggest supporter of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting.
The "science" behind climate alarmism is computer models that everyone agrees leave a lot to be desired and that disagree between themselves by wide margins.
Nice puff piece. You made a lot of claims though, you might do your due diligence and find out if any of them are true. Eg, a steady average worldwide temperature? Not hardly. Have you heard of an ice age? The little ice age, medieval warming, etc, etc.
And you should try reading Mann's book. He accuses his detractors of doing exactly what he does in the book. If anyone is guilty of name calling, its Mann himself.
This is an excellent article: thank you. It's a shame that in the USA science must still be defended.