Some Christmas gift notes for Dr. Michael Mann

As reported this past weekend, we had a hilarious case of Mann overboard! Since then, it has become the #1 story on WordPress worldwide. It stems from a $10 calendar from COSTCO I sent Dr. Mann, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Dr. Peter Gleick and Dana Nuccitelli of “Skeptical Science” as Christmas gifts. As I said then, a little good humor didn’t work on the humorless.

Not content to simply stay quiet or just admit he went overboard in his claims while the world laughs at his reactions, he goes further with this latest Tweet:

A few notes for Dr. Mann:

1. I never received $88K. The project it was for was to be funded in two stages, only the first stage has been funded. The second stage never materialized, mainly because I haven’t asked for it, I’m still working on getting phase 1 finished so I can show results. Note that the money didn’t come from Heartland per se, they only found a private donor for me.

See this (in comments for the original story via Roger Knights who explained it well):

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Here’s the background on the Anthony/Heartland deal, which has been posted in one form or another widely enough that warmists ought to know about it. Watts isn’t paid for his blogging. A Heartland document describes a request he made last year for funding for a different project:

“Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011. The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.”

Watts later reported on the progress of this project. Most of the money, apparently, will go to a contract programmer and for equipment and internet fees:

“Using the funds provided with the help of Heartland’s private donor, I hired a specialist programmer familiar with NOAA systems to trap and convert the NOAA sat feed data to look like any other hourly station (like ASOS hourly stations at airports etc) so that we’d be able to start the visualization and comparison process. This is just one phase of the project before it is ready for public consumption. When finished, there will be a website free and open to the public that will allow tracking and visualization of temperatures from the CRN right alongside that of the regular surface network”

See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/07/an-update-on-my-climate-reference-network-visualization-project/

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And the fabricated documents (which Dr. Mann apparently still thinks is factual) which lead to the sort of misinformation Dr. Mann uses, are here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/02/global-warming-alarmists-resort-to-hoax.php

Some early output from the data visualization of the project are here:

and here:

Note that’s not a complete output, just two samples of many. The project is still not complete as any technical person who has done such projects knows, monkey wrenches and hurdles abound in the best made plans.

2. Dr. Mann, as a scholar of this debate, you should know by now that facts surrounding the Koch involvement with Heartland (stolen by his own admission and leaked by your buddy Dr. Peter Gleick) was $25K, and it was designated for a health care project.

See this via Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, emphasis mine:

But not a full understanding of those documents, because the memo made curious errors. Most notably, it claimed that the Koch foundation had given $200,000 in 2011, when the actual number was $25,000 ($200,000 is what Heartland’s fundraising document indicates they hoped to get in 2012)–and since that money was donated for Health Care News, Heartland’s health care newsletter, it’s hard to see why it would show up in the climate strategy document, rather than, say, a document about their health care strategy.  Given other anomalies surrounding the document, it seemed to me very likely that whoever had phished the authenticated board package had been disappointed by the lack of sizeable contributions from Big Oil and the Kochs, and so had written the memo to make sure that the documents told a nice, neat story about corruption and secrecy, rather than a boring, equivocal story about an issue advocacy organization with a spot of budget trouble.

Dr. Mann, please do show how this Koch donation for health care somehow found its way to me or kindly shut your π hole.

3.  As for the money from the calendar itself, it came from my personal credit/debit card as I previously demonstrated:

In essence, all WUWT readers funded it, because that debit card has a balance on it from previous calendar sales. It is used to pay COSTCO for producing and shipping the calendars, something that was obviously beyond Dr. Mann’s comprehension based on his initial reaction.

4. As Tom Nelson pointed out, similar questions could be asked of you:

Twitter / MichaelEMann: #WUWT minions out to defend …

#WUWT minions out to defend #Watts against having spent any of his 88K from #Heartland (i.e. #Koch et al) on calendar. So how did he spend?

Hey Michael: How did you spend the income from your climate hoax books?

And…

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