Readers may recall the strange series of events leading up to the post facto revisionism at the Vail Daily News when Dr. Michael Mann sent an angry reply letter to the newspaper and then the original letter from Dr. Hertzberg disappeared then reappeared sans a couple of paragraphs that Dr. Mann didn’t like.
Dr. Hertzberg sent this letter to me today, while at the same time sending it to the Vail Daily News. I reproduce it here in entirety, with no edits or changes of any kind.
Response to Michael Mann
When Scott Glasser’s comment of 9/26/11 referred to me indirectly as an “inaccurate” and “irresponsible” “fool” for challenging the theory that human carbon dioxide emission was causing “global warming / climate change”, I felt compelled to respond. My 9/30/11 comment cited the facts and the data that supported my challenge to the theory. In that article, Glasser defended what has been come to be known as the Mann “hockey stick” curve. I responded in my article with the well documented criticism of it from a large number of scientists who carefully reviewed his claims. Also, the so-called “climategate” e-mails revealed an appalling lack of scientific integrity and manipulations by a cabal of advocates of that theory. Mann responded on 10/1/11 accusing me of “false and defamatory statements” packed with “lies and distortions”; of “lying to the public about science”; of a “string of lies tied together”. He stated my “lies are pernicious” and that I am a “charleton”.
In his response, Mann uses an ad-hominem overkill accusing me of lies and lying some six times! Methinks he doth protest too much.
When I am engaged in a scientific dispute with an adversary, and that opponent instead of citing the facts or the data that might support his argument, instead directs an intense barrage of ad-hominem slurs toward me, I am fully confident that I am winning the argument.
My response now is to cite the data. The IPCC report of 1990 prior to Mann’s publication of his “hockey stick” showed a Medieval Warm Period considerably warmer than today with its peak temperature in about 1250 AD. That was followed by a Little Ice Age considerably colder than today with its coldest average temperature in about 1700. Mann’s “hockey stick” curve shows a flat line temperature during those same periods. It finally got rid of the embarrassing Medieval Warm Period that the “climategate” cabal hated so much because it showed a higher temperature than today at a time when the human emission of carbon dioxide was trivial. The more recent and reliable reconstruction for the same time period using 18 other different temperature proxies that are much more reliable than tree rings, reaffirm the 1990 IPCC report. The pesky Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that Mann obliterated with his “hockey stick” are still there!
For a detailed look at that data and much more, go to www.youtube.com and enter “climategate” and “hertzberg” in the search column. For a more detailed discussion of the “hide the decline” issue, go to Prof. Richard Muller’s talk on the subject at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk.
In any case, don’t take the word of someone like me who Mann characterized as a “charleton”. Here is the much earlier opinion of a distinguished Australian scientist, John Daly:
“The evidence is overwhelming from all corners of the world, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age clearly show up in a variety of proxy indicators, proxies more representative of temperature than inadequate tree ring data.”
“What is disquieting about the hockey stick is not its original publication. As with any paper, it would sink into oblivion if found to be flawed. Rather it was the reaction of the greenhouse industry to it – the chorus of approval, the complete lack of critical evaluation of the theory, the blind acceptance of evidence that was so flimsy. The industry embraced the theory for one reason and one reason only – it told them exactly what they wanted to hear.”
Not long after those comments were written, John Daly died. In one of the climategate e-mails, his death is mentioned as a kind of fortunate occurrence, some “cheering news” that removed one of their adversaries.
So much for scientific integrity!
Dr. Martin Hertzberg
Ph. D. Stanford, 1959
www.explosionexpert.com
Richard Telford.
Thank you for once again demonstrating the ‘thought’ processes that underpin Warmism.
So, it’s perfectly ok for the climategang to extrapolate global temperatures from a mish-mash of tree ring proxies with bits of other records grafted on….perfectly OK…but the MWP which is historically recorded (See Danish National Museum’s description of Greenland settlements etc etc) why, that’s not OK!
Tsk…Richard, the thing about ‘real’ science (as opposed to climate science) is that you’re not allowed to just …. make stuff up.
Quack Quack!
the truth will out. well done for actually revealing that fact.
Richard Telford can’ardly reason anymore, due to cognitive dissonance. Poor sod.
davidmhoffer says:
October 5, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Steptoe Fan;
i want nothing less than a judgement at Nuremberg.
I’m mad as you know what about the corruption in climate science, but comparing that to the Nuremberg trials is over the top. The Michaell Mann’s of the world may have been guilty of promoting falsehoods in the name of science, but that hardly compares to the plotting and carrying out of plans to herd millions of people into death camps and systematically murder them.
Steptoe Fan is merely turning the CAGW cheerleaders talk back onto them.
From George Monbiot’s book “Heat”, published in 2006:-
When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
I think it’s about for Dr.Mann to call his shrink. He has major mental problems…
The only lying charlatan here is Mann not Dr. Hertzberg.
Thank you Dr. Hertzberg for a clear and concise answer to Mann’s ridiculous claims.
Perry says:
October 6, 2011 at 12:36 am
Mann seems as cavalier with his spelling as with his facts. I draw your attention to charleton, which as any person with one iota of education knows; the word is charlatan. Dr. Martin Hertzberg nails it well with his use of quotation marks around the offensive utterance.
As spellcheckers are ubiquitous, Mann’s distain to use basic technology, is yet more evidence that he believes he is endowed with a Pope’s infallibility on such religious matters as AGW.
What a plonker!
———————————————————————————-
Perry, would that be disdain for basic technology?
By the way, it looks like Mann has so much money in his bank balance that he’s unconcerned
with the prospect of a libel court case.
richard trelford
if ‘only a fool or a fraud would argue that natural climate variability in a single small country represents natural variability over the whole globe’
what type of person would claim that evidence from a few tree rings would do the same ?
Vail publishes it… http://www.vaildaily.com/ARTICLE/20111005/LETTER/111009946/
It was not a strange situation at all for a newspaper to remove potentially libellous material from its website.
I find it very amusing when people look back with such fondness on the single temperature reconstruction shown in the 1990 IPCC report. In science, a lot of things change in 21 years. Dark energy, which makes up 75% of the universe, was undiscovered. So why do you think that single graph was somehow unimpeachably correct? Data moves on. Techniques move on. Knowledge moves on. It has been superseded. It was in fact not a global reconstruction but only regional – central England specifically.
Yes, there was a mediaeval warm period. No, it was probably not warmer, globally, then than it is now. Even if it was, it would not make a particularly huge difference to our prevailing understanding of the effect of infrared absorption on the energy balance of the atmosphere.
Mann is the closest adherent to the political spin advice: “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations”.
It always fails eventually, but it takes a long time.
Pat refers to – 5 Oct: Vancouver Sun: Randy Boswell: Climate change eradicating Arctic’s oldest ice
It is interesting how NSIDC spin things. This summer has seen a sizeable increase in 3 year ice which bodes well for 4 + 5 year ice in the next 2 years.So what do NSIDC say?
“The oldest, thickest (5 years+) has continued to decline”
As most MYI disappeared in 2008 it is hard te see what other direction this could take.
Canard, eh Telford? Does that go for the Bronze Age climatic optimum as well? Or the Roman period warming? You’re on a loser mate – you already know that, hence the utter and evident desperation in your tone and attitude. Mann has been systematically discredited, repeatedly, over a number of issues, including Climategate and his narcissistic and pathetically childish responses to any attempt to obtain his supposed ‘evidence’ or even to discuss his ideas. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? All his actions show a man who’s neither a real scientist nor a mature adult.
This only amplifies why we must separate anthropogenic global warming
from Mann-made global warming.
Micheal Mann is behaving like any arrogant individual whose expertise is shown to be wanting. The world is generally turning its thumbs down to the idea of AGW theory as they find out more about the weak nature of the assumptions it is built on and the manipulations of the organizations that support it.
Well done Sir, I congratulate you on your measured response.
A charlatan often uses such a word to divert attention from his own endeavours, he is making a million dollars plus a year,
Madeoff went to gaol I seem to recall.
Perhaps he had cheese on the mind; he (Mann) certainly had the whine …
charleton – urban dictionary
.
T.C. says:
October 5, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Bzzt. Circulation is not “page views”.
What you want is the number of people who have read this Web page. That’s quite a bit lower than the number of page views of this page, and that is quite a higher than the number of people who have read this page.
Start with 100,000 page views per day here, divide by the number of posts per day, divide by (1 + reloads/per reader) and then you’ll have a semi-decent number for WUWT.
You can also try computing the number of page views of the Vail Daily News. Take the circulation, multiply it by the number of issues published, then by the average number of pages, then by the percentage of pages actually viewed by readers, and by the number of readers per copy printed.
I wasn’t aware that the climategate emails revealed a reference to Daly’s death as “cheering news”. What a bunch of schmucks.
The “greenhouse industry” is a great term. An interesting oxymoron.
Did the Vail Daily News print this response?
Mann is never wrong. He wasn’t referring to Dr. Hertzberg as a “charlatan”, he was calling him a “Charleton”, which we all know is “a civil parish in the English county of Devon”–a witty and devestating insult.
Take that you Shropshires!
The Nuremberg trial rhetoric may be a little over the top, but when one looks closely at the impacts the policies of the Hanson’s of the world advocate, it may be by very little over the top. The deaths that would result from deindustrialization would dwarf those caused by the axis powers in the 1939-1945 global warfare. Our medical infrastructure would collapse. Our agricultural infrastructure would collapse. Indeed our societies themselves would collapse. A city can not feed itself. It relies on the mechanized agriculture to provide its food, and that relies on fossil fuels. If everyone were forced to grow their own food to survive, a billion or more people would probably starve. All over a hoax bought by people craving power.
Of course politicians would never let it go that far. They would simply use the “crisis” to consolidate power and repeal individual freedoms. Then they would redistribute the energy resources to their favored crony groups, and leave the rest of us as beggars or slaves. At that point they would cast aside the useful idiot “climate scientists” and rule as they wish as all idealist totalitarians always do. Animal Farm was an excellent primer on human nature – it seems to be the pattern that emerges when “our betters” rise up to rule us.
In a reply to fluid dynamicist David Young at RC Gavin Schmidt said:
“This kind of forecast doesn’t depend too much on the models at all – it is mainly related to the climate sensitivity which can be constrained independently of the models (i.e. via paleo-climate data),”
Does thIs include the hockey stick and other tree ring “paleo-climate data”?
“charleton” – I assume this is the opposite of charlatan, which obviously best describes Mann himself. Either that, or Mann’s spelling is as bad as his ‘science’.
char·la·tan (shär l -t n). n. A person who makes elaborate, fraudulent, and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge; a quack or fraud. …
Richard Telford,
Given all the work on climate that has occurred since 1990, I can see some merit in the claim that Lamb’s groundbreaking work is now a bit quaint and primitive. Entirely independent of that, the Hockey Stick is quite controversial and no one who has objectively read the critical M&M papers, and the responses to those papers, should have any confidence in it. If we can declare a draw on those points, can you provide links or your own narrative as to why you think that there is serious doubt that the MWP and LIA were global phenomena?