By Chris Horner, ATI
Michael Mann made his way back to the Commonwealth of Virginia yesterday to watch his U.S. lawyer reprise the dark conspiracy theories previously weaved throughout his Canadian lawsuit against Tim Ball for repeating the old joke about “belong[ing] in the State Pen, not Penn State”.
The forum was a hearing in the American Tradition Institute’s Freedom of Information Act (VA) case against the University of Virginia (UVa) for certain records sent to or from Mann accounts while he was at UVa. That period is when the chatter about deleting records to circumvent FOI laws and other wagon-circling took place among the self-appointed “Hockey Team”.
That sort of paranoia sounded even worse in the spoken word that it reads in a brief. The judge gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head when my colleague David Schnare wondered aloud, when his turn came, about responding to all of the ad hominem. Enough already, this gesture seemed to say.
The Court allowed Mann to enter as an intervenor in this dispute, from the bench and without explanation. So there’s little we can offer there except that, when all is considered, this does provide the Court with the path of fewest problems (though hardly none, if Mann’s record in pleadings and argument is any basis to judge by; possibly some allies will try and delay matters yet again when we next proceed).
Given Mann’s argument was almost entirely limited to a vast right-wing conspiracy if one involving some names I’d never even heard of and in an apparently studious avoidance of the applicable law, we can only surmise the rationale for this move was grounded in equities found elsewhere than that curious display.
ATI opposed Mann’s motion to intervene simply because he offered no principled basis to intervene. We will appeal therefore with an eye toward settling the question as to what rights, or other considerations, justify a faculty member’s intervention in a FOIA case. For now we welcome Mann to this case to defend the content of his emails in a public forum. Presumably, just more conspiracy theorizing won’t suffice anymore.
We then proceeded to UVa’s effort to reopen the Protective Order, seeking to substitute themselves for us as the party reviewing and selecting exemplar emails from the cache they now admit to possessing. That it would be reopened was pro forma after Mann was deemed to have interests at stake, if what these interests are was left unstated.
The Court noted the distrust between the parties, particularly ours of UVa after all of what they have done, and so did not allow UVA to assume that role. This was despite that in advance they and Mann had agreed to jointly stipulate to this (his lawyer’s rather odd, earlier argument notwithstanding, see below).
But, as we argued, UVa’s utterly terrible record on this matter does not inspire confidence that a fair review and representative sample is to be had from them. Their ill-fit for the newly adopted pose of independent arbiter is somewhat betrayed by their legal bills fighting the AG’s Civil Investigative Demand now heading toward a million dollars. Then there is the enormous pressure from their faculty and pressure groups — which they finally copped to, after arguing previously in pleadings that this was all in our heads. Speaking of its track record.
And, finally, UVa has essentially the same interest as Mann at stake and is no more a suitable arbiter than Mann himself (per Mann, that’s “embarrassment”). To say UVa is aggressively focused on limiting the damage of what occurred in its program, with still not a finger toward self-policing lifted to date, is also something of an understatement.
So we have until a scheduled December 20 hearing to agree to a third party reviewer, cost and methodology. If we cannot agree the court will impose a process.
Toward that end, Mann’s attorney informed the Court that, well, Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received, thereby not only raising questions about his correspondents but making his future objections as to reviewers something less than entirely relevant or credible.
Cost is to be split at worst three ways, one presumes. Mann is surely going to be raising money for this. So, we won’t be shy, either. We can’t match the cool million the University of Virginia is pouring into their effort to make the embarrassment the revelations in ClimateGate emails to and from Mann’s UVa accounts has caused them go away. But every little bit helps.
IPCC reliability index WGI > WGII > WGIII >> WGIV
Davidmhoffer:
Another example of Spencer debunked. Spencer and Christy got the arithmatic wrong and sat temps. Skilled climate scientits found and corrected the error. After leaving false information hanging around , Spencer finally surrendered and corrected his work. Now that’s a debunk. Mann? Hasn’;t happened.
Trenberth didn’t need to shred Spencer’s paper. Lots of shredding was done onlots of blogs and not a Trenberth in sight. Is this the type of fact that is coming out in alternate information sources to which you refer.
You seem to think that Trenberth was resposible for Spencer writing a fataly flawed paper. No Spencer was.
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
Dr. Scott,
You do realize that if your linked reconstruction was accurate it would imply an extreme climate sensitivity….right?
Pretty sure I’ve sen multiple commenters on this site state that they don’t disagree that the world is warming or that the radiative properties of CO2 do contribute to a greenhouse effect. They say these basic facts aren’t disputed, it is simply a question of how much the earth warms in response to a change in radiative balance and all suggestions otherwise are straw men.
John McManus/rumleyfips said:
“Just because McIntyre is not competent to write an programme with this much material does not reflect on Mann.”
Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.
William M. Conolley: Louis Hooffstetter said: Finding out what Mann said is the point of the lawsuit…
You replied: Err, no. What Mann *actually* said is the point at issue.
Reading your convoluted logic is like watching someone stab their eyes out. It’s senseless and almost too painful to watch.
“Mann’s trick of grafting the instrumental record to his proxy record was intended to hide the fact that the treemometers can’t be relied on…” – REP
So why then is ‘the divergence problem’ openly documented in the scientific literature? Why has it been the subject of presentations at high profile conferences? It’s not a secret. It’s not being hidden.
Nor is there any expectation in scientific writing that rejected parts of a data series or other extraneous bumpf should be detailed in a paper or plotted in a graph not specifically about rejecting parts of said data series (see Effective Writing. Improving Scientific, Technical and Business Communication – Turk and Kirkman).
There is still no crime. ‘Hide the decline’ is nothing but a strongly cured kipper. You should neither allow yourself to fall for it or, worse, perpetuate the myth in the hope of tricking others.
And given that there is no crime, the burning desire to snoop through someone’s socks and knickers draw in case they’re part of a communist plot is really kinda creepy.
Best,
Jay
Louis:
I didn’t say code. I said methods.
When the Muir Inquirey wanted to check the instrumental data, they read the methods and wrote their own code ( remember they are scientists). They didn’t run about wriging their hands demanding someone do their thinking for them; they took personal responsibility.
Much more convincing to do your own work without cribbing isn’t it?
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
@- Louis Hooffstetter says: November 4, 2011 at 10:37 am
“Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.”
Not sure why you would want to mess around with data and code over a decade out of date to ‘verify’ the results of a paper that has not only been confirmed but significantly improved upon by more recent work…
But try this link for the code and data –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/codes/WA_original.tar
Let us know how you get on with it, if you have any problems this might help –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/CODES_MBH.html
“The New York Times (Inadvertently) Demolishes Mann’s Defence”
“Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. “The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found,” said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well.” […]”
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-new-york-times-inadvertently-demolishes-manns-defence/
If noone’s seen it
“There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish.” – Frank Zappa
Rabbit says-
“Let us assume … ”
Exactly. We have to assume. Some of us, based partly upon the ‘rigorous’ defence of the hokey stick by all you big guns visiting this thread and the continued, costly refusal to disclose … well, anything pertinent wrt the reasoning, collaboration and methodology that produced said stick, assume the worst.
Because it really is simple.
If your heroes just showed their work, before, during or even after they ask the modern world to spend it’s diminishing wealth by further investigation of their demons’ characteristics, pursuing those monsters and killing them, there would not be this sticky mess for us to wade through and all you sploogemops would be doing something other than chasing those of us who are asking that a modicum of method is applied to your heroes’ guesswork in the vanishing hope that there be some there there.
A smidgeon, tad or splinter of evidence that current or projected concentrations of CO2 in atmosphere will cause the calamities you require us to bend to your will to avoid.
Your lacking that evidence (not the endless junk referenced at numberwatch.co.uk ) may well be the cause of your initially amusing contortions and the increasingly vile attacks on those of us that are attempting to make some sense of your runaway fears.
Most probably because, contrary to your false assertions, the results of the paper were not “confirmed” and were not “significantly improved upon by more recent work”, and are the subject of a state legislative inquiry and a state prosecutorial inquiry into its propriety with respect to fraud in the awarding of taxpayer funded grants.
You sound very very confused, talking about code, methods, the Muir Inquiry and they’re being scientists. Have you perhaps been taking walks on the other side of Alice’s mirror?
D. Patterson:
What does a self serving investigation by a small time political hack have to do with scientific accuracy?
No confusion, just amusement.
If you think that only one code will do for any particular problem , you don’t understand . Give a bunch of data and pose a question ( method) to a bunch of programmers and you will get a bunch of different programming ( code) back. All of it will work but in the end only one will be chosen for reasons of cost, speed, personal bias etc.
Take a look at Smokie’s beloved spaghetti graph. One question, a bunch of data and some programmers. The code is different in each case ( different approaches) but the results are similar. That’s because it is the data that determines the result not the adherenceof line by line code to the whims of an auditor.
I mentioned Muir because “skeptics” whined about not having Jones” etc. code for years. Muir didn’t even ask. They are scientists: they did their own programming and then compared the results with Jones etc. An excellent way to verify; much better than auditing each fly speck on 40 year old fortran punch cards, dripping with mold and half eaten by mice.
Keep your stick on the ice.
John McManus
rumleyfips,
I don’t know how to help you. The pages worked in my browser first time. I’m running Firefox 7.0.1 on Win7 Ultimate.
We can’t swap email addy’s due to policy here, so if you or anyone knows of a nice free file-sharing website I could upload to that will link for public access let me know.
The first word doc of emails has some interesting comments::
Kept this email because it identifies may of Mann’s email contacts.
From (S_F___________-000000000005) 02-01-2002_18:14:01_
From: “Rxxx Sxxxx”
To: “Rxxx Sxxxx”
Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: Ah – another virus, yet easy to remedy
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 14:11:46 -0400
I assume this is from schnare and co.
Harvesting emails for more FOIs?
A number of family members have served in law enforcement careers ranging from municipal police officers and state police officers to state prison wardens. Their tales about the stupidity of criminals have one common theme. The criminals typically think they are cleverer than most everyone else, more brazen than their victims, and inevitably commit the stupidest of errors which get them caught sooner or later. It’s like the bankrobber who orders the bank teller to hand over the cash, but gives his driver’s license when the teller insists upon having some identification before writing the withdrawal receipt.
Likewise with embezzlers, who ought to know a routine audit is liable to expose the embezzlement scheme before the funds can be returned or the embezzlement can be hidden. Some scientists have typically enjoyed a virtual license to commit fraud with grant awards for many many years now. Too often law enforcement has refused to even contemplate the investigation of such fraud, much less prosecute even some of the most egregious examples of such fraud. Nonetheless, some scientists have managed to outstrip the patience of even the most lethargic and reluctant government prosecutors and courts, and convictons for a number of felonies by scientists have occurred. Few of those prosecutions have occurred without their defenders decrying an infringement upon certain unique privileges scientists effectively claim to belong to them above and beyond the law. Like the banrobbers self-incriminating themselves to the bank teller and the embezzlers leaving behind their fraudulent bookkeeping records, they always have a blizzard of pitiful excuses why they committed no crime or the crime they committed was not serious enough for them to be held seriously accountable and punishable for their actions.
It is remarkable to note how the defenders of Mann are so quick to declare with righteous indignation that “there is no crime” at the very hint of any form of inquiry. It is remarkable in one respect because the British government has already acknowledged the deliberate refusal to release the Climategate e-mail constituted a violation of their FOIA laws, but the violation of the law could not be prosecuted because of an extraordinarily brief statute of limitation upon such a violation..It is remarkable in another respect because no crime was officially alleged with respect to Mann’s activities at the University of Virginia.
The inquiry in regard to Mann at the University of Virginia arose when a state legislator in a state committee responsible for the state’s appropriations of funds for Mann’s grant/s and later such grants for other researchers attempted to exercise his duty to provide legislative oversight of the funding. Since the British government acknowledged the e-mails evidencing the usage of funds appropriated from taxpayers had been unlawfully withheld from FOIA disclosures, the State of Virginia’s legislature had a public interest in determining the appropriateness of past and future appropriations for such grants. This legislative inquiry was then obstructed when the University of Virginia and/or Mann falsely represented the e-mails no longer existed, when in fact they did still exist. Ken Cuccinelli’s official state inquiry came about in part as a consequence of the University of Virginia and/or Mann misrepresenting destruction of the e-mail in question and the implications for the obstruction of the legislative inquiries. Still, the inquiry did not constitute an accusation of a crime being committed by Mann or the University of Virginia. It constituted nothing more than an inquiry to determine whether or not the University of Virginia and Mann were compliance with the applicable laws of the State of Virginia, especially with respect to grant funding in light of the violations of British FOIA laws.
Reluctantly, the University of Virginia started to prepare for the release of the requested e-mail, when the politicians supporting Mann intervened to once more obstruct the release and disclosure of the e-mail and other requested evidence. The amazing and interesting part of this political intervention to obstruct the inquiry is its seeming self-destructiveness. Even if the State’s inquiry found the e-mails had been unlawfully withheld from disclosure, the fine for doing so was trivial and non-consequential beyond any contents of the e-mail itself. The continued obstruction of the State of Virginia’s inquiries into the Mann e-mail and other documents risked a huge expansion in the scope of future discoveries and legal costs far far beyond the original e-mail and any fine that had been at stake in the beginning of the events. In effect, the University of Virginia and Mann are taking a calculated gamble in a court of law that the content of the e-mail, its continued confidentiality, and non-disclosure to public oversight is significantly more important than the multi-million dollar costs of litigation, any loss of confidence in the integrity and openness of the University of Virginia, and any loss of confidence in the integrity and openness of Mann and his associates. The general public can be excused for wondering whether or not such an extraordinary escalation in risks being taken by Mann and the University of Virginia is prompted more by a stand on principles of conscience or more by consciousness of serious criminal misconduct hidden behind illusory and false principles of conscience. In any case, there is still no pending criminal investigation of Mann’s e-mail, which makes a supporter’s assertion, “there is no crime,” sound more like a criminal trying to avoid a routine non-criminal audit or inquiry that could discover potential evidence of criminal conduct. Does Mann really need this kind of destructive support?
What really is “creepy” is the implication that Mann and his associates think they can prevail upon their friends in politics to appropriate millions of dollars of taxpayer monies in grant funds for their exclusive personal use without honoring an obligation to share all correspondence related to the employment of the publicly funded grants with the general public and/or their legislative representatives. Such behavior tends to invite a comparison to embezzlers who think they should also remain immune from inquiries into their embezzlement.
@- Henry Galt says: November 4, 2011 at 12:07 pm
“A smidgeon, tad or splinter of evidence that current or projected concentrations of CO2 in atmosphere will cause the calamities you require us to bend to your will to avoid.”
I am not sure what the second half of this sentence means…
If the you think the evidence is credible no ‘bending’ is required, you would be persuaded by the evidence.
But what would the evidence – even a smidgeon of it look like that convince you CO2 in the atmosphere can cause global warming?
Are you able to describe the sort of evidence, or climate change, that would cause you to consider the AGW theory valid ?
I can if you wish describe the sort of evidence that would cause me to doubt and re-examine MY position, I wonder if you can do the same?
If you really find it inconceivable that any evidence could change your mind…
Well the next line of your quote is –
“The other two, are living on you!” -FZ
Barry:
I’ll check again ina couple of days. Maybe somethying will work. I have IE9 but my whole system does wierd things now and then.
The one email I got to read was pretty boring- something about followup on a conversation at a conference. I read every climategate email and was underwhelmed.
Thanks for your help:
John McManus
rumleyfips says:
November 4, 2011 at 10:04 am
Davidmhoffer:
Another example of Spencer debunked. Spencer and Christy got the arithmatic wrong and sat temps. Skilled climate scientits found and corrected the error. After leaving false information hanging around , Spencer finally surrendered and corrected his work.
Good grief. The error was minor, Spencer agreed to it nearly immediatly, publicly thanked them for pointing it out, corrected his results while at the same time advising that he’d found additional errors in addition to those pointed out by his critics, also minor, and publicly corrected those at the same time. You imply that he fought them and surrendered. The fact is he acknowledged, thanked them, and exposed more errors in his own work than they found. That’s called scientific progress, not “surrender”.
Now that’s a debunk.
No, that’s a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
Mann? Hasn’;t happened.
Only by being willfully obtuse could one come to that conclusion. If you want to argue M&M’s devastating expose of his work, then I suggest you wander on over to Climate Audit where you will soon look foolish trying to argue the facts with the people who actually debunked it. I’m betting you won’t do that because you know very well that your version of events is a twisted and tangled set of half truths woven together to support an agenda.
As for any other of Mann’s work, can you seriously defend using just seven trees for a 1000 year reconstruction and weighting just one of those trees to represent 50% of the data? If you can defend that, then you will just look silly. after that, how about defending having time series of data inserted in a study in reverse of the rest of the data? Going to defend that too, even though it is clear that is what was done and he’s simply ignored the requests to correct it? I don’t need some scientific journal to publish a PhD paper saying these things are wrong. As Einstein once quipped to a student with a completely screwed up math paper, “that’s not right. That’s not even wrong”.
Trenberth didn’t need to shred Spencer’s paper. Lots of shredding was done onlots of blogs and not a Trenberth in sight. Is this the type of fact that is coming out in alternate information sources to which you refer.
Again, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation and then brag about getting an apology from Wagner? Why did Wagner say in his own letter of resignation that there was no scientific problem at all with Spencer’s paper, and that it was properly peer reviewed? How is it that the only criticism Wagner had of Spencer’s paper was that it was observational data and the “modelling community” hadn’t been consulted? Do you know who the leader of that modelling community is? Ooooops, its Kevin Trenberth!
Further, you claim Spencer was shredded on multiple blogs. Aside from name calling, I saw nothing but magic dressed up as science. That said, why is it that you first claim that unless papers have been peer reviewed and published, they are meaningless, but now you claim that blogs count. Which is it? One or the other, you can’t change your mind because it happens to be convenient for your argument.
You seem to think that Trenberth was resposible for Spencer writing a fataly flawed paper. No Spencer was.
No, I said that Trenberth was so terrified of Spencer’s paper that he first tried through pressure on Wagner to prevent the paper from being published, and then, when that failed, tried to discredit it by forcing Wagner’s resignation on the basis that “modellers” hadn’t been consulted. That’s debunking? Nope, that’s the fantasy that the Trenberth’s of the world have that somehow models produce better results than actual measurements. Again, that’s not right. That’s not even wrong.
Keep your stick on the ice:
Well, since I’ve seen you slashing, spearing, cross checking and high sticking from one end of this thread to the other, I’m quite happy to play by the rules. You’re agenda is clear, your twisted version of reality speaks clearly to your agenda, and it just amounts to an own goal.
You do yourself and your argument no favors with such irrational ad hominem rhetoric. First, the inquiry concerns whether or not the grant funds were obtained using declarations the applicant had reason to know at the time were false or likely to be false. The inquiry does not need to determine the truth or falsity of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conjecture in order to determine whether or not false declarations were used to obtain state grant funds. In past cases, scientists have used false declarations to obtain grant funds even though the scientific conclusions may have been scientifically valid. Pharmaceutical researchers have falsified drug studies to secure government approval, even though the drug was safe and effective. In other words, Mann could hypothetically have falsified his data and reports and thereby made a false declaration to obtain state grant funds, even though AGW were a true fact. Another hypothetical situation is where a researcher such as Mann has inadvertently and unintentionally falsified his data and report, yet the State of Virginia still retains the obligation and the legal right to exercise investigative oversight to detect and correct such unintentional errors when determining appropriations of grant funds. In other words, your comment about “scientific accuracy” is a deceptive strawman argument designed to distract attention away from the reality that the inquiry does not need or seek to serve as an arbiter of the controversy about AGW.
Secondly, your ad hominem comments about “a self serving investigation by a small time political hack” are juvenile taunts which are inaccurate, disrespectful, and needlessly insulting to the majority of the population of Virginia who selected him to represent their public interests. Attorney General Cuccinelli did not open an inquiry until after Mann and the University of Virginia obstructed the apparently lawful inquiry of the Virginia State legislature’s committee responsible for appropriating the grant funds Mann used. Unless a person is the beneficiary of undue political corruption, they are obliged to expect a formal inquiry into their uage of public funds in the wake of the British government finding the FOIA law had been violated by Mann’s correspondents. Your attempts to belittle the Attorney General as “a small time political hack” only serve to make yourself look small, petty, and worse.
The “amusement” of the sel-deluded it appears. For example:
I never said or implied anything whatsoever about there being one code or any number of other codes. You are so self-deluded, you invent these strawman arguments at the drop of a hat and go off in your self amusement oblivious to the real world in front of you. The inquiries into Mann’s e-mail are only concerned with what Mann knew about his own code, data, methods, and other related issues. The inquiries do not even need to know whether or not Mann’s research reached a scientifically correct conclusion. Most government funded grants result in scientific research which reaches partially or wholly incorrect scientific results. The inquiries only need to know whether or not Mann knew or had reason to know his application/s for grant funding included false representations about what the applicant knew at the time of the application.
For example, if a grant applicant knows when applying for the grant that only 500 data points are used in the grant funded study, while the application cheats when it claims 2,000 data points were to be used to exaggerate its comprehensiveness, the inquiry may find the application obtained grant funds fraudulently no matter what the scientific accuracy of the study’s conclusions may have been. Such false and fraudulent applications may wrongly cause the grant to be denied to a more deserving grant applicant who honestly reported 1,500 data points in their grant application. When this kind of grant fraud is allowed to go unchallenged and unpunished for too long, otherwise would be honest grant applicants are forced to consider becoming false grant applicants as well or face being marginalized out of the profession when they are unable to successfully compete for grant funds against more unscrupulous and unpunished frauds. Therefore, it is in the public interest and the interest of science to detect grant fraud and grant funds on the basis of honest applications and honest disclosures of compliance with the terms of the grants.
All of which is your strawman argument set up to avoid a discussion of the right of grantors to govern compliance with the terms of the grants and the information represented in the grant applications. Mann was perfectly free to use code, data, and methods which would produce erroneous results, so long as he provided disclosures as required by law and he did not know or have good reason to know such code, data, methods, and so forth would necessarily produce false results.
It is very interesting to see you come right out and admit you don’t care about Muir, Jones, Mann, et al needing to actually behave like scientists by actually using the scientific method and encouraging free public review. It has perhaps not dawned upon you that such comments on your part largely demolishes any hope of your earning respect for the credibility of your other comments and opinions outside of the community of AGW faithful.
As for Jones and the others being “scientists” worthy of being used in arguments from authority, good luck in pursuing that line of irrational argument. A scientist as a would be scientist does the scientific method. More than a few scientific experimenters will object to some of these people being described as anything more than pseudo-scientists, especially the post-normal scientists.
davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation”
You just make stuff up.
davidmhoffer,
Loved your (Nov 4, 405pm) Gordie Howe treatment of John MacManus’ garbage post. Not sure if he’ll read it, but I could feel how hard facts ran him into the boards from here. Brilliant!
Nick Stokes says:
November 4, 2011 at 5:07 pm
davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation”
You just make stuff up>>>
C’mon. Trenberth bragged about having extracted an apology from Wagner for allowing the paper to be published. Wagner resigned, and Trenberth was trumpeting the apology he personaly got from Wagner the next day or so. Sorry, but creative though I may be, the fact is, even I couldn’t make this stuff up.
S Basinger says:
November 4, 2011 at 5:35 pm
davidmhoffer,
Loved your (Nov 4, 405pm) Gordie Howe treatment of John MacManus’ garbage post>>>
Thanks! And bringing up Gordie Howe…
John MacManus;
Please add elbowing to the list.
Nick Stokes,
That the best you got? It was a question, not any kind of fabrication. Making stuff up is what the alarmist crowd does. Specifically, Michael Mann.
Next, rumleyfips is trying to explain away why the alarmist clique ignores the scientific method:
“I didn’t say code. I said methods.”
The scientific method cannot function without transparency. Now, thirteen years after MBH98 and its debunked hokey stick chart were hand-waved through the climate pal review process, Mann still refuses to provide all of his data, methodologies, code and metadata.
Transparency is necessary for the scientific method to function because it allows other scientists to use the same data and methods to either confirm or falsify a conjecture like MBH98. The fact that Mann withholds crucial information makes it clear that he knows his results will be promptly falsified if he provides the information. And his craven apologists argue to distraction, hoping the central issue of transparency is forgotten.
The truth is that the alarmist crowd is terrified of a properly functioning scientific method, because their cherished CAGW belief system will be falsified. AGW will be seen for what it is: a conjecture. It is not a theory [anyone who uses the term “AGW theory” doesn’t understand]. AGW is not even a hypothesis, because it cannot be falsified at this point. Maybe at some point AGW will become testable, but the only current argument for AGW comes from computer models [I happen to think that CO2 has a small and beneficial effect that warms the planet by a fraction of a degree]. But AGW is still a conjecture.
I challenge anyone to falsify my [testable] hypothesis:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
As usual I expect to hear crickets chirping in response. But if anyone wants to take up the gauntlet, they must use the scientific method; testable, empirical evidence – not models – and provide solid evidence of verifiable global harm due specifically to human CO2 emissions.
Smokey, it is up to you to provide evidence for your hypothesis. Scientific method and all that…