I was surprised to see this essay and poll on the Daily Kos tonight.
Don Mikulecky writes:
Michael Mann is a Modern Hero and we need to acknowledge that!
I have been both a scientist and a political activist for most of my 76 years. But the situation regarding Michael Mann is very different. I just finished a very moving experience reading The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and I have lots more to say than I can fit in a single diary. So I will devote this diary to trying to convince you that this Mann is a hero. There are too few heroes among the scientific community because of the nature of what we do.
Michael Mann was not someone who chose his role. Military persons can anticipate the possibility of being in situations where acts of heroism are called for. Scientists are certainly not in the same situation. Or at least, they have not been for a long time. Galileo comes to mind and it was the Church then that made his life one of great sacrifice. In these times the situation has deteriorated so rapidly that few of us have had a chance to evaluate the impact of what is going on. Science is a threat to the dark forces that are moving to control us all. People like Carl Sagan and Stephen jay Gould were out there early on fighting against these dark forces. They did a lot for us. Rachael Carlson and many others were on the front lines.
Yet the situation with Professor Mann is something beyond all that. He has become a symbol for what our future is all about and he did not chose his role. No sane person would have. Read on below and I will try to paint a broad picture of how much is at stake and give you a perspective on how this one Mann has focused on the threat to all of us.
…
The full essay is here:
And, there is a poll at the end which has some surprising choices.
Update 3/14: One of the comments there is by somebody who posts here regularly, John Sully. He writes:
Anthony Watts posted about this over at his site and told the trolls to come and freep the poll. This is why year after year his site gets voted “Best Science Blog” or whatever.
Mr. Sully please point out exactly where in the 35 words I wrote (the rest are from Kos) in this essay I have “…told the trolls to come and freep the poll.” Otherwise sir, you are a liar. – Anthony
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Those vote choices were comedy gold! Fire him, said I.
Here’s what AGW SUPPORTER, Dr. Richard Muller from Berkely had to say about the Hockey Stick. Somehow this was left out of the book:
But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on?
So the science is settled then, 97 %* of scientists** agree that Michael Mann distorts evidence and/or should be fired from his university.
* there’s a missing 2 %.
** random internet scientists
just got a screen capture at a total of 1187 votes.
Last 2 Q total 97% … now why does that number ring a bell 😉
Two points. The KOS people expected an overwhelming positive vote for M. Mann. When they wake up and seee it is > 90% negative they will take it downa and blame honest scientists (i.e. called deniers by the watermelons) for biasing their crooked poll. Or they will put the word out and block negative votes until it is overwhelming positive for Mann.
I voted that he should be fired, but thought I’d be in a tiny minority. I was stunned when I saw the results of the poll.
I’m sure that when I look at this again later this morning that the missing votes will have been found in the trunk of a car in Minneapolis.
The only way these guys get any traffic is to post something that gets picked up by WUWT. Maybe it’s a test to see how many of us are in the hoard? Or maybe it’s to improve their site ranking? I kinda wish I hadn’t voted or added to it’s page views.
By the time I got to the poll 1230 out of 1256 had supplied one of two correct answers to the poll. Naturally in the comments from the faithful and anointed, these voters were referred to as trolls (presumably sub-human and worthy of eugenic elimination).
I voted at 1256 votes and the tally was: (votes: selection, %)
4: did not choose to become a symbol, 0%
1: has been attacked, 0%
0: is an outstanding scientist, (LOL)
17: all the above, 1%
916: Is distorting evidence to prove his point, 72%
314: should be fired, 25%
And after I finished laughing, I voted for the last selection.
Rest assured, Mann et. al will find a way to adjust the data set to hide the apparent decline in his poll rating here. No doubt it will instead show a fairly flat initial run for today, followed by an uptick tomorrow when more AGW promoters are notified about the need to vote on it. Troll votes are anomalies to be discarded, of course…….
Update on the Daily Kos Michael Mann poll, 03/13/12, 11 PM:
did not choose to becme a symbol:
0% 4 votes
has been attacked in many of the same ways that the President and John Kerry were
0% 1 votes
Is an outstanding scientist and human being
0% 4 votes
all of the above
1% 17 votes
is distorting evidence to prove his point
72% 958 votes
should be fired from the university
25% 334 votes
The left, which I belong to, looks more reasonable all the time.
Headline in DailyKos tomorrow:
In a recent online poll, 75% of participants voted for Dr. Mann to keep his job.
/sarc
Hi William Martin of OZ.Sorry my name was the same as yours.I apologize.Have added of NZ after my name.Sorry for any inconvenience.
Michael Mann is a hero.
And I’m Miss Australia.
LOL
Didn’t bother to vote, don’t want to give their page stats the illusion that people voluntarily read it.
That article along with the attached poll results is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Of course, a “dark force” such as me would think that. I considered remotely combusting the author with my “evil powers” (poof!), but I didn’t want to waste a shot on such an entertaining target.
1380 votes, 26 like Mann. 1364 think he is despicable.
As the lawyers say, never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.
Of course the results show the effects of a co-ordinated attack by big oil and their denialist lackeys.
But perhaps we have read this post wrong: perhaps Don is a skeptic in warmist clothing, and this is satire. Now that makes some sense ….
If it is satire, the poll results stay up. If not, they will come down.
Re: This poll and the Hockey Stick.
Never fear, Mannian Maths will somehow provide the ‘right’ answer, the inconvenient data (that’s nearly all of it) will somehow be eliminated or ignored.
Current Poll results:
Michael Mann
did not choose to became a symbol
0% 4 votes
has been attacked in many of the same ways that the President and John Kerry were
0% 1 votes
Is an outstanding scientist and human being
0% 4 votes
all of the above
1% 17 votes
is distorting evidence to prove his point
72% 1062 votes
should be fired from the university
25% 380 votes
Rachael Carlson? Who’s that?
Mikulecky says on his blog:
“Mann’s research, data, algorithms and code are all online. Anybody can check his work. But nobody has come up with a climate reconstruction that differs substantially from Mann’s studies.”
Obviously the link doesn’t work.
Trust Michael Mann is a C–T
Oh its easy. Mann will invert the poll results, and then say it doesn’t matter.
In my understanding of “hero,” courage is a fundamental component. If Mann is a hero, why is he so afraid to debate the issue in an open public forum (or even a closed academic forum)?
I would imagine that by the time the high priests have rung round the acolytes, the poll figures will change somewhat. However atm 97% of respondents believe that Mann is a schmuck That looks like a consensus to me.