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
Just testing. I just opted for the university to apply a boot to Mr. Mann’s posterior for the 3rd time, all from the same URL. (That does make me some kind of troll, I guess.) So the poll is bogus. The socialists used to be able to rig votes to elect their maximo liders into office with 99% approval – and now they cannot even keep such a charade straight? They have truly lost it.
Almost 2300 votes. 73% for distorting 24% for should be fired.
Either the Kos kids aren’t bothering to vote, or they don’t think highly of Mann either.
Actual Poll Results:
Poll
Michael Mann
did not choose to became a symbol
0% 9 votes
has been attacked in many of the same ways that the President and John Kerry were
0% 2 votes
Is an outstanding scientist and human being
0% 5 votes
all of the above
1% 27 votes
is distorting evidence to prove his point
73% 1678 votes
should be fired from the university
24% 572 votes
| 2293 votes | Vote |
Since ClimateGate it has been made known that Mann is a liar and manipulator of scientific data.
In some peoples perception he has become a hero. A hero for a worthy cause.
Hitler duped many. We should not be surprised if such wrongs-for-rights can occur again, in this present age.
Michael Mann is now being interviewed live in a CBC Toronto studio on the program “The Current” (Mar 14 0930). He is attacking us sceptics, proclaiming “the science”, etc., etc. The program can be heard in later time zones across Canada today and within a day or so at http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/radio/the_current.
The fawning interviewer is stomach-churning.
IanM
Thanks for the heads up and the opportunity to vote. Do you think the Daily Kos is surprised?
John D. said on March 14, 2012 at 5:06 am:
I think it’s just a cookie, I fired up a different browser and the voting options were there.
===
From Chris Wright on March 14, 2012 at 5:10 am:
Nothing so nefarious. The poll went up with the story (and what a story) on the ninth, the Kos regulars chimed in then. Since registration is required for commenting and there’s a waiting period, naturally it’d be awhile for critical comments from those just showing up to be made.
It is curious though that the comment:
was made long before WUWT readers were notified about it. Apparently a tiny number of negative votes among the very few votes back on the ninth was enough to level a charge of denier trolls being present. There are blasphemous heretics among the Kos faithful! We must announce this finding so those led astray by the lies and false rhetoric can be identified and their erroneous views corrected!
From Ulrich Elkmann on March 14, 2012 at 5:38 am:
Maybe the poll allows you to change your vote, in case you hit the wrong button, for a certain amount of time or so many submitted votes, or both. That’s a fair way to do an online poll, in case you change your mind. I just checked my cookies, they can keep track of those voting with a unique user ID cookie. So vote three times for the same thing, it’s still only one vote, provided it’s the same browser and you didn’t purge cookies.
Visiting Mikulecky’s blog revealed this gem regarding his holistic view of science:
“The artificial lines between science, religion, philosophy, politics, and othger(sic) compartments that human thought has been forced into by reductionism are of no real use in this context.”
Yup. I can certainly see why he considers Mann a hero. I’m sure his next essay will be a lengthy tribute to the work of Dr. Peter Venkman…
Wow. On the Daily KOS, the poll results are great:
Out of 2392 votes, only 46 are pro-Mann. It doesn’t matter how the KOS spins it.
Whenever I see “scientist” and “political activist” used to describe an individual, I immediately begin to question the “science” practiced by that individual.
Mann clearly has a PR firm on retainer to create and spin a clueless and self-serving heroic PR story based on the concept of the mono-myth (see Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’ for examples of mono-myths).
Problem is Mann, as spun by any PR firm as a mono-mythic underdog hero, cannot displace the darkly opposite stark image of Mann as an unprincipled anti-hero as was shown (for example) in CG1 & CG2.
Anti-hero indeed! I think Mann will turn on his former CG1 & CG2 associates in a heartbeat to save himself when all his self-serving publicity and legal options are exhausted.
John
Am I the only one who noticed you can vote more than once? After I clicked vote, I clicked on Results. On that screen there is a link that says “Vote”; just click away and watch the count for your choice go up each time. I did this three times. Using Firefox 10.0.2.
The mechanics of this poll seem to be completely bungled. Results are meaningless. Probably Kos will eventually figure this out and toss the whole thing.
I should clarify: you need to click on the “Vote” link more than once, you will eventually reach a screen that has both the results AND a Vote button. There is where the magic happens.
Addendum to previous posts: there may be a correction mechanism that operates with a time lag. I just returned to results and the votes in my category were a bit lower than what I saw immediately after I voted.
Robin Hewitt says: @ur momisugly March 14, 2012 at 3:11 am
Not really an opinion poll since Anthony released the enormous blog-firepower of WUWT on it.
____________________________________
As Peter Plail says: @ur momisugly March 14, 2012 at 2:11 am
For anyone wanting to sign up to comment you will have to wait. Here is the message I got:
Just as a reminder, there is a 24-hour waiting period for making new comments and a one week waiting period for writing new diaries. This might seem like a long time, but if you’ve got valuable insight that’s worth sharing, it will be worth sharing once your waiting period is over.
___________________________________________
So only those who are already registered on Kos can vote.
The SIGNIFICANT point that I found really fascinating is not the 97% who voted that Mann lies or should get the boot, but the fact that under 50 people out of the 2293 votes voted FOR Mann! We are not even talking close here folks. (From the result of March 14, 2012 at 5:46 am posted by of Allan MacRae)
Either the people who read Kos are not interested and did not bother to vote at all or there are a heck of a lot of non-right wingers who are no longer taken in by the CAGW crap.
The other point is the one I see happen all the time. The assumption that people can be pigeonholed. We see that here on WUWT all the time. Someone new comes on to the blog and ASSumes every one here is not only a right-wing-nut but doesn’t care about the environment too.
I do not know about the rest of you but I really hate being pigeonholed and then herded like a cow.
From Gail Combs on March 14, 2012 at 7:43 am:
Too fast on the trigger. Clearly non-registered can vote, but they can’t comment.
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.
snif…never fear, Bambi, because this time “Mann is in the Forest!”
I’m reminded of the saying-
All thieves believe everyone else is a thief.
Gail Combs says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:43 am
I agree, Gail. I used to frequent a few sites swarming with self-righteous environmentalists and occasionally I’d ask one what they had actually done for the environment (other than separating their plastics, glass, metals and newspapers when tossing out their garbage), and except the occasional “cash donation” as a response, couldn’t get a viable response to my question.
I’d counter that as a mining engineer, I worked for a mining company that would take old mining sites that had been trashed by irresponsible fortune seekers in the last century and clean up square miles of old waste dumps, junk piles, dangerous shafts, and toxic tailings, while at the same time providing jobs, precious and base metals to further the cause of humanity, and leave the site almost unrecognizable if one were looking for evidence of mining (except we’d throw in some raptor nesting sites, lakes or wetlands for waterfowl and fish, and wooded areas for larger animals just to appease the happy locals).
The vast majority of these “environmentalists” I encountered are actually “wanna-be’s”–they sit on their green fat asses and talk a lot but do next to nothing–except roil the general populace with their green self-righteousness.
It’s really disgusting.
Bruce Stewart says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:26 am
[ I just returned to results and the votes in my category were a bit lower than what I saw immediately after I voted.]
Smoothing, averaging, zone weighting, proxy vote reconstruction, temporal inversion, a dash of climatology and Voila!
People have voted him a hero.
In November 2010 Don Mikulecy wrote this about himself:-
“I have been a political activist since the sixties. We were developing parallel institutions back then. I helped start the experimental school system In Boston while teaching at Harvard Med. Before that I was the leader of an anti-war/civil rights coalition in Buffalo N.Y. while a faculty member at SUNY. I was a delegate to the New Politics Convention and a supporter if the initiation of Black Power. I worked with Resist and participated in the big draft card turn in at the Justice Department by turning in my draft card on national TV. (I had been a USMC officer 1957-1963.) Fast forward to answer your question, I now am a Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity at Virginia commonwealth University”.
Presumably the man who boasts of being a “political activist” from VSA and hence probably an ex-colleague of Mann has other heroes. In the light of his bio. does he place his new hero, Michael Manm, on the same pedestal as his ealier heroes such as Malcolm X and Timothy O’ Leary? .
Wow. There are only 11 comments in the article, and 4 are from the author! And only 41 warmists bothered to vote. If global warming can’t rile up the liberal base, maybe this “war” is over.
“Winning?”
0% 10 votes – did not choose to became a symbol
0% 3 votes – has been attacked in many of the same ways that the President and John Kerry were
0% 5 votes – Is an outstanding scientist and human being
1% 32 votes – all of the above
73% 2023 votes – is distorting evidence to prove his point
25% 693 votes – should be fired from the university
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Kos kids will not be/cannot be pleased with these results …
.
A very contrite Michael Mann was interviewed this morning (9:30-10:00) on CBC-1 “The Current” by warmster Anna-Maria Tremonte. Of course MM was promoting his book, lambasting the deniers and promoting himself as the true defender of science against such misguided people as Santorum. One would almost think he is looking to become Obama’s science Tsar.
If you can stand half an hour of Mann, you could find the podcast at