All I can say is “ouch”! Mann of course will be sending his usual letter to the editor whining about unfair treatment. He’s really just misunderstood you see.
Excerpts from the review by Anne Jolis:
The book’s climax is a recounting of the 2009 leak or hack of emails and other documents written by Mr. Mann and his associates (and funneled through the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit). The correspondence, along with a second trove released in 2011, highlighted the patchwork behind IPCC science. The leading lights of publicly funded climatology appeared to be brainstorming to pressure journals and review boards to suppress work that challenged their theories, trading tips on how to avoid public-information requests and planning how to present their findings so as to best further “the cause.”
In his book, Mr. Mann dubs the unauthorized release of his emails a “crime” and claims that the ensuing “witch hunt” constituted “the most malicious” of “attack after vitriolic attack against us” by the “corporate-funded denial machine.”
Yet for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)
Just this February, Mr. Mann took to the Daily Kos to praise the theft of internal documents from the free-market Heartland Institute for offering “a peek behind the curtain of industry-funded climate change denial.” It was revelatory, but not in the way he thought. Hours after Mr. Mann posted his online musings, the much-decorated hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick (2003 MacArthur fellow, adviser to the EPA and, until recently, chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s task force on scientific ethics) confessed to the Heartland theft. Apologizing for his actions, he wrote that he had been “blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists.”
Mr. Mann closes “The Hockey Stick” with a passionate call for more scientists to join him “on the front lines of the climate wars.” “Scientific truth alone,” Mr. Mann writes, “is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion.” It would be “irresponsible,” he says, “for us to silently stand by while industry-funded climate change deniers succeed in confusing and distracting the public and dissuading our policy makers from taking appropriate actions.” These are unfortunate conclusions for a scientist-turned-climate-warrior whose greatest weakness has always been a low estimation of the public intellect.
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Full review here
Also related:
Shollenberger’s Technical Review of Mann’s recent book
Josh on Mann’s Jurassic Moment
Gleick declares in Mann’s book review (after phishing Heartland) – “there IS a war on”
I am so sick and tired of tax-payer funded climate alarmists like Michael Mann complaining about “industry-funded climate change deniers [who] succeed in confusing and distracting the public and dissuading our policy makers from taking appropriate actions.”
Anthony Watts is not funded by industry. He and his many volunteers do research in their spare time. I’m not funded by industry to write the occasional letter to the editor protesting about climate alarmism.
In the you beaut land of Oz, Tim Flannery is the face of climate alarmism preaching environmental doom and gloom. Yea, the once mighty Murray-Darling river was under threat from global warming said Tim in his tinnie (aluminium boat) as he navigated the river system. Somebody – taxpayers? – funded him to make that documentary on how the Murray-Darling was drying up.
Guess what? That river system is in flood as I type. And where’s Timmy babe? Not in Australia. It’s reported he’s lurking in Germany.
I’m not sure if the news has reached WUWT but in the tradition of ironic Australian humour some Australian farmers have renamed “inches” of rain as “flanneries”: “yeah, we had two flanneries yesterday, how much did you get?”
Ouch. I’m delighted to report the new measurement is catching on.
Oops, I obviously meant to say the sceptics are outfunded by the CAGW cult by at least 1,000 to 1.
For those in Australia…. Dr Mann is ABC Late Line tonight… He was touted in the promo as the “Nobel Prize winning scientist who weathered the Climategate storm”. I for one can’t wait to see him subjected to a thorough examination of the Hockey Stick debacle and his advocacy for “The Cause” … Oh wait… It’s the ABC… What was I thinking…
When little Mickey joined his first physics 101 class, the professor spoke about ’cause’ and ‘effect’. Mickey simply got confused on the meaning of ’cause’ and the rest, as they say, is history.
““Scientific truth alone,” Mr. Mann writes, “is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion.””
So they have to revert to selective editing and manipulating of data, bullying, intimidation, political posturing, fraud, theft, fakery and other nefarious means to push their “cause” because what they call “scientific truth” is NOT working. I would argue therefore that what they are pushing, is not scientific truth.
It appears that, contrary to Dr Mann’s claim, that actually scientific truth alone IS winning in this debate. The Alarmist side produce shoddy science and use tens of billions of dollars of “industry funded research” to produce that shoddy science. It has to be shoddy, because accurate, empirical science will not show them what the industry, and political advocacy groups and think tanks and lobbyists are paying BILLIONSof dollars for.
The climate realist scientists, on a comparative pittance, (so shown by the stolen documents from Heartland), and with an adherence to the scientific method in establishing scientific truth is winning the hearts and minds of the public. For the public have a very good bovine excrement detectors. We can clearly recognise when people engage in good solid, honourable science, and when they engage in acts of dishonesty, fraud and other crimes (as in the fakegate case) to prop up their political advocacy cloaked as science.
IF the alarmist’s “science” was good, then they would not need to fall back on theft, fraud, bullying and intimidation to back up their case. It must be very frustrating for the warmists alarmist, natural variablity denialist, warming advocates, to be outspending the realist side by a factor of 1,000 to 1 and yet still be losing the debate.
That kind of slam dunk only occurs when the least funded side is pushing the truth and the other are pushing bull-excrement.
“…a scientist-turned-climate-warrior whose greatest weakness has always been a low estimation of the public intellect.” No, no, no: it’s only his second greatest weakness. His greatest weakness is his own intellect. By the standards common in the physical sciences he’s a dud.
She hit the key with “low estimation of the public intellect”.
That’s exactly why Americans have stopped believing in all the “scientific consensus” pseudotheories. Not just carbon, but evolution, Big Bang cosmology, quantum “physics”, and economics. Proponents of all those fraudulent pseudosciences have been officially censoring our speech,, condescending to us, and calling us all sorts of nasty names for 20 years.
We’re damn tired of having our money stolen and our mouths sewed shut by obnoxious bullies.
Reading Mr Mann is like reading a child. He keeps referring to the ” fossil fuel” industry as if they were his official boogeyman.
But every warmer uses his weak childlike arguments. They can’t prove their theory and when they try ….facts get in the way. So warmers end the statement with doomsday scenarios and if you disagree you are with the boogeymen.
Now Mann and his ilk have to promote themselves. They will sponsor warmer gatherings where they will refer to themselves as ” critical thinkers” out to save the world. Anyone who dares confront their stupidity has started a “war” and then we get drivel like his most recent book.
Frankly anyone who uses the term denier is a bigot. It has nothing to do with science or scepticism nor with the scientific method. How does the scientific study of climate proceed unless people are allowed to examine data and test theories for flaws that lead to furhter investigation.
There has been far too much gotcha reports trying to prove CAGW, so the actual conclusions are slewed away from serious scientific effort.
The ridiculous claim of some mysterious funding for sceptics is the sort of hogwash that goes with bigotry. The facts are very different. Enron wanted the carbon trading markets. It wants to return to the big time as an energy broker. All the major oil companies have spent billions investigating renewable energy and trading schemes with miserable results.
All Mannis doing is making himself irrelevant and ensuring he is left far behind in unravelling the climate puzzles.
This well funded campaign of disinformation, does it actually exist outside Micheal Mann’s head? As far as I can see it is only bloggers that are challenging the ‘consensus’. I have seen the occasional sceptical newspaper article but TV and radio give us a constant bombardment of warmist propaganda, even in the adverts. It never seems to occur to him that people don’t believe in alarmism because it simply isn’t true.
For me, the title says enough. Talk about pretentious huff-n-puff or what?
I presume it was originated by the publisher in an attempt to brighten up something that would otherwise be mind-numbingly tedious.
Worst case= if the author came up with the book’s title, in which case the observed global temperature rise is explained by a huge, expanding and overheated ego. If American universities need their own police forces, can’t they also invest in a fire-brigades for exactly this eventuality?
The idolatry seems to be wearing thin, interesting.
The video is very good. Interesting to see how it’s not necessary to be a “climate scientist” to grasp what Mann is all about. Which leads to the question – how is it that so many people do not grasp that, or do not care? The most obvious explanation is, because they share Mann’s attitude.
an earlier piece by Jolis:
7 Sept 2011: WSJ: Anne Jolis: The Other Climate Theory
Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends
Scientists have been speculating on the relationship among cosmic rays, solar activity and clouds since at least the 1970s. But the notion didn’t get a workout until 1995, when Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark came across a 1991 paper by Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, who had charted a close relationship between solar variations and changes in the earth’s surface temperature since 1860.
“I had this idea that the real link could be between cloud cover and cosmic rays, and I wanted to try to figure out if it was a good idea or a bad idea,” Mr. Svensmark told me from Copenhagen, where he leads sun-climate research at the Danish National Space Institute.
He wasn’t the first scientist to have the idea, but he was the first to try to demonstrate it. He got in touch with Mr. Friis-Christensen, and they used satellite data to show a close correlation among solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic-ray levels since 1979…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904537404576554750502443800.html
An attorney client of the firm I work for emailed me in January and wanted to know if I would accompany him to see MM at the book-selling at UCLA 13Feb12. Although I figured I had better uses of my time, “know thy enemy” instructed me to accept. We went, accompanied by the attorney’s wife, and another associate. It was a lot like going to a fundamentalist revival. Rant after rant, accompanied by much sympathy from the audience filled most of the time.
We were told by Cara Horowitz, Executive Director, UCLA Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment School of Law, that notepaper and pens had been provided for questions which runners would carry forward. We were not told that these would be heavily screened, presumably in the interest of time. My question, the first submitted was simply “When will the Holocene end?”
It got filtered out. As did the questions submitted by my 3 associates. The attorney’s wife suggested that I get my pic taken with MM, and as we walked up, someone beat us to it, so it then seemed natural for a second one. MM does not know me from Adam anyway.
I remember thinking on my way home that I had just been to perhaps my first direct experience with fascism.
Michael Mann is to science what Michael Moore is to documentary film making. Both know how to use a little bit of truth to tell a whopper.
“for us to silently stand by while industry-funded climate change deniers succeed in confusing and distracting the public…”. As a non-native English speaker I could easily miss a deeper meaning of this sentence. Correct me if I am wrong: There are people who believe that in the past 4.5 billion of years the climate did not change on this planet. These people get money from at least one industry. They are successful in confusing other people (made them to believe the same). We should not remain silent about this (which is probably the reason Mann wrote a book).
I have to ask this. Does anyone know of any technical field – physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, etc – where a professor who published this kind of book, and used arguments like Mann’s when discussing criticisms of his work, would still be taken seriously by his colleagues?
The smug Michael Mann got a real easy free plug in for his book, the hockey stick and how bad scientists were being treated, when interviewed on the ABC, tonight, no hard questions, lead in for his disinformation and no one with the nous to ask him anyway. Poor Australians, up to the neck in government propaganda from the CSIRO/BOM joint climate report with more than three reports so far and not a dissenting voice to oppose the government construct, and we have to put up with this because of crippled media!!
Enough to make one puke!!
I was thinking how much of a blowhard these climate scientists are. They are losing the war and instead of admitting their idea is wrong, they think it must be some well-funded anonymous group. The problem Michael Mann and his cohorts have is they refuse to believe that could possibly be wrong in anything.
Of course, the Wall Street Journal is a Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper. The same Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News, the news organization that liberals act like is worse than Adolph Hitler. If Michael Mann acknowledges this review, it will only to be to claim it is part of the Fox News smear machine. (Note: I have Fox News blocked on my TV, along with MSNBC which is the liberal version of Fox News. I also rarely watch CNN or any cable news.)
Harpo says:
March 15, 2012 at 3:49 am
For those in Australia…. Dr Mann is ABC Late Line tonight… He was touted in the promo as the “Nobel Prize winning scientist who weathered the Climategate storm”. I for one can’t wait to see him subjected to a thorough examination of the Hockey Stick debacle and his advocacy for “The Cause” … Oh wait… It’s the ABC… What was I thinking…
For those interested, here’s a link http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3454652.htm to the Lateline transcript.
Quote: Mr. Mann closes “The Hockey Stick” with a passionate call for more scientists to join him “on the front lines of the climate wars.”
and M. Mann is the new Jesus calling for his followers (LOL)
Heh. In the comments below the review, Mike Mangan proposes a subtitle:
“Mann Kampf”
Michael Mann and climatology will fade like Louis Farrakhan and numerology. There are still too many sympathizers surrounding Michael Mann that don’t have the courage to tell him his beliefs have been discredited.
polistra said:
“Not just carbon, but evolution, Big Bang cosmology, quantum “physics”, and economics. Proponents of all those fraudulent pseudosciences have been …”
Comments like these are what gives alarmists ammo.
Can I, for one, say that I do not consider evolution, cosmology or quantum phsyics to be fraudulent pseudosciences, and that I am actively hostile to the sort of anti-science attitude displayed by polistra’s post. We need to regulate the nutters from our ranks if we are to be taken serioiusly as a realist argument.
If polistra actually believes that, then I would say this forum is NOT where they should be, since this is a SCIENCE blog, and as such, evolution, cosmology and quantum physics are not disputed in any way. I suspect polistra is in fact sockpuppetinf in an attempt to make this blog look anti-science.