Readers may recall: The question put to Dr. Mann at Disneyland today where WUWT regular Roger Sowell was one of the rare skeptics that got to ask Dr. Mann a question.
The video is now online of the event.
Sowell’s question starts at around 59:35 minutes, Mann’s answer ends about 1:03:10
UPDATE:
Dr. Mann’s slide presentation is available at this link. Note the polar bear on the ice floe.
http://www.ocwatersummit.com/ backup link: MichaelMann_OCWS (PDF 24mb)
I find it fascinating that Mann is still pushing the now long debunked claims about the Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Even Mann’s buddies Lonnie Thompson and Phil Jones privately admit the issue is local deforestation/evapotranspiration and not “climate change”. It is mind blowing he’s still pushing this.
Note point 3 in this image in his last slide:
Pompeii used to be a port now it is well inland and well above sea level, is this the fate Mann sees for Venice, New Orleans and Amsterdam?
Maybe he means in bullet point 3 that there will still be snow, just the giraffes and elephants will be gone!
Follow the money
Those criticizing Roger Sowell need to STFU. It is very likely that those same people would NOT have the guts to do what he did. He did it for all of us and I challenge those critics to try it themselves and see how they fare. I will be watching and waiting.
Good job and my appreciation to you for your efforts Mr. Sowell. Thank you.
I don’t think that Mann is smooth talker or great a thinking on feet or anything like that, in fact he comes across as being very uncomfortable on the stage, but the question was totality blown, especially since it was written out.
Dr Mann is fighting for his life; why shouldn’t we be surprised?
Yes, he will be less than delighted, with the treatment he will receive in the future but, for the moment, he still believes that “doubling down” will keep him afloat.
I doubt that it will for much longer but he’s a survivor and will maintain a positive, albeit diminishing, buoyancy!
My thanks and appreciation to those with positive comments on the question I posed:
David Ball, mfo, Bob the Swiss, HankHenry. I hope I did not inadvertently overlook anyone.
There are some critics among the commenters, too.
The question, as Anthony posted in an earlier thread on Mann at Disneyland, was the result of a collaborative effort. I did read it off of a piece of paper. As Mann correctly pointed out, I did state Briffa when I should have stated Bradley as one of the coauthors. However, that was a minor mistake.
There are several very interesting things to be learned from this question and Mann’s answer. First, it is important to note the venue, the purpose, and the time constraints.
This was not a debate. Live debates in modern days are fairly uncommon. Scientific debates, or promoting an issue while downplaying others, are generally carried out in the published, peer-reviewed literature.
This was also not a command performance, a Congressional hearing, with subpoenaed witnesses providing sworn testimony under penalty of perjury. In such a hearing, elected officials may ask question after question, delving into what they see as important aspects of an issue.
It was also not a presentation to a hearing board of a government agency, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency.
It was also not a board of inquiry into alleged scientific misconduct.
Finally, it was not a trial in a court of law, with a judge, jury, witnesses, expert witnesses, tangible evidence, and skilled attorneys for each side.
This was none of those venues. This was a one-hour (more or less) audio and still-slides presentation during a half-day meeting, open to the public. A few questions were taken, and a short answer was made to each. Time was short. There was no requirement to tell the truth, and no penalty for being less than truthful. There was no means for a questioner to ask follow-up questions. There was no means for an attorney (in this case, the questioner, me) to object, on the grounds that the witness’ answer was non-responsive. Non-responsive means the witness did not answer the question that was posed to him.
Yet, we can learn a few things from Mann’s answer.
We note that, as one commenter indicated above, Dr. Mann turned a one-sentence answer into a 3-minute ramble. Clearly, Mann wanted to address the issue, or a least part of the issue. It could be that he really would like to have a live, face-to-face debate. It may rankle him that “the debate is over.”
Mann also used his time to focus on an admitted error in the factual pre-statement, Briffa rather than Bradley. The pre-statement was offered before the question, in order to establish a bit of context for the question. Also as someone above noted, this is a debate tactic where one debater attempts to avoid an unpleasant point and focus on a trivial matter. Politicians also do this.
Why would Mann do this? Why would he, having a perfect opportunity, avoid saying why he believes he is right and Steve McIntyre is wrong? There could be a number of reasons. Just speculating, but Mann probably was elated when his Hockey Stick graph was chosen for a prominent position in the IPCC report. Mann undoubtedly has followed all the hoopla after that, too. He is surely aware of the debunking efforts, and must be keenly aware that the Hockey Stick graph no longer has a prominent position in the IPCC reports. Perhaps that stung, maybe more than a little. Perhaps that is why Mann felt compelled to write a book on the entire matter, and place his version of things in public.
It could also be that Mann was keenly aware that this presentation was being video recorded and would be placed on the internet where, potentially, 6 billion pairs of eyes and ears could see and hear it.
It is evident that Mann did not want to address the actual question posed to him, that his data for the hockey stick graph was cherry-picked to provide a pre-determined outcome. It seems to me that this is the question that should be posed to him at every opportunity. I suspect he really does want to answer that question.
Finally, as to asking a question to a panelist in a public venue such as this OC Water Summit, I felt comfortable with that. But then, as an attorney, I do this sort of thing routinely. As for reading the question off a piece of paper, attorneys do that, too. It is good practice to write out one’s questions, especially long or complicated questions.
In a civil or criminal trial at court, I would not pose a question in this manner. It is far too open-ended and gives the witness far too much latitude. This was not a court of law, as noted above.
For this venue, the question was fine, and the answer was very instructive.
Perhaps others have a different view on the significance of Mann’s response and non-response.
The significance of Mann’s response is in his sincere and very evident belief in catastrophic AGW. His answer and presentation bestows on him the mark of a “Hansen”-ian follower. The only thing he didn’t bring to the show were the tall “The End Is Near” signs so ubiquitous on campus years ago.
In all things, belief trumps data. This is seems more true now than in snake-oil days and has invaded universities like a terminal cancer. Data is an inconveniance in this era.
If Mann still thinks snows of Kilimanjaro are receding due to ‘climate change’, then the fact that the snows are returning to Kilimanjaro shows that things must be getting better.
“With each passing year of inaction, stabilizing Earth’s climate becomes increasingly difficult.”
The question that would have popped into my head right there would have been, “Since we’ve evidently progressed from ‘humanly impossible’ to merely ‘increasingly difficult’ without doing anything, doesn’t it stand to reason that continuing to do nothing will eventually stabilize Earth’s climate?”
Mann didn’t get the memo on the Snow Job of Kilimanjaro. I climbed it in 1990. The third and last camp was up in the ice and snow and we spent a cold night, rising about 2 am, and with parkas on, laboured up the last few hundred metres. I’m sure its just as cold as ever whether the snow waxes or wanes – certainly, if warming has only been 0.7C in a century. No moisture up there could fall as anything other than snow. I also was on a diamond drilling project (a lithium pegmatite deposit) in the James Bay region of Quebec the first week of December in 2005 where it was -35C virtually day and night. I’m sure the polar bears were snuggled up tight.
I honestly am surprised at what he has on that last slide. I would have expected sciecobable from him, not gorobable.
Dr. Michael Mann’s debate evasion at the Orange County water summit. Better luck next time Dr. Patrick Michaels. Now I know why they say the debate is over.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/06/27/michael-manns-hissy-fit-shows-why-global-warming-alarmists-fear-debate/
Dr. Mann: “… work of the world’s climate scientists that establishes the reality of human caused climate change.”
No Dr. Mann, the reality is the reality – science does not “establish” reality. What science can do is approximate reality with theories. The closer the approximation to reality (with all currently known facts), the better the theory. Only once a theory can explain all known facts with an reasonable approximation, can we consider that theory to be a reasonable approximation of reality – so no “hide the decline” and no cherry-picking 2000 years of paleo-climate reconstructions.
Dr. Mann is the poster boy for the scientist grazing in the trough of public grant money, using his proceeds to read tea leaves and tree rings, rather than doing the important research in astrophysics wherein lies the true answer to climate change on the Sun and Earth. The disgusting thing about his conduct is he will continue to do this lying for years to come, and will never be called to account along with all these other CO2 snake oil climate salesmen like Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, Jones, et al. Thirty years from now, when we are freezing our testicles off at the nadir of the Grand Solar Minimum, charlatans like Mann will be a distant, unprosecutable memory.
Mann is still pushing his hockey-stick, therefore one could be forgiven for asking the question is he lying, thus committing fraud?
It is appropriate that in the polar bear slide, the movie The Island is mentioned. You see, in the movie, the people that live in the apocalyptic world and confined to a sealed indoor environment are actually being lied to and are murdered when their organs are required for their hosts of which they are cloned from. As for Soylent Green, we are only 10 years away from when this movie takes place. Maybe we will be generating our electricity by stationary bicycle by then 😉