Dr. Michael Mann invokes the Streisand effect

Michael Mann
Director of Earth System Science
Pennsylvania State University.
[open letter]
Communicating climate science to the general public can be difficult. Perhaps you are just misunderstood by all those who have branded you and your hockey stick “fraudulent”. Let’s use an analogy.
It’s 1998. Your chairman of a pension fund. A stockbroker tries to sell you some new-fangled derivatives. Let’s call them climate futures. He tells you that the government’s stimulus package is driving this segment of the market ever higher. To convince you, he shows you a graph that looks like a hockey stick, and points out that for a long time this market was relatively flat (the handle), but after the stimulus kicked in it shot up (the blade).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hockey_stick_chart_ipcc_large.jpg
He predicts sustained long term growth based on complex computer models devised by Nobel laureate economists. You point out that the hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, run by two other Nobel laureates, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, which used complex computer models based on the algorithm for which they won their prize, has just crashed spectacularly, losing $4.6 billion in less than four months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
He tells you this is different.
He tells you to invest all your money and all the pensioners’ money in this market. Sell the house, the college fund, mortgage your kids’ future, bet everything. You’re still a bit skeptical but you take his advice.
Fourteen years later, the value of your investment has essentially flatlined. In fact, you point out to the stockbroker that it is slightly lower than the peak value on his graph.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-temperature/
He points out, that the endpoint of his graph was the climax of a particularly big bubble. That this market regularly experiences these bubbles. The other stockbrokers call them El Ninos. He chides you for comparing the value of this market now to the value it had at the height of an El Nino. Everybody knows the market crashes after an El Nino.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/eln/rcnt.rxml/
You point out that the value of your investment is lower than the lowest of his projections based on the worst market conditions. He assures you that the last fourteen years are just a temporary halt in a long term upward trend.
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG1_TAR-FRONT.pdf [page 14]
The handle and blade of the stockbroker’s hockey stick are each based on two different sets of data. You find out that data from other sources indicate that this market had been higher in the past without any stimulus and was in general more volatile than you had been led to believe.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
If the same data set had been used throughout there would have no blade to the stockbroker’s hockey stick in fact the graph would have declined at the end. This demolishes the stockbroker’s claim that his graph shows the effect of the government stimulus. Emails from your stockbroker then come to light showing the stockbroker conspiring to “hide the decline” and much else besides.
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?search=hide+the+decline&word=y
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?search=medieval
If you’re not a fraud Mr. Mann then neither is this stockbroker.
Note:
Scholes and Merton’s hedge fund bet on arbitrage deals called “convergence trades”. In the Climategate emails, the difference between late 20th century thermometer records and tree-ring proxies is usually referred to as the “divergence”.
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?search=divergence&word=y

For those who were wondering where the money came from
The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund
http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/

Smokey says: @ur momisugly July 22, 2012 at 6:21 pm
….Ten years of billing clients, in one case! Someone has very deep pockets, because Michael Mann would never write an open-ended check over such a weak case. What do lawyers cost these days? $400 an hour and up?
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The $300 to $400/hour is for a run of the mill lawyer and they charge by ten minute increments, so yes some one has VERY DEEP pockets.
Most lawyers would look at this and tell you not to waste your money.
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If you skim through last month’s instapundit (Glen Reynolds) blog, you will find several references to the way the law market has collapsed, with many law-school graduates unable to find jobs. (There is even, I believe, references to these graduates suing the law schools for misrepresenting the state of the legal market to potential students, although that particular set of posts may have been in the month before.) Hence it is conceivable that Mann’s lawyers are charging little or nothing, being faced with the choice of no work at all or working on spec.

It’s depressingly hilarious that one of the loudest-mouthed hitmen “linking” Prof. Mann to “pedophiles” is a former school teacher whose career ended in scandal almost a decade ago following his arrest and trial for sending dozens of obscene text messages to a 16-y-o school girl. Former high school art teacher John O’Sullivan was acquitted after his step-daughter testified she had sent the obscene messages — testimony that the judge said he did not find entirely credible. O’Sullivan then published an autobiographical novel (titled “Vanilla Girl”) in which he defends what he called “kiddie fiddling” — I kid you not.*
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/SIR+CLEARED+OF+SEX+TXTS.-a0113713467
Two days ago, John O’Sullivan, the leader of a group of global warming denier wackos called the Sky Dragon Slayers (which includes Tim Ball), published an even more rabid diatribe than Steyn’s in which he claims Prof. Mann is “linked to” the pedophile Sandusky and that he has “lawyered Up after Penn State Child Sex Link.” That’s followed by his usual libelous accusations of “scientific misconduct,” “criminal fraud, etc,”
http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/breaking-climate-scientist-michael-mann-lawyers-up-after-penn-state-child-sex-link/
O’Sullivan claims to be legal scholar and a lawyer with a law degree from University of Surrey and that he has “successfully litigated for 13 years in New York and Federal 2nd District courts.” He claims to be a science writer with major articles published around the world including in National Review and Forbes magazines. He also claimed to be employed as a legal consultant by Pearlman Lindholm, the law firm defending Tim Ball in the matter of Mann vs. Ball, et al. before the Supreme Court of British Columbia. None of that is true. He is an utterly shameless humbug. In 2010, he purchased his “law degree” from the online diploma mill “Hill University” that sells any degree in any field with a “promised delivery in just 14 days!”
But this time, Mr. O’Sullivan may have stuck his big foot so deeply into his mouth, it may emerge out his backside and kick him in the butt. For example, he says in the article published Saturday that the “case isn’t going well for Mann because he appears to be stalling about complying with a court motion to hand over his hidden ‘dirty laundry’ metadata to [the Supreme Court of British Columbia]… If Mann persists in failing to comply the court may find him in contempt and dismiss his case and award substantial damages in favor of Ball.”
Once again, this defender of “kiddie-fiddlers” is just making it up. The Supreme Court of BC has issued no such order. It will be interesting to see what Prof. Mann’s attorneys will do with this.
*– The following quotes are from O’Sullivan’s self-published autobiographical novel “Vanilla Girl,” which he describes as a “fact-based crime story of a teacher’s struggle to control his erotic obsession with a schoolgirl”:
“I tell my online friends that the age of consent varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The median seems to range from fourteen to sixteen years, but globally ages can range anything from nine to twenty-one. It sickens me that people, so-called civilized, intelligent people can’t see it. Their clinical, sanitized attitudes toward the appropriate age of consent have drifted upwards in modern times-Ignorant people rally against me-against us-us free thinkers.”
“Too many fools still believe and need to believe that children are ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’, that is, asexual, untainted by sexual thoughts, feelings or urges. But, you see, Leo, you and me know this is not true even of very young children, and it is certainly not true of children much past the age of ten or eleven.”
“By looking at the female waist to hip ratio, you know when a female is of the right age for reproduction. At that time, and if the mind is mature enough you can argue that you are dealing with a woman and not a child. If nature says she a woman then she is a woman-it’s not arbitrary like the age of consent laws that vary so wildly throughout the world from country to country, jurisdiction to jurisdiction.”
http://cupboard55vanillagirl.blogspot.com/

Darrylb says:
July 23, 2012 at 6:22 pm
…. One sad outcome is that the general public may eventually be much less willing to believe the scientific community.
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It is already happening. You even have a website called Retraction Watch and Rasmussen poll: 69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research

jabali316 – better yet, put him on a football team where he can really get – oh, sorry, self-snip.

You should consider what the Butts/Bryant Effect did to the Saturday Evening Post. Losing a libel suit to Wally Butts put an end to that famous mag. Accusations of fixing games are similar to accusations of fixing climate science. Conflating Mann with Sandusky just raises the damage amount beyond infinity.