Some days, you get gifts from on high.
Dr. Michael Mann apparently still doesn’t understand how his own actions invoked the Streisand effect. So, he compares people asking questions to the larval form of insects.
Steve McIntyre tips us off to this and writes with the driest wit possible:
From time to time, we hear from climate scientists that they are limited in their responses by the dignity of their profession. The dignity to which climate scientists aspire is nicely exemplified by the following remarks of a prominent real_climate_scientist:
hey trolls who have been given marching orders to flood the comment threads here like an infestation of beetle larvae: Don’t bother! We’ve seen the mindless talking points before, and coming here to parrot them simply (a) pollutes the otherwise thoughtful discussion in the comment threads here, and (b) exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of your climate change denial zealotry.
Here’s the screencap:
I wonder, has Dr. Mann just libeled everyone whose comments he has been serially deleting? The best part is Steve McIntyre’s response, be sure to read it here.
In other news, it has now been 10 days since Mark Steyn wrote the article that ticked off Dr. Mann, and now the backlash has sent him scurrying for entomological comparisons for lack of any better arguments.
Since the Steyn article is still there, I suspect that NRO has told Dr. Mann and his attorney to “go fish”. Well, at least he’s having bait delivered.
I’m reminded of this quote from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.:
“If Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him.”
Stay classy Mike!
Seth
Welcome to WUWT.
You must be new here. After all, you’ve clearly missed all the discussions on papers and studies we’ve had here over the years, or all the rebuttals to Mann’s shoddy work.
I also noticed you purposely chose to avoid Mann’s vulgar outburst at people asking him questions. Nice cherry picking. Mr. Mann must be proud.
Seth
re: ” the main reason why I don’t believe climate skeptics”
Well that’s a really bad way to evaluate evidence, is it not?
Michael Mann does loads of nasty ad homs, so I guess that no one should pay any attention to his “evidence” then….
As for WUWT, it’s a lively place but typically one does not see ad homs toward scientists who have not first engaged in same. Mann has been a nasty politicized guy from early on (review some Climategate emails of how he behaved many years ago regarding serious scientific and statistical questions). Serious scientists get treated with a lot of respect unless and until they have shown a nasty ad hom streak themselves. Sauce, goose, gander…. pot, kettle.
For anyone like Seth who is concerned about the excess of ad hominems in climate science issues, a case study should be made of the “hatchet job” done last summer/fall against Spencer and Braswell. What should have been scientific debates about data, methods, and competing analyses turned into this (the fault lies entirely with the “alarmists” like Trenberth and Gleick, who could not stand to see an unwelcome scientific analysis allowed any oxygen at all, so to speak):
Pielke Sr. on the bizarre ad hominem attacks by Trenberth-Gleick-Abraham on Spencer and Braswell
Trenberth teams up with Peter Gleick on “hatchet job” on Spencer and Braswell
Spencer discusses the unhinged and unscientific assaults upon his name and reputation
The now notorious fraud artist Peter Gleick weighed in with his own assault upon Spencer and Braswell
WUWT thread on the libels agains Spencer and Braswell
correction, that was the paper in the journal Remote Sensing by Spencer and Braswell (2011)
Christy has also come in for abuse along with Spencer and UAH, but was not a co-author on that Remote Sensing paper.
Sparks said on July 26, 2012 at 2:00 pm:
Sycamore? Sequoia? Spinach? Spam? The different species eat a lot of different things. Ever watch an episode of CSI when they talk about them?
As I predicted, Steyn says that he is preparing for a full-length trial and that although there is no defense fund, you could contribute or subscribe to National Review to support his cause:
http://www.steynonline.com/5087/bluff-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry
The chance that the principals at National Review would cooperate with thuggish legal demands to censor themselves was slim.
I don’t see the beetle larvae on Mann’s FB page anymore. Hide the deranged, I guess.
Seth says:
You’ve lost me straight away. Well done. You come in at the end of a thread devoted to a scientist calling people who question his claims “beetle larvae” for heaven’s sake, and the first thing you do is criticise those who respond to this nasty bigot for ad-hominen attacks?
You have got to be kidding. Either that, or you are really – and I mean really – dumb.
Seth says:
July 26, 2012 at 3:45 pm
The science does not become false if you don’t like dendroclimatology, and it certainly doesn’t become false if you don’t like Dr. Mann.
The science of dendroclimatology becomes false if you try to twist it to do something other than it was meant to do, which is examine tree growth in order to take an educated guess at the conditions in the particular microclimate in which it grew, which includes a host of factors other than the ambient temperature. And if you snip off the end of a proxy record and graft an observational record to it, then claim the whole as a proxy record, that’s not science, that’s fraud.
Mickey Mann is God’s gift to man. May he stay clueless until the day they haul him off to prison.
Speaking of beetles, to the ancient Egyptians the scarab beetle was a symbol of death and rebirth. Isn’t it odd that Michael Mann keeps getting into public conflict with Canadians? Steve McIntyre, Dr Tim Ball, and now Mark Steyn. Maybe Mann was mean to Canadians in a past life. Karma’s a bitch, Mann, and she’s coming for you.
Jericho says:
July 28, 2012 at 2:08 am
Isn’t it odd that Michael Mann keeps getting into public conflict with Canadians?
Canada perfected the hockey stick, but only use it for playing hockey.
Mann considers that sacrilegious…
Steve McIntyre says:
July 27, 2012 at 9:00 am
I don’t see the beetle larvae on Mann’s FB page anymore. Hide the deranged, I guess.
“Hide the malign”…
Sparks says:
July 26, 2012 at 2:00 pm
We all know what insect Larvae like to feed on, it begins with S.
____________________________________
That’s right its hokey Sticks! So the Mann got that right. (I am sharpening my teeth for another round)
Sean Lennon should be outraged.
“For anyone like Seth who is concerned about the excess of ad hominems in climate science issues, a case study should be made of the “hatchet job” done last summer/fall against Spencer and Braswell.”
Spencer and Braswell somehow got a paper through a peer review process that did not address well known refutations that exist in the science. Any reviewer with a familiarity with the field should have known that it needed to supply a lot more evidence, and the editor of the Journal quite rightly resigned.
All of that is an argument about science. Not a pleasant one, but science often gets heated.
“Mann compares hordes of idiots making attacks on his facebook page to Beetle Larvae”. Is also not pleasant, but it is also not about the science.
And the groupthink mantras repeated in this thread show nothing worthwhile in the thought processes here:
“I don’t see the beetle larvae on Mann’s FB page anymore. Hide the deranged, I guess.”
– Pathetic
“Mickey Mann is God’s gift to man. May he stay clueless until the day they haul him off to prison.”
– Pathetic
“Hide the malign…”
– Pathetic
“We all know what insect Larvae like to feed on, it begins with S.”
– Pathetic.
The idea of an ad-hominem is that it is a fallacious argument. Calling people beetles isn’t an ad-hominem unless you are saying that therefore some argument they are making is false.
Attacking the respected and highly awarded Dr. Mann on a blog that’s raison d’etre is to culture a social group of people who deny climate science, however, is. You’re attempting to create an anti-science demagoguery by maligning individual scientists. The fallacy being that because of the hatred you create towards them, therefore climate science is false.
Quite apart from the fact that Dr. Mann is a well regarded scientist with many notable contributions, so the hatred is without basis, even if you have some personal vendetta against scientists with male pattern baldness, or computer geeks, and do genuinely hate him for some reason of your own, climate science and atmospheric physics are still valid.
Wombat says:
July 29, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Spencer and Braswell somehow got a paper through a peer review process that did not address well known refutations that exist in the science. Any reviewer with a familiarity with the field should have known that it needed to supply a lot more evidence, and the editor of the Journal quite rightly resigned.
That’s like saying the managing editor of your local fishwrapper should resign if one of his stringers gets a partial story and turns it in a final. The worst that happens is that the story gets retracted or corrected — which is the editor’s *job*.
“Hide the malign…”
– Pathetic.
I thought it was pretty clever, myself. De gustibus, and all that…
The idea of an ad-hominem is that it is a fallacious argument. Calling people beetles isn’t an ad-hominem unless you are saying that therefore some argument they are making is false.
Mann explicitly denigrated the posters’ comments as “mindless talking points” polluting his sacrosanct FB page with the “intellectual bankruptcy of…climate change denial zealotry.” That’s fit enough for even your description.
Attacking the respected and highly awarded Dr. Mann on a blog that’s raison d’etre is to culture a social group of people who deny climate science, however, is.
You just shot holes through your own definition, genius.
You’re attempting to create an anti-science demagoguery by maligning individual scientists. The fallacy being that because of the hatred you create towards them, therefore climate science is false.
Which is precisely what Mikey did. Do you even *read* what you’ve written?
…climate science and atmospheric physics are still valid.
Yup — and CAGW has had to distort both and add a generous mixture of prevarication, obfuscation, intimidation, and outright fraud in order to make it appear genuine.