While dodging the issue of his own ten thousand dollar speaking fees this past week, Mike Mann thinks its all a big hugely funded conspiracy (like those WUWT calendar sales). From a hilarious interview at The Independent:
A climate scientist who says he has been subjected to a vitriolic hate campaign has denounced the way that American billionaires have been able to secretly finance the climate-sceptic organisations that have attacked him.
Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, who has been targeted by climate-change sceptics for his work on global temperature records, said it was wrong for wealthy individuals such as the oil billionaire Charles Koch to surreptitiously finance the “counter-movement” that denounces the science of global warming.
…
It was only when he was researching a book that he became aware Koch was assisting some of the organisations that he says have been attacking him and his colleagues for so many years, Professor Mann said. He said the sceptic organisations had “single-handedly sought to poison the public discourse over human-caused climate change. In the process they have potentially mortgaged the futures of our children and grandchildren. You couldn’t invent villains like this if you tried.”
On the subject of the Koch Brothers and funding of sceptic organizations, Dr. Mann might recall that his criminal acquaintance, Dr. Peter Gleick’s document theft was helpful it putting that issue to rest once and for all. From Junkscience.com
As this page shows, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation only gave $25,000 to Heartland in 2011 (about 0.5% of Heartland’s budget) for a health care project. Heartland only hoped to get $200,000 from the Foundation in 2012 — again for its health care project. But Dr. Mann would never talk about such adverse results.
Nor does Dr. Mann like to talk about the millions he has received in grants at Penn State.
From the American Spectator:
Inarguably the next-largest culprit is Michael Mann, Mr. Nature Trick, who is not to be confused with the Nature Boy or the other “Heat“-making Mann. He has had his grants available for public viewing for a while, so I’m surprised I’ve not seen those spread around the ‘Net. They are right there listed in his curriculum vitae. (now deleted -AW)
2009-2013 Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991
2009-2012 Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann; Co-Investigators: K. Keller (Penn State Univ.), A. Timmermann (Univ. of Hawaii)] $541,184
2008-2011 A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, DOE [Principal Investigator: T. Wagener; Co-Investigators: M. Mann, R. Crane, K. Freeman (Penn State Univ.)] $330,000
2008-2009 AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship (Anthony Sabbatelli), American Meteorological Society [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $23,000
2006-2009 Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, USAID [Principal Investigator: P. Tschakert; Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, W. Easterling (Penn State Univ.)] $759,928
2006-2009 Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $459,000
2006-2009 Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: K. Cobb (Georgia Tech Univ.), N. Graham (Hydro. Res. Center), M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.), Hoerling (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center), Alexander (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center)] PSU award (M.E. Mann): $68,065
2006-2007 Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), NSF-EAR [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: R. Alley, M. Arthur, J. Evans, D. Pollard (Penn State Univ.)] $100,000
2003-2006 Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U.Va), J. Cole (U. Arizona), V. Mehta (CRCES)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $102,000
2002-2005 Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: S. Rutherford, R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $315,000
2002-2005 Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, NSF-Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Oceans and Climate System [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U. Va), E. Steig (U. Wash.), D. Weinbrenner (U. Wash)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $133,000
2002-2003 Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, NOAA-Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR) Program [Principal Investigators: Rosanne D’Arrigo, Ed Cook (Lamont/Columbia); Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $14,400
2002-2003 Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: Malcolm Hughes (Univ. of Arizona); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann; J. Park (Yale University)] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $20,775
2001-2003 Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, University of Virginia-Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) [Principal Investigator: J.D. Albertson; Co-Investigators: H. Epstein, M.E. Mann] U.Va internal award: $214,700
2001-2002 Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, Office of Naval Research [Principal Investigator: P. Wiberg (U.Va), Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] $20,775
1999-2002 Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data Intercomparison, NOAA-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (U.Va), Co-Investigators: R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $381,647
1998-2000 Validation of Decadal-to-Multi-century climate predictions, DOE [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: H.F. Diaz, M.E. Mann]
1998-2000 The changing seasons? Detecting and understanding climatic change, NSF-Hydrological Science [Principal Investigator U. Lall (U. Utah); Co-investigators: M.E. Mann, B. Rajagopalan, M. Cane] $266,235K
1996-1999 Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally
Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, NSF-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, M.K. Hughes] $270,000
1996-1998 Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last
Millennium, DOE, Alexander Hollaender Postdoctoral Fellowship [M.E. Mann] $78,000
For those keeping score, that’s almost $6 million total for various predictions, models and reconstructions over the last 13 years by Mann and his playmates.
As for the “villains”, I’m reminded of this famous quote from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.:
If Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him.
To John H:
You wrote:
If so, it is a really, really baaaaddd remake….
D.B. Stealey says:
January 26, 2013 at 3:38 pm
It seems to be about mosquitos, although it doesn’t say so above
If we google “Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases” we easily find
http://nsf.gov/awards/award_visualization_noscript.jsp?org=NSF&showARRAAwards=true®ion=US-PA&instId=0033290000
which gives a link to
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0914384
Six papers so far, Mann is not an author on any of them.
The PI on this grant is Matthew Thomas at Penn State. Here’s his home page:
http://ento.psu.edu/directory/mbt13
He’s an Entomologist, which is a kind of biologist. As it happens, the most relevant kind. (His goatee and closely cropped head make him vaguely resemble Mann, although more so if you stretch the image horizontally.)
Mann did not get this grant; he was a co-PI. What that means for his funding is impossible to tell without more detail–it may mean a major role, but often it means that he signed on for a nominal time contribution, or none at all, to prove to the NSF that there was a climate scientist available to consult on that part. Certainly, he did not get 1.8 million to play with, very likely, less than 10% of that would go to bits of his salary, a student he supervised, etc. over the four-year grant period. But the 1.8 mil went to, and was administered by, a bug guy.
D.B., this stuff is not difficult. Why not try looking stuff up before drawing conclusions? You’ll like it, it’s fun.
Meanwhile, when you add up all of the grants for which Mann is listed as PI, the amounts come to about 2.1 million. (That includes the $78,000 that supported him for two years as a postdoc). As noted, he probably wouldn’t have gotten much of the 1.8 M disease vector study. This about 2 million of which about 1/4 million is directly assignable to Mann, and the rest, we can’t tell how much Mann got. With walterschneider’s update, there’s another $400k attributable to Mann. Add these up, and we get something like $2.75 million. Then there’s whatever his share was of the rest–we could generously give a total of 3.5 million.
$350,000 per year sounds like a lot. But if you pay for a prof to work full time on research in the summer and 20% during the academic year (buy out some of his time so he can spend it on research instead of teaching), then throw in a postdoc and three or four grad students, that leaves a reasonable but modest amount for equipment, supplies, travel if necessary. It’s far from extravagent. Nobody’s getting rich, and the students are really just barely getting by. As usual, Mann’s been getting more funding as his career advances, so his research group(s) would be smaller earlier on, and larger more recently.
I can’t help comparing this with a friend of mine, who, back in the ’90’s, received a single grant for five million dollars over five years. His one grant was undoubtedly for more than Mann ever got. But my friends was doing biomedical research, which is expensive. There’s a huge of money spent on climate studies, but university profs are not, by themselves, deploying phalanxes of robot buoys or purpose-built satellites. In biomedical research, the big-ticket items are purchased by the labs, with grant money (or else borrowed, shared, etc.).
People have found many ways of criticizing Mann. Pointing out that he has a successful, but unexceptional, track record, as a science prof, for external funding seems to be a way of belaboring him with a wet noodle, with occasional blows from a wilted celery stick.
Mann’s CV is on the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20121026221636/http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/cv.php
Re. my last, though the Wayback Machine shows the original CV, the .pdf and .doc links lead to the amended “contributed to” version links.
Suggest using virtual .pdf printer such as PdfFactory or Foxit pdf printer if a .pdf copy of the page is required.
Almost all comments favorable. No evidence presented. I sure with someone would pay me for being a long term (from the beginning) skeptic and critic.