Sticking it to the Mann

Global warming has stopped. Get over it.  A response to Michael Mann in the Richmond Times Dispatch

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The collapsed global warming scare certainly has some odd characters coming to its defense in this paper. Michael Mann (Aug. 25), whom the Attorney General of Virginia investigated under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act 2000 after some statistical peculiarities in Mann’s failed attempt to abolish the medieval warm period, now bloops another blooper.

He tries to deny the embarrassing near-17-year pause in global warming because “NASA found the warming continues unabated, with the past decade the warmest on record”. As an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel, let me correct his latest gaffe.

The monthly near-surface temperature record from the RSS satellites (above) shows no warming trend for 16 years 8 months. But go back 20 years and some warming shows up. The temperature climbed from 1993-1996, then stopped.

So the latest decade is a bit warmer than those that went before, but there has still been no warming for almost 17 years. Even the climate-science chairman of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, admits that. Elementary, my dear Michael. Tut, tut! Statistics 101.

Mann says there is “evidence that humans are warming the planet”. There can’t be. For 200 months there has been no warming at all. Get over it. Get a life.

Mann says his discredited attempt to rewrite medieval temperatures “has not been disproved”. Well, here is what Professor Ross McKitrick, who exposed Mann’s statistical peculiarities in the learned journals, had to say about it:

“… The conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments …”.

And here is the report of three Congressional statisticians in 2006:

“… we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.

“Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

“Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”

Mann goes on to say, “Dozens of independent groups of scientists have independently reproduced and confirmed our findings …”. His double use of “independent” was scarcely the mot juste. Here is what the three statisticians told Congress:

“In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of co-authored papers with him.

“Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.”

Mann then complains at my pointing out that his earlier offensive references to climate “ ‘deniers’ and ‘denialists’ would be illegal in Europe as being anti-Jewish, racialist hate-speech.” He says he is Jewish. Then he should know better than to use such unscientific and (in Europe) illegal terms, calculated to imply Holocaust denial on the part of his opponents.

Mann says the House of Lords says I am not a member when I say I am. Sigh! Mann knows no more of British constitutional practice than he does of elementary statistics. Hansard records that the House has recognized my title to succeed my late beloved father, but does not record the House as saying I am not a member. Facts wrong again, Mike, baby. Try doing science, not invective.

Finally, Mann says I “impersonated a delegate from Myanmar” at a UN conference. Do I look Burmese? Do I sound Burmese? Did the chairman of the conference say he thought I was Burmese? No. He said he knew I was not from Burma. Facts wrong yet again, Mickey.

Meanwhile, the world continues to fail to warm as predicted. Not only Attorneys General but also taxpayers will soon, and rightly, be demanding their money back from the grasping profiteers of doom who so monstrously over-egged this particular pudding.

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Lord Monckton is an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report. He has lectured worldwide in climate science and economics and has published several papers in the learned literature. Oh, and his passport says he is The Right Honourable Christopher Walter, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.