From the soon to be a Climate Crock of the Week department, Barry Woods writes to me in an email:
One of the insights in the climategate emails was perhaps how poisonous Michael Mann’s involvement was, for the niche area of the paleo science community (ego due to IPCC and Hockey Stick)?
This tweet from earlier this morning (now deleted, only a text version survives -Anthony) shows the immediate labeling of “denier” for another scientist who disagrees with his paleo work.
Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann
Closet #climatechange #denier Rob Wilson, comes out of the closet big time: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/10/21/wilson-on-millennial-temperature-reconstructions.html … #BadScience #DisingenuousBehavior
Shortly afterwards, Mann got into a long and somewhat huffy discussion with Tamsin Edwards over that labeling, here’s the opening salvo:
Also in the feed earlier this morning, (though I can’t find it now) was a Tweet from Mann backing down saying he’d withhold judgment on Rob Wilson until he confirmed those words, suggesting that Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) had misinterpreted Wilson’s words..
That Tweet apparently has disappeared too. (A WUWT commenter found it, see below, but the original “denier” tweet is still missing -A) I wasn’t going to bother with this article until Dr. Mann started disappearing his own words.
Awful blog piece (http://t.co/61oFMFD3Ho) may well have misrepresented Rob Wilson's views. I suspend judgment, pending his disavowal of it..
— Dr. Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) October 21, 2013
Woods continues:
[About the same time] Rob Wilson, had just publicly confirmed (in comments at Bishop Hill) that he thought and had publicly told students, public, etc Mann’s recent work was a ‘crock of shit’… (his words)
“Lastly, the “crock of xxxx” statement was focussed entirely on recent work By Michael Mann w.r.t. hypothesised missing rings in tree-ring records (a whole bunch of papers listed below).
Although a rather flippant statement, I stand by it and Mann is well aware of my criticisms (privately and through the peer reviewed literature) of his recent work.
Rob”
in the comments
Here it is in full:
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Greetings.
Although I vetted Andrew’s post, I want to clarify that my 2 hour lecture was, I hope, a critical look at all of the northern hemispheric reconstructions of past temperature to date. It was not focussed entirely on Michael Mann’s work. I described each of the major studies and tried to highlight both their strengths and weaknesses – they all have some useful information but it is important to understand the limitations of the studies as well. Of course Mann’s work was mentioned as several of his papers have been so prominent over the last 15 years but I actually spent substantially more time taking apart the D’Arrigo et al. (2006) study on which I did much of the analysis.
This was a session where I wanted the students to critically look at the different studies and specifically address what we can learn from them and how the science can move on over the next decade. Such large scale reconstructions are critically important for understanding the controls on large climate variability, but as yet, due to great uncertainties and large differences in reconstructed amplitude, they are not yet very useful at constraining modelled estimates of future temperature change.
Bar some personal comments, much of what I said is published (see papers below) and is in the public domain.
Lastly, the “crock of xxxx” statement was focussed entirely on recent work By Michael Mann w.r.t. hypothesised missing rings in tree-ring records (a whole bunch of papers listed below). Although a rather flippant statement, I stand by it and Mann is well aware of my criticisms (privately and through the peer reviewed literature) of his recent work.
Rob
I hope all the PDF links below.
NH RELATED PAPERS
Edwards, T.L., Crucifix, M. and Harrison, S.P., 2007. Using the past to constrain the future: how the palaeorecord can improve estimates of global warming. Progress in Physical Geography 31 (5), 481-500.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/papers/Edwardsetal2007.pdf
D’Arrigo, R., Wilson, R. and Jacoby, G. 2006. On the long-term context for late 20th century warming. Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 111, D03103, doi:10.1029/2005JD006352
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/DArrigoetal2006a.pdf
D Frank, D., J. Esper, E. Zorita, R. Wilson. (2010). A noodle, hockey stick, and spaghetti plate: a perspective on high resolution paleoclimatology. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change. doi: 10.1002/wcc.53.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/Franketal2010.pdf
Trieste 2008 Paleoclimate Uncertainties Workshop, Final Report.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/reports/trieste2008/trieste2008final.pdf
Esper J, Frank DC, Wilson RJS (2004) Climate reconstructions – low frequency ambition and high frequency ratification. EOS 85, 113, 120.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/Esperetal2004.pdf
Esper J, Wilson RJS, Frank DC, Moberg A, Wanner H, Luterbacher J (2005) Climate: past ranges and future changes. Quaternary Science Reviews 24, 2164-2166.
http://www.geo.uni-mainz.de/Dateien/Esper_2005_QSR.pdf
MISSING TREE-RINGS AND MAJOR VOLCANIC EVENTS
Mann et al. 2012. Underestimation of Volcanic Cooling in Tree-Ring Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric Temperatures, Nature Geoscience, 5, 202-205.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MFRNatureGeosci12.pdf
Anchukaitis, K. et al. (2012). Tree rings and volcanic cooling. Nature Geoscience. 5: 836–837. doi:10.1038/ngeo1645
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/Anchukaitisetal2012.pdf
Mann et al. (2013). Discrepancies between the modeled and proxy-reconstructed response to volcanic forcing over the past millennium: Implications and possible mechanisms. JGR. 118, 14, p. 7617-7627.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/MRSTF-JGRInPress.pdf
Esper J et al (2013) Testing the hypothesis of post-volcanic missing rings in temperature sensitive dendrochronological data. Dendrochronologia. 31 (3): 216-222.
http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb09climatology/files/2012/03/Esper_2013_Den.pdf
Esper J et al (2013) European summer temperature response to annually dated volcanic eruptions over the past nine centuries. Bulletin of Volcanology 75, 736, doi: 10.1007/s00445-013-0736-z.
http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb09climatology/files/2012/03/Esper_2013_BullVol.pdf
St. George et al. (2013). The rarity of absent growth rings in Northern Hemisphere forests
outside the American Southwest. Geophysical Research Letters 40, doi:10.1002/grl.50743
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/Stgeorge2013.pdf
D’Arrigo, et al. (2013). Volcanic cooling signal in tree-ring temperature reconstructions for the past millennium, Journal of Geophysical Research, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50692
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/all%20pdfs/D’Arrigoetal2013.pdf
Rob Wilson ==================================================================
It seems that Rob Wilson has some serious basis for the claim, and he’s sticking by it.
Ross McKitrick sums it up pretty well in a comment:
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Mann’s tweet just reveals openly what has long been his working assumption. To Mann, a “skeptic” is anyone who doesn’t accept his work uncritically, and a “denier” is anyone who actually disagrees with him.
Ross McKitrick ==================================================================
This is Rob Wilson:
Rob Wilson Earth and Environmental Sciences – Senior Lecturer
School of Geography and Geosciences
Irvine Building
St Andrews
KY16 9AL
United Kingdom
It seems he is well qualified to spot paleo-crocks:
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A tree-ring reconstruction of East Anglian (UK) hydroclimate variability over the last millennium
Cooper, R. J., Melvin, T. M., Tyers, I., Wilson, R. J. S. & Briffa, K. R. Feb 2013 In : Climate Dynamics. 40, 3-4, p. 1019-1039
Article
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Contrasting water-uptake and growth responses to drought in co-occurring riparian tree species
Singer, M. B., Stella, J., Piegay, H., Dufour, S., Wilson, R. & Johnstone, L. 2013 In : Ecohydrology. 6, 3, p. 402Article
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Orbital forcing of tree-ring data
Esper, J., Frank, D. C., Timonen, M., Zorita, E., Wilson, R., Luterbacher, J., Holzkämper, S., Fischer, N., Wagner, S., Nievergelt, D., Verstege, A. & Büntgen, U. Dec 2012 In : Nature Climate Change. 2, 12, p. 862-866
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Update: In case anyone doubts the “poisonous” nature of the rhetoric Dr. Mann uses, I’ll point out what he has begun labeling an Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who wanted to look at Mann’s UVA emails under FOIA.
Conservative @RTDNEWS refuses to endorse #Cooch for #VAGov, citing "divisive agenda..that was unbecoming in an AG" http://t.co/ggCl4RbNSz
— Dr. Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) October 20, 2013
The definition of the slang word “cooch” is:
Source: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/cooch
What a terrible misogynistic label to apply to somebody. You’d think with the recent sexual harassment scandal over Scientific American’s Bora Zivkovic and his actions, Dr. Mann would be a bit more reserved in such nasty labeling.
My advice to Dr. Mann: When you’ve tweeted yourself into a hole, stop tweeting.
more solyent green!: “Is it really possible to communicate on climate science in 140 characters or less?”
— GHG heats air. Does not effect convection. Oceans are sneaky.
[62] characters of haiku.
Someone needs to remind the “good” Dr. Mann that all tweets are live-archived to the servers at the library of congress for posterity. Right now there isn’t a good way to search them, but they are working on that. All his nasty tweets will be there no matter how much he deletes them from the twitter feed. Once sent, they are forever available!
Some historian or sociologist is going to have a field day with his twitter blasts some day.
“125 characters of haiku.” — Some guy that can’t count.
Wrong column in the text editor… 62 Characters. Should have made a pair of haikus.
Risk is a funny word to use in the context of milder weather.
Risk of some projected warmth over parts of a large landmass?
As Onslow said to Daisy – “anything goes”.
http://www.wunderground.com/news/fall-winter-forecast-weather-channel-20131021
It doesn’t seem to occur to Mann that the entirely artificial, human-designed and computer-generated global climate models could be fallible. The fact that they don’t match the real temperature record except in the very narrow range of years used to calibrate the computer models is not so much a problem of incorrect design of the computer models but the failure of the natural world to properly record what really must be going on. In other words, the computer models become the real world and the real world is just a fallible proxy of the computer models. Yeah, I can see why Wilson might smell a stinky crock.
Gunga Din;
He told them to “Get off your fanny.” In England at the time “fanny” meant the same as “cooch”.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah, I remember being totally confused when someone from Britain asked me if I had a fag on me. Turns out he meant a cigarette, not the north american common use which would be a derogatory term for a gay man.
On the other hand, I am ex of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where a “Nip” means a hamburger. To this day I don’t know what a “Nip” means in Texas, only that when I tried to order one I got slapped.
Mike’s Mama used to chuck him under the chin, saying,”Coochie, coochie! Coo!”
And the phrase stuck!
Michael Mann and his Twitter feed are the gift that keeps on giving!
Just a point of clarification (re Mann’s use of the offensive word “cooch”), Mann is not the originator. It seems to have been coined by a Virginia-based abortion activist named Shelley Abrams, the founder and domain owner of coochwatch.com, created as a platform to attack Cuccinelli. This by no means exonerates Mann, guess he figures the local feminists have his backside covered
coochwatch.com is currently unavailable and returns a 503 error.
Here’s the most recent wayback archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121112035250/http://coochwatch.com/
Missing tree rings following the 1258/59 eruption? There’s a big problem here, equatorial eruptions are supposed to give warmer winters in the mid-upper latitudes, and cooler wetter summers, I can’t see how that would reduce ring size.
While strong cooling before the eruption would follow the usual pattern, so I looked to see if there was a frost ring in 1257:
“There are frost rings, however, in 1257 and 1029. While volcanically forced cooling in the AD 1200s has been tentatively associated with Anasazi cultural collapse and population movements on the Colorado Plateau ( Salzer, 2000 ), tree-ring growth associated with the large ice-core signal of 1259 was not small enough for this eruption to be identified using our method.”
http://media.longnow.org/files/2/Salzer_Hughes_2007.pdf
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I lived in Texas for a year. I don’t why that got you slapped.
I’ve heard “nip” used for a shot of whiskey. I’ve heard “nip” used (in old movies) as a Japanese.
In what type of establishment did you order a “nip”? 😎
(Just to be clear, that was meant as a joke! (and I sure hope “joke” doesn’t mean something odd in another country!))
@daviditron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement 🙂
N.B. I’m British…
@John West
Thanks! Welcome to Twitter. Do say hello.
Gunga Din
“In what type of establishment did you order a “nip”? 8-)”
———————————————————————-
If it was a Shinto Temple he got off lightly.
If it was in an Irish pub he also got off lightly as he should have stopped breathing from alcohol poisoning…….
to davidmhoffer says:
Not sure what Nip means in Texas, but growing up in CA it was a derogatory word for a person of Japanese (i.e., Nippon) descent. Chink was used similarly for Chinese, Gook for Vietnamese.
[“Nip” is normal word in long use, meaning “to cut off” – Usually, implying to cut off with a sharp instrument, close to the branch or source. Mod]
Gras Albert says:
October 21, 2013 at 3:00 pm
I see no evidence that Mann’s IQ is particularly high.
Engaging in his fraudulent activity would require an IQ no higher than 120, if that.
IN 2007 wilson and 9 other tree ring experts reported
“No current tree ring based reconstruction of extratropical Northern Hemisphere temperatures that extends into the 1990s captures the full range of late 20th century warming observed in the instrumental record.”
Obviously temperatures in natural habitat away from airports and heavily populated regions will not reflect urban warming. But Mann and other CO2 advocates argue that tree rings that do not show his modeled warming are essentially wooden-headed deniers. Such arguments truly earn “crock of the millennia” award.
Tamsin Edwards says:
October 21, 2013 at 3:46 pm
@daviditron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement 🙂
N.B. I’m British…
@John West
Thanks! Welcome to Twitter. Do say hello.
Yo, go girl!
The day is yours!
On holiday at present but when I get back near a family brat I will try Twitter to aid John West in his quest!
Mann HAS to defend himself — if his work is generally accepted as being the crap that we know it is then he, himself, is in deep kimchee. Look at how much of climate science literature is based on Mann’s work – think about what it would do the the reputations of those authors if Mann’s work was generally considered do-do. Think about how those scientists would THEN think about Mann… Scientific knives and a dramatic fade-away.
<i Tamsin Edwards says:
October 21, 2013 at 3:46 pm
@daviditron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement 🙂
N.B. I’m British…
=========================================
David, “that’s pretty strong” is Brit-speak for “WTF are you talking about ??!!??”
I always look forward to Tamsin’s insights, wherever they appear.
Mann has a PhD does he not – any resemblance to this fellow?
http://goo.gl/LywjPp
Observations:
– As to Mann’s idiocy in tweets, he should be advised by his associates that ‘less is more’ . . . . in fact wrt his tweets his associates should advise him that ‘none is more’.
– His problems with criticism means he choose the wrong career, science is a very very criticism filled world indeed. He should have gone into a night watchman career.
– He would be really funny if he wasn’t so pitiable.
Q => I wonder if he is he still on the sabbatical which started IIRC from 2011?
John
Manniac.
Mann’s work is piss poor and his intellect his so bereft of any value that he is unable to afford a pot to piss in.
Mods it’s not a swear word just an old word for urine 🙂
Nip is short for nipple of course.
Mann is his own best friend as he’ll never find another so faithful and forgiving of him as himself, and he is also his own worst enemy as nobody tries harder to make him look bad. He excels in both roles, don’t you think?.
den·i·er [ dénnyər ]
1. one who uses the term “denier” as a weapon. It is self-referencing.