Professor Michael Mann, if you see something, say something – or maybe just keep your mouth shut
Guest essay by Dr. Fred Singer
Professor Michael Mann, the inventor of the Hockeystick temperature graph, had a contentious editorial essay in the January 17th issue of the New York Times. [The Hockeystick graph purports to show that temperatures of the last thousand years declined steadily — until the 20th century, when there was a sudden large rise.]
I am using the word “inventor” on purpose, since the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality. It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800. In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000AD to 1980, at which point the proxy temperature suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.
Since its publication in 1998 and 1999, the hockeystick graph has had a turbulent history. It was adopted by the IPCC (UN-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 3rd Assessment Report (2001) to support the claim of a major anthropogenic global warming (AGW) during the 20th century. Since then, the IPCC has distanced itself from the graph, which has been completely discredited. It not disagrees not only with much historic evidence that shows a MWP and LIA, but also with other analyses of proxy data. Most of the criticism has come from the work of two Canadian statisticians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who have uncovered a misuse of data, a biased calibration procedure, and fundamental errors in the statistical methods.
McKitrick, an econometrician at Guelph University in Canada, has a pungent comment on Mann’s op-ed, which had been titled “If you see something, say something.”
“OK, I see a second-rate scientist carrying on like a jackass and making a public nuisance of himself.”
I have added my own comment as follows: “OK, I want to say something too: I see an ideologue, desperately trying to support a hypothesis that’s been falsified by observations. While the majority of climate alarmists are trying to discover a physical reason that might just save the AGW hypothesis, Mann simply ignores the ‘inconvenient truth’ that the global climate has not warmed significantly for at least the past 15 years — while emissions of greenhouse gases have surged globally.”
Of course, this is not the first time that “hide the decline” Mike has done this. Remember his “Nature trick” — so much admired by his ‘Climategate team’ mates? [For those who don’t remember the 2009 Climategate scandal: It consisted of a leak of some thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia, involving mainly Michael Mann and several of his English colleagues, documenting their completely unethical attempts to suppress any contrary opinions and publications from climate skeptics by misusing the peer-review process and by pressuring editors of scientific journals– unfortunately, with some success.]
We don’t quite know yet what the “Nature trick” refers to — until we get Michael Mann to tell us why he has refused to reveal his never-published post-1980 proxy data. We may have to wait until we have him on the witness stand and under oath. But I strongly suspect that it has to do with absence of any temperature increase after 1980; its publication would have created a conflict with the reported (and problematic) thermometer data and with the assertion by the IPCC that humans are responsible for such a temperature rise.
In actuality, we now have adequate proxy data from other sources, most particularly from Fredrick Ljungqvist and David Anderson. Their separate publications agree that there has been little if any temperature rise since about 1940! However, there was a real temperature increase between 1920 and 1940, which can be seen also in all the various proxy as well as thermometer data.
Anti-Science
Michael Mann saw something he didn’t like in the Senate testimony (Jan 16, 2014) of fiercely independent climate scientist and blogger, Georgia Tech professor Judith Curry; so he decided to say something in his NYT op-ed. He forgot that often it is better to say nothing than to accuse Curry of peddling anti-science.
Curry has lost no time in taking Mann’s challenge and turning the tables on him:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/18/mann-on-advocacy-and-responsibility/#more-14347
“Since you have publicly accused my Congressional testimony of being ‘anti-science,’ I expect you to (publicly) document and rebut any statement in my testimony that is factually inaccurate or where my conclusions are not supported by the evidence that I provide.
During the Hearing, Senator Whitehouse asked me a question about why people refer to me as a ‘contrarian.’ I said something like the following: Skepticism is one of the norms of science. We build confidence in our theories as they are able to withstand skeptical challenges. If instead, scientists defend their theories by calling their opponents names, well that is a sign that their theories are in trouble.
Curry’s final message to Mann: “If you want to avoid yourself being labeled as ‘anti-science’, I suggest that you are obligated to respond to my challenge.”
War on Coal
It is interesting that Mann now plays the role of the victim in purported persecution by powerful interests, darkly identified as the fossil-fuel industry. Actually, the reverse may be the case. Mann has become a strong proponent of emission controls on carbon dioxide, which fits in very nicely with the ongoing War on Coal conducted by the EPA and the White House – and with the editorial policies of the NY Times — coal being the most prolific source of CO2.
It is ironic that while coal use is increasing rapidly in China and India, it is also increasing in Europe where governments have been anti-CO2 fanatics in the past but have decided to stop nuclear power, which emits no CO2 whatsoever.
In the United States, requirements are being set up to capture CO2 from smoke stacks of power plants and store it underground. Carbon Capture and Sequestration is a difficult and costly undertaking, and has never been demonstrated on a commercial scale. There have even been calls for sucking CO2 out of the global atmosphere, which sounds like an impossible task — and in any case, would be very, very expensive.
And to what purpose? As pointed out many times, CO2 is beneficial for agriculture. As a natural fertilizer, it accelerates the growth of crops. Czech physicist Lubos Motl has calculated that if it were indeed possible to reduce CO2 levels to their pre-industrial value, global agriculture would suffer a strong decline and billions of people would starve to death.
But perhaps this level of population control is what the climate fanatics are really after. They have always maintained that the Earth suffers from over-population and that the number of people needs to be reduced to protect natural values –a truly misanthropic scheme. In 1974, the ‘Club of Rome’ group published a detailed study, predicting that a billion people would die of starvation, beginning in the 1980s and peaking in 2010. One of the proponents of this thesis is now the White House science adviser.
******************************************************************
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings, see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.
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Great post.
One typo in the top graph though…
“Media eval warm period”
Or a Freudian slip perhaps!
Mike M says:
January 21, 2014 at 2:55 pm
“But perhaps this level of population control is what the climate fanatics are really after. They have always maintained that the Earth suffers from over-population and that the number of people needs to be reduced to protect natural values –a truly misanthropic scheme.”
Mike,
You hit the nail on the head there! UN Agenda 21 has a lot to say about population control, always couched in warm fuzzy terms of course.
Even traditional population organisations have jumped onto the and wagon. http://www.populationmatters.org/issues-solutions/
There are papers around with the UN or UNESCO letterhead or similar that talk about optimum earth population of between 500 million and 1Billion not to mention what these mega wealthy and influential people think.
“A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Ted Turner
“In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”
J. Cousteau, 1991 explorer and UNESCO courier
“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
Mikhail Gorbachev
“World population needs to be decreased by 50%”
Henry Kissinger
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Prince Phillip
“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
What’s amazing to me is that macro economics has an equally controverial/ nonsense hockey stick curve similar to Mann’s, the Keynesian Aggregate Supply curve.
You were doing fine up until “proscribe”: To forbid or prohibit. (transitive) To denounce.
Maybe you mean prescribe?
CO2 capture is a long-established technology. Any source of CO2 in the gaseous state may be used out of which CO2 is liquefied and stored at a very low temperature and high pressure. The problem is what to do with that. The problem is sequestration.
The only ‘identifiable’ method of sequestration is pumping the gas into the earth’s deep geological cracks, old coal mines and depleted oil fields. But this is a very risky and dangerous thing to do. Imagine a mega-bubble of CO2 suddenly escaping. This has occurred naturally. In one particular case, in Cameroon a whole villages were devastated. Wiki has this to say:
>>21st August 1986: Lake Nyos suddenly emitted a large cloud of CO2, which suffocated 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock in nearby towns and villages.[2] [3] Though not completely unprecedented, it was the first known large-scale asphyxiation caused by a natural event. To prevent a recurrence, a degassing tube that siphons water from the bottom layers of water to the top allowing the carbon dioxide to leak in safe quantities was installed in 2001, and two additional tubes were installed in 2011.
Today, the lake also poses a threat because its natural wall is weakening. A geological tremor could cause this natural dike to give way, allowing water to rush into downstream villages all the way into Nigeria and allowing much carbon dioxide to escape.<<
Better to let trees do the trick of sequestering CO2. It's the one and real non-Mann-made 'nature's trick'
The Hockey Stick
There was a crooked Mann
Who played a crooked trick
And had a crooked plan
To make a crooked stick
By using crooked math
That favored crooked lines
Lysenko’s crooked path
Led thru the crooked pines
And all his crooked friends
Applaud what crooked seems
But all that crooked ends
Derives from crooked means
Eugene WR Gallun
@Eugene WR Gallun – Standing O! very clever!
“In the United States, requirements are being set up to capture CO2 from smoke stacks of power plants and store it underground. Carbon Capture and Sequestration is a difficult and costly undertaking, and has never been demonstrated on a commercial scale. There have even been calls for sucking CO2 out of the global atmosphere, which sounds like an impossible task — and in any case, would be very, very expensive.”
===============================================
Simple: plant lots of trees! They’re very efficient at removing CO2, and have beneficial
side effects, like refreshing oxygen, creating useful materials (timber), look good, and
provide homes for lots of lifeforms. And most importantly, they’re way cheaper to make,
and operate than any industrial CO2 extractor …
oh, sorry: too sensible.
I’m sure that scientists are able to genetically modify some tree species, or twenty, that would be able to thrive in the vast expanses of the earth’s semi deserts, producing timber for construction and other purposes while sucking that ‘nasty’ fertilising gas that is (not) ‘killing’ our planet. But that nasty word, ‘genetically modify’ must be a very improper and politically incorrect phrase. So pump that gas underground were it will come back to hit us hard like it did in Camerron.
I am a sworn enemy of depressive green propaganda, and of turning to the government for solutions — but the idea of reducing Earth’s population, by voluntary means, isn’t so bad in itself.
Granted, 10 or 40 billion people can still feed themselves, but why constant growth of population is necessary? It only strengthens thieves and bandits who already rule in practically every country of the world. All of us would be richer and freer if there were, say, 500 millions of us on Earth, not 6.5 billion.
I believe that distribution, by private non-governmental organizations, of freely accessible contraceptive pills on a massive scale is a very useful activity. There are much too many people in this world who don’t know what to do with themselves, and have no capacity, ability or opportunity to enjoy life as such. Why bring more and more hapless morons, suffrage-clogging parasites, violent fanatics and half-witted thugs into this valley of tears?
“All of us would be richer and freer if there were, say, 500 millions of us on Earth, not 6.5 billion.”
Nonsense. The people of the Earth are the most prosperous they’ve ever been, in large part because there are enough people to support all the activities which lead to good living. If you dislike crowds, there are still many places you can live with low population density, and will continue to be as the birth rate continues its plunge in developed countries. But, recognize that this is a neurosis, and others of us do not share it.
The people of the Earth are the most prosperous they’ve ever been, in large part because there are enough people to support all the activities which lead to good living.
Nonsense. If in a country, such as the United States, 300 million people can “support all the activities which lead to good living” (even if they agree to your definition of “good living,” and even if most of them agree that they have a “good living,” which they do not), then there is no need for much more people in order to achieve the same level of the quality of life.
Intellectual and entrepreneurial achievements of the relatively few people (tens of thousands, perhaps) resulted on the technological progress that allows billions of people to survive, even in the post uneducated, corrupt and enslaved societies. Life in overpopulated modern cities is truly terrible, and every rational man would agree that it is the modern urban existence that is, in essence, neurotic.
If you like the way of life in Mexico City, in Calcutta, or in Shanghai, it is your personal tragedy; don’t impose it on others who do not share your lamentable neurosis.
I’ve always had a problem with the dichotomy set up by Mann’s claim the MWP was not ‘global’ and the implication in his work that his bristle-cone pines/Yamal were.
Donald L. Klipstein says: @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 9:12 pm
I don’t think population control and reduction is such a bad thing. And nobody needs to get killed; we just have to reduce the birth rate.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So who determines who can have children and who can not? What traits are is the government looking for? The same as a farmer? docility, herd mentality….
But do not worry, governments are now collecting DNA from babies to make that determination. In the USA the police are collecting DNA from people arrested but not yet convicted of serious crimes.
Seems Eugenics is still alive and well.
Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet: Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable
The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget
How eugenics poisoned the welfare state: A century ago many leading leftists subscribed to the vile pseudo-science of eugenics, writes Dennis Sewell, and the influence of that thinking can still be seen today
Are you SURE you want these people to decide who has children and who does not?
Just defund the new occupation paid for by our taxes called “Unwed Mother” if you want to slow the birth rate. Otherwise increase the wealth and prosperity of a nation. It works better and does not destroy freedom.
The NYT was pro-Stalin long after it was clear he was a monster. The NYT claimed rockets could never work because the exhaust would have nothing to push against in space. The NYT has backed disaster after disaster. Backing Mann fits right in.
rogerthesurf says: @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 9:39 pm
…There are papers around with the UN or UNESCO letterhead or similar that talk about optimum earth population of between 500 million and 1Billion not to mention what these mega wealthy and influential people think….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Do not forget that Eugenicist Julian Huxley was first director-general, the UNESCO (1951) and set the tone which has not changed.
Blair M says: @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 9:45 pm
What’s amazing to me is that macro economics has an equally controverial/ nonsense hockey stick curve similar to Mann’s, the Keynesian Aggregate Supply curve.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Do not forget that Keynes through his friendship with Woolf and Russell brought him into contact with leaders of the Fabian Society, including Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. . Sir Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley were also Fabians. All of whom were supporters of Eugenics.
Alexander Feht says:
January 21, 2014 at 11:14 pm
Demographic transition occurs naturally when people feel safe having two babies instead of 20, thanks to increased likelihood of the two surviving to adulthood. Improved health & economic conditions have already achieved zero population in growth in most of the developed world. The developing world will follow suit in this century.
World population should stabilize under ten billion, then start to fall as a result of such improvements. Already Mexico City & (especially) Shanghai aren’t as bad as you seem to suppose, & even Calcutta isn’t the hell hole it used to be. Poverty is actually worse in some rural areas than in the teeming cities.
The decline was about the divergence of the proxies used with the modern temperature record. Showing it made clear that the proxies were in adequate and that they did not capture all temperature increase and levels. And that they almost certainly missed other, higher temps in the past.
hunter says January 22, 2014 at 5:43 am:
I guess that means that Stalin would have made a great icon for Greenpiss and WWtF. (“A million deaths is a tragedy; twenty million, a statistic.”
milodonharlani says:
January 22, 2014 at 6:17 am
I hope you are right, and stabilization of the population would not happen too late, and would not be a result of some plague or global catasrophe.
I advocate the voluntary use of birth control pills, nothing else. Contrary to Gail Combs’ fears, in that case her question “Who decides?” would be answered by the potential parents temselves. Governments, of course, should not touch this issue; everything government touches, shrivels and festers.
BTW, suburbs of Shanghai are just horrible. As are countless clusters of multi-story, multi-apartment “modern slums” around big cities all over the world. Life is too short to waste it living like that.
Alexander Feht says:
January 22, 2014 at 7:15 am
People wouldn’t move to Shanghai suburbs if life there were not better than back in rural Szechwan. The Communist regime lures them there, doesn’t round up peasants & transport them there in cattle cars.
Demographic transition has occurred in Europe, the Americas, developed Asia & Australia, so why not in developing Asia & Africa?
Every now and then, I post about the “overpopulation”/population control/eugenics topic, because it splices in even better with the global warming fable even better than an inverted tree ring proxy splices into the historical temp record.
I hope the zero-population-growth people here begin listening to others, like me, who have seen the population-control movement for what it is: total scare tactics on a grand scale by God-complected pseudo-scientists.
Just like the predictions of the global-warming cultists have failed to materialize across decades, the catastrophies predicted by the population-scare forces have failed time after time.
This fable does not begin at Club of Rome.
The best I can tell, from reviewing dozens of publications I have gotten holt of over the past decade, the roots can be seen in the Poor Laws of England, dating back to the 1300s. [A starting point for reading up:
http://www.thepotteries.org/dates/poor.htm ]
Why the 1300s? I don’t know. I am weak in that history. My guess has something to do with climate/productivity, Black Plague, and the Schism of the Catholic Church. Just guesses, though.
From the 1300s, England has a series of legislative attempts to deal with vagabond ne’er-do-wells.
Pondering how to deal with able-bodied people who are dependent on us productive people led to the great political philosophers, such as Rousseau, to ponder the nature of Man. If only we could understand the nature of Man, we could figure out how to address petty thievery, laziness, irresponsible reproduction, and so on. And so relieve ourselves of the burden of supporting those who are dependent on us despite being able-bodied.
Malthus circa 1800 looked at these irresponsibly reproducing ne’er-do-well dependent people (see where I am going with this? -nowadays, it is not British vagabonds, but almost entirely is those darkies of Asia and Africa spoiling our good thing here in the white developed west). Malthus (and others in the era) expanded the problem from not just being one of public burden/immorality, but of environmental collapse.
Malthus can be seen as ground zero for this topic moving into the modern period.
Much talk ensued in intellectual circles. Darwin and Galton were in that legacy.
Darwin’s theory of the mechanism of selection added a scientifick-y justification for treating the ne’er-do-well vagabonds differently. His book title says a lot:
“The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Circa 1860.
His cousin, Galton, who contributed to modern measurement and statistics approaches, used this idea to declare that he could figure out by physiology who had the bad genes.
Galton coined the term “eugenics,” (circa 1860) and the idea of positive eugenics – encouraging us white middle class productive people to reproduce – and negative eugenics – discouraging the dependent, lazy, irresponsibly-procreating petty-thievery rabble from reproducing.
Along this time, we educated white people enjoyed, directly or indirectly, the Black slave movement of 1500s-1800s.
When slavery was abolished, circa 1830 in England, and circa 1860 in U.S., we no longer had Blacks as an exploitable resource, but had Blacks as fellow members of society – and “they” often seemed to be quite a burden – again, the same burdens on us white, middle-class productive people – we saw “them” as petty thieves, vagabonds, beggars, lazy, and being irresponsibly reproductive. We had the “science” support to perform sterilizations, though.
We also saw the Native Americans the same way, and maintained involuntary/uninformed sterilization programs on Native American across decades (up to the 1970s, and possibly more recently). The basis of this was the dependency argument, and science.
We educated people hear NOTHING about the eugenics movement, although it continued to be a major area of scientific discourse, policy and public “health” attention from 1860 onward.
Jumping ahead a bit, this eugenics concept was solid enough to be the basis of Buck v. Bell, a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting COMPULSORY STERILIZATION for those judged by any given state to be too much of a burden, or to not have that great of a prospect of an independent, fulfilling life.
So, we carried on with sterilization.
Margaret Sanger provided a great boost to the idea of birth control as a more refined solution to these perceived problems. She was strongly eugenic, and was strongly tied to the eugenic movements of the time. But times were changing, and she realized a different face would have to be put on the idea of managing those unproductive ne’er-do-well irresponsible classes of people.
With Marxist influence, she developed a picture of a lower-class wife as shackled to the home by children, and offered us the modern woman role we now accept without a blink. This benefit begin due partly to shaking off the oppression of the Catholic church, and the promotion of birth control.
Hilter got the idea of positive and negative eugenics from the U.S., and aggressively put this into action – we know the killing part, but in our education we do not cover his breeding programs – positive eugenics – why not? Because our liberal educators all believe we should go there, eventually.
Due to the bad press that eugenics got from WWII, eugenics had to go underground – a different smiley face was needed to advance the totalitarian concept of reducing those meddlesome ne’er-do-wells.
Eugenics hung on for a bit longer — Frederick Osborn, a recognized military leader, was heavily involved in this movement, and wrote, circa 1950, his text on the scientific background supporting eugenics “Preface to Eugenics.”. This included – get this – the science/public burden argument for killing off the deaf. The deaf.
But he was late. The problem was still there, and needed a newer, up-to-date face.
This is where the current “overpopulation” / quality of life movement picks up. With Harrison Brown, the “Manhattan Project” physicist who wrote the Malthusian “Must Destruction Be Our Destiny?” circa 1940. These writings were fairly popular.
Post-WWII, the fear of those darkies reproducing too much led the U.S. and other developed nations on the major population control movement. That is not that hard to find. It involves the UN, Planned Parenthood (Intl PP Federation), major U.S. industrialists including Ford Foundation, etc.
We drastically suppressed the population of many nations from, I believe, the time of Japan reconstruction to the present.
Henry Kissinger’s NSSM 200 of 1974 CLEARLY states that it is a matter of world power to control the populations in the darker-pigmented corners of our globe.
“Overpopulation” is just the ruse to get us to go along with all of this. But it is actually classism, all the way down.
milodonharlani:
Thankyou for your very fine summary of key points in the history of population control which you provide at January 22, 2014 at 7:27 am.
For those who want more about this I point to the article by Tim Ball on the present state of the subject and the informative discussion in its thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/
Richard
Alexander Feht says: @ur momisugly January 22, 2014 at 7:15 am
…I advocate the voluntary use of birth control pills, nothing else. Contrary to Gail Combs’ fears, in that case her question “Who decides?” would be answered by the potential parents temselves. Governments, of course, should not touch this issue; everything government touches, shrivels and festers….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Alexander, I agree with you. Providing birth control at little or no cost is a very good idea. Just do not let governments decide who is allowed to have children and who can not.
We are already seeing the fertility rate nose dive. CIA Fact Book
LOL, Gail (re: 7:12pm, yesterday). “….. and part of my job is to be funny (presses red nose like a car horn) honk, honk, honk….” lolololololololoLOLOLOLOLOLO!.
Except… those rodeo clowns (and I realize you agree, the analogy can only go so far) are very noble, brave, skillful, intelligent, great-hearted, people. Unlike the inventor of: “innovative statistical techniques” (GREAT quote, Michael Snow at 6:55pm yesterday). Oh, MAN, that was funny. Whoo, wee, this has been a great thread for humor.
Thanks for all wit laughter, all you clever commenters. WUWT is the best site in the WORLD.