From the “Manntastic claims require Manntastic evidence” department.
Guest Opinion By Marlo Lewis
In an op-ed published Wednesday in the UK Guardian, Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be “fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”
Mann and Ward are upset that “a group of hardcore climate change deniers and contrarians linked to the administration is organizing a petition in support of a new panel being set up by the National Security Council to promote an alternative official explanation for climate change.”
The chief organizer of said petition is my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Myron Ebell. Mann and Ward describe CEI as “a lobby group for ‘free market’ fanatics which has become infamous for championing climate change denial.”
Let’s sift through their mud-slinging.
Mann and Ward’s evidence that CEI preaches “denial” is an ad campaign with the slogan, “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Well, in fact, so-called carbon pollution has done more to invigorate and expand the planet’s greenery than all government conservation programs combined.
Similarly, carbon-based energy has done more to improve the human conditionthan all other energy sources combined. Spotlighting the upsides of the world’s dominant energy sources is not denialism but a corrective to the Left’s misanthropic demonization of fossil fuels.
Contrary to Mann and Ward, the objective of the proposed President’s Commission on Climate Security is not to promote an “alternative official explanation” for climate change. Rather, the commission would examine the evidence for ranking climate change as a national security threat.
UN Secretary General António Guterrez claims climate change poses a “direct existential threat” to human survival. Former Secretary of State John Kerry claims climate change is “perhaps the most fearsome weapon of mass destruction of all.” If they are right, then of course, climate change is a national security threat. However, such claims are science fiction, not science.
Consider the U.S. government’s November 2018 National Climate Assessmentreport, recently hailed by 58 “former national security leaders” as an authoritative text on the subject. As summarized by The New York Times, the report found that unchecked global warming could reach 8°C and “knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.”
To get that alarming result, the government’s experts relied on an ensemble of overheated climate models that project twice as much warming as has occurred over the past 40 years. They then ran the models with an inflated “baseline” emissions scenario (called RCP8.5) in which coal scales up rapidly to supply almost half of all global energy by 2100—an energy mix not seen since the 1940s.
Even when the errant climate models are run with the implausible emissions scenario, warming hits 8°C in only one percent of model projections—a critical detail inferable from a chart in an article (Hsiang, et al. 2017) cited by the Assessment but never mentioned in the report itself.
Nor does the Assessment explain that even if warming cuts GDP by 10 percent, the economy could still be 10 times larger than it is today. In other words, even in the Assessment’s wildly improbable worst case, climate change does not rise to the level of an existential threat.
One way to measure the sustainability of a civilization is its vulnerability to storms, droughts, floods, and other forms of extreme weather. Since the 1920s, about 90 percent of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions in history entered the atmosphere, atmospheric concentrations increased by about one-third, and the world warmed by about 0.8°C. Did fossil-fueled civilization make Earth’s climate less livable—or more?
During that period, the global annual death toll from extreme weather declined by about 95 percent, despite a four-fold increase in global population. Individual risk of dying from extreme weather declined by 99 percent.
As energy scholar Alex Epstein put it, human beings using fossil fuels did not take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they took a dangerous climate and made it much safer.
More cheery news. Since 1990, a period encompassing the top 10 warmest yearsin the instrumental temperature record, the relative economic impact of extreme weather has declined from about 0.31 percent of global GDP to 0.24 percent.
To be sure, weather and climate are factors the Pentagon takes into account when planning campaigns, constructing bases, procuring equipment, and the like. And defense planners and engineers should keep abreast of reliable estimates of how such factors may change. But an increase in flood risk at a particular base doth not a national security threat make. It’s just not on a par with Russia’s ICBM modernization program, China’s military buildup, or the Islamic State’s expansionin 2015.
Rather than make America safer, elevating climate change to a national security priority will likely promote groupthink, wasteful mission creep, and inattention to bona fide security threats. For example, President Obama obscured rather than clarified America’s strategic situation when he characterized Vladimir Putin’s military buildup in the Arctic as a climate change problem rather than a Russia problem.
What’s worse, the Obama-era Department of Defense gave no thought to the security risks of climate change policy. Climate change, it declared, is an “instability accelerant” and “threat multiplier.” But it never considered whether drastically limiting developing countries’ access to fossil fuels, as would be required to meet the Paris Agreement’s emission reduction goals, might trap millions in poverty, undermining international stability and peace.
Mann and Ward continue:
The creation of the new panel of climate change deniers, and the recruitment of supporters to provide it with a veneer of legitimacy, echoes the campaign by Joseph Stalin’s regime to discredit the work of geneticists who disagreed with the disastrous pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko.
That’s Orwellian. It’s not us contrarians who seek to establish party-line science. That’s the goal of the climate industrial complex. See President Eisenhower’s prescient warning about the corrupting influence of federal grants on scientific research and the danger of public policy becoming “captive” to a federally-funded “scientific-technological elite.”
Turning science into an official dogma is the very purpose of the interagency and intergovernmental consensus-building exercises of which Mann and Ward are so proud.
CEI and its allies merely ask that the U.S. government, for the first time, host a robust, on the record debate between the self-appointed guardians of climate orthodoxy and experts who assess things differently.
It speaks volumes that Mann and Ward resort to name calling and smear dissenters as “Stalinists.” Such behavior is typical of those who fear debate, not those who are confident in the validity of their views. Ironically, Mann and Ward’s opposition to the proposed commission would appear to confirm the desirability and timeliness of such an exercise. As our coalition letter observes:
We note that defenders of the climate consensus have already mounted a public campaign against the proposed commission. We find this opposition curious. If the defenders are confident that the science contained in official reports is robust, then they should welcome a review that would finally put to rest the doubts that have been raised. On the other hand, their opposition could be taken as evidence that the scientific basis of the climate consensus is in fact highly suspect and cannot withstand critical review.
Mann insists, pay no attention to those people who “… try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”
Isn’t that exactly what the scientific method calls for. How can he claim to be a scientist himself or propose to back any hypothesis when he denies people the opportunity to prove him wrong?
Despite Mann’s purported scientific credentials. it’s clear from his work, words and weaseling, that he’s no scientist, but is a political activist who knows just enough about climate science to jump to an incorrect conclusion that supports his politics in lieu of the truth.
Just as with the law, the scientific method is necessarily adversarial. All scientists (should) know this and welcome it.
Jon S, you are right about the scientific method. During a meeting to negotiate a combined Government and Private company mining venture, I insisted on forming a “Transparency Committee” which would include even an “environmentalist”. This caused an uproar and canceled the meeting. Anybody that is Professional should welcome feedback, but enough with the ad hominen attacks, like “Stalinist”.
It was Mann who brought up the Stalin reference.
Yes.
Yes it was. And finally he is showing some scientific proof when he is openly talking to the whole world about his exeptionally low mental capacity.
Ron Long, that does not work.
If you already “insist on forming a Transparency Committee “which would include even “an environmentalist”” –
then you should “insist on forming a Transparency Committee “which would include even an environmentalist. “Equipped with Margaret Thatcher’s famous handbag he can bang on the table under an oil painting by former President Barack Obama.””
That really would stimulate the conversation.
I’ll disagree with the claims that its adversarial. Ideally, you set out find out that you’re wrong all by yourself. Sceptics are merely helping you out.
Even in the legal system, the police are required to provide the defense with any evidence that could help or drop the charges if that evidence would clear the accused. Its adversarial only because the police are not completely trusted to not be incompetent nor malicious due to bias.
Yes, that is the central organizing idea of my little essay!
Marlo: Mann’s accusation of Trump practicing Stalinist tactics is laughably absurd and projects his own psychopathology of paranoia and conspiracy fears and personal desires of how his detractors should be handled by suppression, imprisonment and liquidation. Trump is not proposing to exile, imprison, or liquidate Mann or his Global Warming followers, he’s merely proposing an independent review of his work. Mann is part of a far Left Marxist ideology that now dominates much of Academia, the Media and the Democrat Party. Mann is relying upon the historical ignorance of the public and the cooperation of a willing media not to examine the appropriateness of his characterization of Trump’s plan as suggested by people at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
I think your essay might have benefitted from an analysis of the ideological rationale and the social consequences of Trofim Lysenko’s administrative and scientific control of Soviet agricultural policy and its subsequent implementation in the Communist Collectivization Farm program under Stalin. The point being that Stalin was willing to risk widespread famine and loss of life to collectivize Russian farms and to rely on an untested theory of vernalization proposed by a uneducated peasant rather than use traditional methods of fertilization and soil management. Just like today’s Identity Politics Trofim Lysenko checked off all the right boxes for the Marxist Leninists in power. Classically trained Biologists did not.
Michael Crichton has a short essay on the evil consequences of the politization of Science in an appendix to his novel State of Fear briefly discussing two examples: Eugenics and Lysenkoism. Both occurred in the early 20th C, less than 100 years ago, sad parts of an era of social catastrophe that marked modernity; the former a pseudoscientific program of selective breeding to prevent the degeneration of the Human Race for which there was no proof, but which had widespread consensus of top scientists, at major scientific institutes like Cold Spring Harbor, Universities, the Rockefeller Institute, and progressive politicians of both parties. It became a world wide phenomenon spreading to Germany in the 1930’s under NAZI party control eventually taking the lead from American scientists in implementing forced sterilization and euthanasia. Crichton points out that the state that performed the most forced sterilization of undesirables was California.
When Mann rattles on about the scientific consensus of Global Warming and Climate Change, the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust and the injustices committed in the name of Eugenics Science should never be forgotten.
Lysenkoism on the other hand affected the people of the Soviet Union. Not only were Russian agricultural scientists and Botanists exiled to Siberia and imprisoned in the Gulag due to their class origins and practice of Bourgeois science of Darwinian/Mendelian genetics, which were at odds with Marxist theory, with the loss of their Pragmatic field research expertise; but the worthless Lamarckian ideas of exposing crop seed to refrigeration temperature (Vernalization) to bring about better adaptation to the colder Russian climate led to crop failures and food shortages and famine. Collectivization itself with the exile of Kulak farming families and at times entire villages for refusing to cooperate with Central Committee food requisition and land collectivization demands undermined the productivity of the agriculture economy due their lost Pragmatic knowledge of how to plant, fertilize, and grow crops.
The loss of scientific expertise meant that agricultural experiments to disprove Lysenko’s faulty Lemarckian reasoning and hypothesis were not carried out which resulted in not merely a single failed harvest but a series of agricultural failures and loss of future progress in the biologic and agricultural sciences. Lysenkoism was ended in 1948 but it’s failures required the USSR to resort to the international markets to obtain grain to feed their people. The institutions of Russian biology were badly compromised and never fully recovered.
In using a Stalinist analogy to describe a Trump Administration plan to create a committee led by Will Happer to review the current science of GW/CC alarmism reveals not only the deceit of Mann’s ad hominem attacks, but also the self delusion of his own sense of righteousness while perpetuating the coverup of the questionable if not fraudulent methods used to create the Hockey Stick graph “to hide the decline” and periods of increased global temperatures equal to or greater than those of the last 30 years and his willingness to replace independent review of his work by honest, competent skeptics who will use the scientific method to reveal Objective truth with political propaganda.
Mann insists, pay no attention to those people who “… try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”
Well he is in trouble then! It was Mann who overthrew the notion that there was a Medieval War$ Period with his 1998 paper presenting a hockey stick temperature chart in place of the universally accepted story that prevailed in his chosen field of endeavour.
He tried (hard) to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science. It was mainstream scientists like McIntyre (mining) and McKitrick (economics) who set him straight.
Looney Tunes is a good analogy. The music is familiar but the Manntastic claims are a cartoon, a spoof, of the science. In a cartoon, many impossible things happen. When it is over, we turn off the screen and go back to our real lives.
We cannot live in the cartoon world of the climate catastrophists. We only look in occasionally for entertainment and escape from reality.
Because…………. See any parallels with Putin’s pre investigation attack on the meticulously conducted Dutch Malaysian Airlines’ Flight 17 crash investigation? He knows his cause can only lose so he and his like will do all they can to discredit it. The machinery is already rolling. I am just waiting for the dirty tricks coming out delving into the private lives of those on the committee. They will stop at nothing because they already bet the farm on their 12 years till foom time nonsense. The fact that the shear irony of what this weasel of a human being is wanting…. something totally contradictory to the absolute basis of all scientific endeavour is lost on him is incredible. His own words tell the world exactly what he is.
As usually the defenders of the CAGW religion will talk about anything but the actual evidence. They won’t go there and don’t want anyone else peaking behind the curtain either. They are doomed once the world finds out they are nothing but adolescent narcissists with no scientific integrity or skill runnning around in their birthday suits shouting “fire fire”.
Um, Andy. Thank you very much for the image of Mann in his birthday suit. My lawyer will be contacting you.
Thank you, Marlo.
Regards,
Bob
Thank you, Bob, you just made my week. Cheers
“Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science”
If the mainstream had done their statistics correctly they would have had nothing to fear and nothing to hide.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/27/spurious/
They are getting desperate, aren’t then?
I mean, Mann’s importance to climate science despite his ignorance of statistics is an indictment of climate science.
This gross misunderstanding of history, though, is an indictment of the Gruniad’s love affair with all things left, warts in tall.
FFS it was Stalinist USSR that weaponized mental health against its dissidents, NOT the other way around.
Which is probably why the alarmists are wheeling out frauds like Lew whatever his name is.
Chaamjamal
I do enjoy reading your links. They are informative and intellectually stimulating.
I see the point of de-trending time-series to discern if there is a close coupling between two parameters that have little or no time delay. However, to be the Devil’s Advocate, can you explain to me how we recognize two parameters that actually have long-term trends that are correlated, but have superimposed ‘impulse’ noise? Or, how do we tell noise from signal?
“If the mainstream had done their statistics correctly they would have had nothing to fear and nothing to hide.”
The did them exactly as they wanted to do them; To achieve the desired result, instead of an objective result.
There’s a reason I always refer to him as Michael “Piltdown” Mann.
Mann’s commentary is a good example of projection. Mann and his cohort of AGW advocates are channeling Trofim Lysenko, rather than the opposition, in proclaiming a party line.
YUP! there is SO much projection coming from the LEFT generally, and it is very telling. Good to see their house of cards tumbling down.
Thus by his own words, Mann has come up with a new, well-fitting name for he and his Warmunist brethren: “Climate Stalinists”.
Maybe one day Mann’s mask will slip and we’ll be called “deviationists.” (I.e., Implying Trotskyites, thereby implying the accuser is a Stalinist.)
Maybe we should call ourselves “Climate Deviationists,” implying our opponents are Stalinists. Probably the current generation wouldn’t catch our insinuation, though.
Skepticism of their scientific hypothesis which led to opposition of radical CAGW proclamations and calls for draconian government interference in our day to day lives “…echoes the campaign by Joseph Stalin’s regime…”
The Stalinists are in reality Mann’s Global Warming Alarmists. Isn’t it slick how they project their evils onto their opponents. Why joseph Stalin would be proud of Michael Mann.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somebody nominated Judith Curry, Roy W. Spencer, William Happer, Richard Lindzen, Anthony Watts, John Christy and Steve McIntyre for a Nobel Prize.
They deserve one.
Considering to whom (and why) the Nobel committee has given some of their previous prizes, I, for one, wouldn’t want to inflict that ignobility upon them. The Nobel just isn’t prestigious when you can get one for not having done anything (Obama) or for making a movie packed with Lies (Gore).
But then again, once the scientific truth inevitabily emerges, the Nobel comitee will be compelled to give out a science prize to offset the political prize they gave to Gore and IPCC for promoting climate alarmism. Refusing such a compensatory prize would make a better statement, but I doubt anyone would actually refuse a science prize, even if if was for political reasons.
Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for climate activism
(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47568227)
It seems likely that she will be named the winner. Still a chance that AOC is in the running though.
Will she get to keep the 8 million Swedish kroner cash award or will it go to her puppeteers? (Question applies equally to either candidate).
There are genuine Nobel prizes for outstanding achievement in the sciences and then there is the Nobel Peace Prize. The former are highly prestigious, the latter is worse than worthless.
Obama’s Nob prize wasn’t for nothing. It was a bribe to surrender the political economy of the United States, the only important nation that can derail global governance, white elitist, neomarxy style. They reckoned a black US president represented the best opportunity for them to achieve their goal and assumed making a fuss over him and giving him a prize would do the trick (a not so subtle cynical form of racism that is a hallmark of the the neo-left).
The whole Eurocentric EU/UN is unambiguously Anti-American. Their mission is to get the US in the bag to dispose of personal freedoms and democratic participation so they can all go forward holding hands and playing ukeleles in the forest.
They courted and flattered the Chinese who know a ripe plum when they see it. They would have loved Russia on board, but since Russia wasn’t going to go along and surrender their independence, they villified them (as did the Dems) and were the target of fake news blaming them for all the politico-economic screw ups and a lost election of US neo-totes.
Trump strode blunt nosedly onto the scene and cancelled the program.
The Nobel Peace Prize is NOT given out by the Swedish Nobel committee that gives out the normal Nobel prizes, but by a political committee in Norway, it´s a political prize that has little to do with reality, e.g. Pres. Obama got it in his FIRST year as pres.
This is from wiki.
“Per Alfred Nobel’s will, the recipient is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway”.
The Nobel Prize was a worthy one when physicists like Sir William Lawrence Bragg and his father received the prize in 1915 – they would not have accepted today’s Climate Change Alarm hogwash. Now your political pedigree and correctness are award criteria.
My own engineering work is scrutinized, peer reviewed … government reviewed … with each and every building permit application. And I show-my-work … in detail. I routinely receive multiple checklists of “correction” … some valid, some not, that I must answer in enumerated detail. What is it with these climate statisticians (I refuse to call statisticians -scientists) who believe they are so Holy as to escape review and scrutiny? It speaks volumes of EVERYTHING … their work, their character, their politics. And it doesn’t speak well.
I am always struck by the difference between the way two of my children work – one an engineer and the other a scientist.
The engineer is by far the most critical of alarmist climate views. The scientist has through research and publication uncovered serious shortcomings at the highest levels in the scientific community.
The scientist will say, “trust but verify,” while the engineer will say, “verify and then trust.” Combined these offer the most formidable challenge to the prevalent political views on climate.
Pure Projection, it’s what they do… Always.
Not enough attention is paid to the dramatic decline in climate related deaths from 1920 to today. Multiple actions drove those numbers down. I don’t know the specifics, but I imagine if they were compiled we’d see fingerprints from adaptation, innovation, and increased wealth.
Alarmists have never explained why those drivers won’t also save us from the outcomes that they fear.
Yeah – at it’s base, this is an all-out assault on this country at its foundation. Nothing more nothing less – AGW is just a vehicle.
Here’s a catch-phrase progressives should internalize: “Forced ‘equality’ without liberty is slavery.”
Not that this pesky little fact bothers them, as they always see themselves as the masters.
Well some of us consider an “..official explanation for climate change” as something of an offensive joke from the get go.
Those who favor the principle of separation of church and state should oppose official government pronouncements about climastrology religious doctrine.
Anyone might be forgiven for thinking that the alarmists have something to hide!
To use an analogy here, Mann and Ward are behaving like they are the ones hiding the corpse in their cellar that the police are looking for, and they are telling everyone that their house does not need to be searched. The Guardian hit piece has their own guilt written all over it.
I’m no psychologist, but there is a point at which any reasonably intelligent person can start to recognize suspicious and self-incriminating behavior when he/she sees it. Treating the CAGW alarmist narrative as though it is infallible and unquestionable only serves to raise the suspicions of anyone who knows full well how scientific discourse is supposed to proceed.
As others have noted here, this does indeed look like projection — and Mann and Ward appear to be quite good at it. However, if Mann and Ward do not have the common sense and intelligence to understand how they are incriminating themselves in the eyes of others, their continuing employment in the science field should and must become a serious matter for debate once climate alarmism becomes exposed for the
serious scientific faultiness that it is infected with.
To be fair Bob’ fast fingers ‘ Ward does known a great deal about Stalinist approach has one of the things he gets paid for using .
While Mann just combines a massive ego with a thin skin
“One way to measure the sustainability of a civilization is its vulnerability to storms, droughts, floods, and other forms of extreme weather. Since the 1920s, about 90 percent of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions in history entered the atmosphere, atmospheric concentrations increased by about one-third, and the world warmed by about 0.8°C. Did fossil-fueled civilization make Earth’s climate less livable—or more?
During that period, the global annual death toll from extreme weather declined by about 95 percent, despite a four-fold increase in global population. Individual risk of dying from extreme weather declined by 99 percent.”
Now I’m no advocate for radical climate viewpoints, I am completely in the denial/natural variation camp. But – the argument listed above is ridiculously easy to refute. I would argue that the reason for improved survival of extreme weather events is easily attributable to a large number of factors having nothing to do with climate change. We have weather satellites, comprehensive land, sea, and air rescue capabilities, tougher building codes, etc. that have – I’d argue a much greater impact on extreme weather survivability. If you’re going to pick out analogies, I think you could do much better. Stuff like this is what perpetuates the endless back and forth. Broad assumptions are poor proxies.
You are actually making my case. I am not saying changes in the weather, anthropogenic or natural, reduced death rates by 99 percent (although cold weather kills about 20 times more people than hot weather (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm), so warming may have direct health benefits). My point, rather, is that the wealth creation and technological advances of our chiefly fossil-fueled civilization have dramatically reduced humanity’s vulnerability to weather extremes.
All of these mitigating factors were brought to human civilization by use of fossil fuels and petroleum based technologies. Full stop.
Exactly.
It annoys me when people counter the argument with the fact that we have better technology and more wealth, without acknowledging that fossil fuels gave us that!
In fact, without fossil fuels that would still be working 16 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, just to survive, and wouldn’t have time for argument. That is, of course, if they hadn’t died in childbirth or as an infant, as used to happen to so many.
Two comments. When the first graph came into view on my tiny smartphone screen I thought Wow this should be a great graph, that’s a pile of flying pigs. I was saddened to find it wasn’t but the information was still worthwhile. Secondly Mann et al should be glad that the White House isn’t actually Stalinist as they would be first for the high jump. See flying pigs.
I’m glad I was not the only one who saw pigs on that graph, I was most disappointed when I couldn’t find the wings!
“Since the 1920s, about 90 percent of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions in history entered the atmosphere, atmospheric concentrations increased by about one-third, and the world warmed by about 0.8°C. Did fossil-fueled civilization make Earth’s climate less livable—or more?”
The obvious answer is more livable,by far. It should also be noted that the one third increase in atmospheric CO2 was not driven by the 90% increase in human emissions but by increased natural emissions. Human emissions only amount to about 4% of the total. (https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/ )
The Concept of Fragile and Anti-Fragile was coined and developed by Hassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the The Black Swan and author of the book Anti-Fragile. It is from Taleb that these following realization comes and science and climate science today.
Fragile Science:
Today’s climate science that invokes alarmism has not employed the scientific method from the bottom-up. Rather the NCA and IPCC authors, using their scientific positions of “authority” in government and academia, have acted as gate-keepers at journals to keep out alternative explanations and dissent, and used the research dollars the government doles out to provide convenient narratives that suited some very powerful ideological interest. They are allied with ideological interests in the mass media to suppress dissenting views in the media as presented to the public. In the Age of the internet this has become increasingly difficult, so their methods have become more extreme. And now even the open internet is under assault from the Left.
Fragile science embraces a pseudo-science position where consensus is presented as evidence to the public. Uncertainty is buried and hidden from the layperson. Failed predictions of the favored hypotheses/theories are ignored, hand-waved away results as not representative, replication by independent teams bushed aside.
Some notable examples of failed predictions of a fragile science: the tropical troposheric hotspot, summer Arctic sea ice disappearance, rapid SLR acceleration, the end of snow as we know it, California/Texas perma-droughts, global food crop failures — all spectacularly failed predictions.
The IPCC and NCA climate change impact assessments are based on fragile science. When it examined objectively, critically and openly it will break and crumble.
Lysenko-ism in the Soviet Union was fragile science. It was top-down directed. Dissent from Lysenko’s views on inheritance were formally made illegal in the Soviet Union by the Stalinist government in 1948. When the Stalinist government was finally dispatched in the last 1950’s, Lysenko-ism began to crumble and finally collapsed with the ouster of Stalin’s deputy Premier Khrushchev. in the 1960’s. This top-down, consensus enforced Lysenko science did enormous damage to Russian scientific academics and institutions. It is an abuse of scientific authority. Ultimately all of science will suffer when one area/discipline of science fails to police its own and allows the practice of authoritarian consensus-driven science to persist.
Anti-Fragile Science:
On the other hand, sound, convincing science-based understandings of nature employ the scientific method. The scientific method explores alternative explanations vigorously. The scientific method does not hide uncertainty. It encourages debate. The scientific method is a bottom-up method of finding truths about the natural world around us, physical and biological. Pet hypotheses that are wrong die early. Pet theories/hypotheses that seem fashionable or elegant die quickly if their predictions fail. However, that which does survive gets stronger because of it. Science is better for it.
General Relativity, is still frequently and ruthlessly challenged 100+ years since put forth by Einstein. The scientific method encourages such challenges in bottom-up endeavor by hundreds of different research groups using diverse methods across the global scientific community.
Theoretical alternatives to GR’s current formulations are openly published and debated within the field. And even when some experimental observation arises that challenges it (like possible evidence of supra-luminal neutrinos which ultimately found to be a system timing problem), the findings and the scientists are not dismissed nor demonized out of hand by the community. Rather repeatable results that seem to challenge GR are explored by independent groups openly and honestly. So far, General Relativity continues to survive every challenge put forth — it gets stronger with each challenge. It is anti-fragile. Yes it can crumble, but now it will take a multiple independent observations of somewhere that GR fails in a specific prediction. And that will not be a failure of GR, but an opening to a new revised formulation of GR. And when verified time and again, that too will become anti-fragile and the truth of nature a little better understood.
Conclusion:
Climate science conclusions of the NCA and the high-end warming scenarios of the IPCC AR are fragile science. They are top-down directed. They exist to provide a narative for an agenda. They are driven by consensus science with an ulterior motive: salaries, grants, and acclaim for the scientists. In return they provide a convenient message for ideological reasons to their pay-masters.
Michael Mann is a Lysenko-ist. He and his co-consiprators have used their positions of scientific authority in an attempt to suppress dissent on their views of climate science and their alarmist rheotric. His university salaries have always been funded from the grants he gets from the government for promoting alarmist climate science stories. He cherry-picks data and statistically mangles results to conform to and present consensus-based results. He suppresses the massive uncertainty from the public view of his results and conclusions on paleoclimate.
Michael Mann’s climate science is fragile, as is all of the IPCC alarmist views of climate science. Mann and his ilk rightly fears their climate science will crumble if challenged with credible, critical analysis in an open forum by experts without his agenda of consensus enforcement. And it should.
Joel O’Bryan
+1
I have viewed videos of Mann in public presentations and his appeal to authority is painfully evident to the point of being nauseating.
Mann has zero credibility and it is sad to see his opinions still get air.
Consensus science is Appeal to Authority illogic. It is anti-science as Michael Crichton pointed out 15 years ago. The longer that remains the basis of climate science, the more brittle and fragile the alarmist climate science claims become. When it finally breaks, the rupture will be spectacular.
“They are driven by consensus science with an ulterior motive: salaries, grants, and acclaim for the scientists. In return they provide a convenient message for ideological reasons to their pay-masters.”
Those are secondary, IMO. The main motive behind climatologists’ alarmism is their green dream—most IPCC members in key roles have affiliations with green organizations, as Donna Laframboise’s book, The Juvenile Delinquent … documents. This greenie mind-set bias therefore likely infests in mainstream climatology to the same or greater degree. (How come no one has surveyed climatologists on this matter?)
What were the motives that led the leaders of consensus climatology into the field? 1) A chance to “make a difference for the planet”—i.e., to chide mankind for its sins against Ma Nature and rto edirect mankind’s environment-related actions in a sustainable direction (even if impractical). 2) A chance to throw their weight around, an eternal temptation. 3) A chance to indict short-sighted greed, aka capitalism, for another sin.
Only after those motives comes #4): A cushy job in a rapidly expanding field where grants, awards, publications, and promotions would expand greatly.
Science Denying Leftist Totalitarian America Hating Stalinists like Mann are starting to sound like unscientific politically motivated idiots (if that sounded circular it was…like defining an ass by pointing out that he’s an ass).
They are counting on people educated by their leftist propaganda friends in education and media to be unaware that it’s stupid to spend $40 Trillion on the indefensible claims of unverified science produced by obviously Leftist activists pseudoscientists…who’s first response to any skepicism is to vilify skeptics dismiss the normal ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED scientific review process.
I’m terribly concerned that the adults in this country have waited this long to take THIS FIRST little STEP to wrest the control of the dialog away from people with evil intent.
If you need proof that their motivation is the promotion of anti-American socialist aims instead of concern for the environment or civilization, consider that they are ok with the UN Plan. This plan does not reduce emissions enough to fix the non-problem they concocted. It’s all a political power grab. If it was real environmental concern, they could not give China, India, Southeast Asia, etc. a free pass on emissions…if total catastrophe is inevitable.
I’m not sure that there’s much evidence that Mann is a leftist anti-American Stalinist. He’s a vain self-interested charlatan to be sure, so don’t get me wrong.
The climate change activism phenomenon is best understood not as a mass conspiracy of socialists, but as many different players working independently to advance their own selfish interests. The true believer socialists are using climate change to build world socialism, but there are plenty of capitalist entrepreneurs who are happy to pretend they believe in the modern religion in order to cash in on government subsidies and tax benefits. Mann stikes me as the sort of mediocre mind who is mostly focused on advancing his career and prestige. He sees that his funding depends on maintaining his narrative and defending against inconvenient data.
He may be a socialist but I’m just saying it doesn’t follow from the fact that he pushes the false CAGW narrative that he is. There is no formal conspiracy with a central committee sending out diktats.
“I’m not sure that there’s much evidence that Mann is a leftist anti-American Stalinist.”
About two years ago Mann addressed some socialist confab in Pennsylvania and concluded by leading the crowd with the fist-pumping leftist chant, “The People, United, Cannot be Defeated.”
As I said, he may be a socialist, but I haven’t seen evidence and if you can substantiate your claim with evidence then I would change that view.
My main point was not whether Mann is or isn’t a socialist. It was that there are many diverse groups who support the Climate Change Alarmism industry, including socialists to be sure, but also a lot of people focused on their own selfish interests who may not support socialism at all. So you cannot say “climate alarmist therefore socialist”.
You probably can’t even say “socialist therefore climate alarmist”, but I suspect that correlation is closer to being perfect.
Complete misdirection and fabrication showing Mann’s own narcissistic rage and projecting his own ‘way of the world’ onto others. He projects this onto others because it’s the only way he can see the world, so therefore everyone must think and act the same way as him.
Here are the 9 traits of a narcissist.. see how many you think Mr Mann displays
Arrogance and Domineering. …
Grandiosity. …
Preoccupation with Success and Power. …
Lack of Empathy. …
Belief of Being Unique. …
Sense of Entitlement. …
Requires Excessive Admiration. …
Exploitative.
And the definition of Narcissistic Rage
1.The narcissist doesn’t get his or her way, even when it’s unreasonable.
2. The narcissist is criticized in some way, even when the critique is made diplomatically, reasonably, and constructively.
3. The narcissist isn’t treated as the center of attention, even when there are other priorities.
4. The narcissist is caught breaking rules, violating social norms, or disregarding boundaries. i.e.
“How dare you talk to me this way in front of my son!” —Angry customer being called out for blatantly cutting in line
5. The narcissist is asked to be accountable for his or her actions.
6. The narcissist suffers a blow to his or her idealized, egotistical self-image (such as when being told he will not be given “exception to the rule”, or be granted “special treatment”).
7. The narcissist is reminded of his or her charade, manipulation, exploitation, inadequacy, shame, or self-loathing.
8. The narcissist feels (fears) not in control of their relational or physical surroundings.
Me thinks he could be close to 100% score…
Were Mann and Ward looking in a mirror or gazing into each other’s eyes when they produced their brainless, post-normal, anti-science tripe? Would explain a lot
… interesting how Stalinism emphasized rapid industrialization, which, of course, required much use of fossil fuel.
Given that solar power and wind power could not do anything to achieve rapid industrialization, while alarmist ideals demand revolutionary reorganization of national economies, it seems to me that it is the climate alarmists who are trying to be the Stalinists, USING THE WRONG TOOLS, which makes their inversion of reality that skeptics are Stalinists even more confused and laughably absurd.
It’s really quite idiotic how they cannot even contradict themselves properly, as they put just enough pieces of history together, leaving out just enough detail, to attempt their pathetic, ill-conceived comparison.
Looks to me like Mann does not trust or even believe his own work. Same goes for Phil Jones. A confident Mann would invite all comers to debate because he believes that he could wipe the floor with the opposition. A confident Mann would throw his work, his methods, and his data and sources open to all and challenge all comers to try to find something wrong with them. That he doesn’t shows that his work won’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.
Well, go on YouTube and you can watch hours of debate between Mann and deniers, not.
Yes, and that makes Mann a science denier. Like all his pals.
Well that’s rich. Well if it’s such a slam dunk , nothing is preventing Mann and Ward from going in for debate with the deniers. Let’s do it and put it on CSPAN so we can hear both sides. It’s easy to call people deniers, not so easy to debunk their positions. I’m sure even a non scientist like Steyn would be happy to participate. What really gets to them, and it’s the reason for all the diversion, is that Happer is leads that panel. You can’t dismiss him as a nut job denier. His knowledge of CO2 and it’s influence in the atmosphere is not easy to brush aside with as hominem attacks.
Whatever tolerance I had for the little fat headed troll has now evaporated. How is expanding a debate construed as Lysenkoism? Stalin fired, imprisoned and murdered dissenters.
Hasn’t Mann been calling for the end of the debate on the subject?
There’s a lot of smart people so blinded by their ideology that they are willing to lie and use fraud to further their ideology. Mann is on top of the list, king of the fraudulent scientists.
I would question Mann’s knowledge of some very fundamental elements of meteorology. In 2015, he claimed that abundant late season snow in eastern Massachusetts was due to warm ocean water that provided additional water vapor to coastal storms. The FACTS were that wet bulb temperature anomalies over the adjacent Atlantic waters were BELOW NORMAL at that time due to an abundance of arctic air in the circulation of several of the storms that piled up the snow. The resulting snow to water ratios of the snowpack were unusually high, which would not have been the case had the wet bulb anomaly been positive.
Recently, Mann was featured in a Newsweek column about the strong storm that rained on a deep snow pack and accelerated the flooding in the Midwest and northern Plains. Of course, he declared that the warmer planet contributed more water vapor to the storm and that was the reason behind the magnitude of the flooding AND the reason why we can expect similar events in the future. He avoided the inconvenient truth that due to the extreme cold that the region experienced through the heart of the winter, frost had formed to a significant depth in the ground over much of the region, and once the snowmelt commenced the only way the water could travel was horizontally.
To this Penn State meteo grad, Mann’s whole act is a disgrace, and I can’t wait until he is no longer on the masthead at my alma mater. Only then will we be able to heal the multiple wounds that he has inflicted on the reputation of the institution.
…and some scientists are more equal than others.
This makes as much sense as The Day Today finance news.
“The creation of the new panel of climate change deniers …”.
============================================
“Denier” is a propagandist term equivalent to the Stalinist “wrecker”.
How ironic that Mann should accuse “climate change deniers” of “Stalinist tactics,” when his own words and the actions of his “mainstream” colleagues mimic the despot’s style of dealing with all opposition.
campaign by Joseph Stalin’s regime to discredit the work of geneticists who disagreed with the disastrous pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko..
so Stalin did do one thing right?
how long do we take crap abuse like the denier and now stalinist smears???
this is what the pc mob would jump on for anything else ,as Hate Speech
I dont deny earths climate changes -but i am damned skeptical about agw “science”
“On the other hand, their opposition could be taken as evidence that the scientific basis of the climate consensus is in fact highly suspect.”
The word “consensus” is nothing but a fancy word for a group opinion, and any educated person knows that there is nothing at all scientific about an opinion. In fact the scientific method itself can best be seen as a set of steps designed to remove subjective opinion from the study of a physical system. So the phrase “scientific basis of the climate consensus” is literally an oxymoron.
Richard Lindzen discusses many issues of concern in this presentation
Alarming Global Warming: What Happens to Science in the Public Square. Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D
Science is always problematic as an institution, and often valuable as a process.
https://tinyurl.com/pkd7w7q
“Science is always problematic as an institution and often valuable as a process”
“Eugenics and immigration. Lysenkoism and Agronomy. “
“Science becomes a source of authority rather than a mode of inquiry.”
“By the way, I should mention at the beginning of the 20th century, the counterpart of the Environmental movement was Eugenics. All the best people displayed their virtue by supporting that.”
“Public inability to judge science inevitably lead to ascendancy of politically correct mediocrities or incompetents (Lysenko, Laughlin, Mann, Jones ). Unfortunately this often induces better scientists to join the pack in order to preserve their status.”
“Global Warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint “
‘In an op-ed published Wednesday in the UK Guardian, Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be “fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”’
These days, take my advice read the Guardian, and assume it’s the socialist version of what they hope things could be. The amount of sheer 1970’s style identity crap is awesome.
“Decline in surface urban heat island intensity in India during heatwaves” https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab121d/pdf
Observation based research can result in discoveries; model based consensus contributions usually result in the expected.