Guest post by Phillip Goggans,
In an op-ed for the Lexington Herald-Leader this autumn, I argued that climate skepticism was a sensible position for informed laymen such as myself. I pointed out that, contrary to what is often said, there is no scientific consensus that we are in a climate crisis. Also, the graphs showing hockey stick changes in global temperatures are based on controversial data. The fact that climate activists routinely cite this data with no mention of the controversy is, in itself, a reason not to trust them. I mentioned that competent people have argued that the world hasn’t warmed very much, that we aren’t sure how much warming is due to natural variability, and that the computer models on which the dire predictions are based are not reliable.
My lead-in for this column was a provocative statement by Michael Mann urging people to ignore climate skeptics. Don’t try to argue with them, he said; report them and block them. The point of my column was that this degree of certainty in climate catastrophism was unwarranted. A sensible, reasonably well-informed person might really doubt we are in a climate crisis.
An editor from the Herald-Leader appended a note to my column warning readers about my supposedly fringe view. To protect their readers even more, they sandwiched my column between two alarmist ones. One was from an attorney in Lexington who evidently knows no more about climate science than I do. He took the case for climate catastrophism to be so simple and straightforward that even a “sixteen-year-old can understand it.” The other was a derisive rebuttal from none other than Michael Mann.
Of particular note was his use of a 2016 survey of meteorologists to support his “consensus” thesis. Mann links to an article in The Guardian that summarizes the survey. It says that only 5% think that the warming has entirely natural causes. Mann infers that “pretty close to 97%” think global warming is mostly caused by humans. This is contradicted in the article. It says “29% believe that the change is largely or entirely human caused; 38% think most of the change is from humans.” A clear third of meteorologists in 2016 are not convinced that humans are causing the warming. In other words, the very document that Mann uses to support his “consensus,” in fact, refutes it. Finally, the survey does not even address the major question on which Mann claims a consensus, viz., that global warming is imminently dangerous.
He dismissed with contempt my statement – easily verified – that many eminent scientists dispute climate catastrophism.
He smeared Tony Heller as a Sandy Hook “truther.” My mention of documents from Climategate provoked his indignant response that “something like 10 different investigations” cleared the implicated scientists of any wrongdoing. A more accurate account of that scandal appears in recent papers by Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick. Mann calls the 70’s cooling scare a myth rooted in a controversy about the cooling effects of certain pollutants. Could he really believe this? Fear of an impending ice age at that time is thoroughly documented.
Finally, he urges his readers to listen to “serious” people, not “carnival barkers” like me.
I wrote a brief, civil reply correcting his mistakes and going a little way towards defending myself against his insults. The Herald-Leader had blindsided me with Mann’s attack and so I thought they owed me a little space to respond. More importantly, they owed their readers a correction of Mann’s misinformation. They would not publish my reply and would not explain why. I suppose they are certain that we are in a climate crisis and that, under these circumstances, normal journalistic scruples do not apply.
Mann’s irascibility is forgivable. I had called a tweet of his “misleading and foolish” and so of course he wanted to strike back at me. More troublesome, though, is his evident willingness to mislead.
Phillip Goggans
Paintsville, KY
Yeah, Mann is a piece of work.
w.
Dr. Michael Mann, Smooth Operator 2013-03-30
People sometimes ask why I don’t publish in the so-called scientific journals. Here’s a little story about that. Back in 2004, Michael Mann wrote a mathematically naive piece about how to smooth the ends of time series. It was called “On smoothing potentially non-stationary climate time series“, and it was…
Kill It With Fire 2011-05-30
The discussion of the 1998 Mann “Hockeystick” seems like it will never die. (The “Hockeystick” was Dr. Michael Mann’s famous graph showing flatline historical temperatures followed by a huge modern rise.) Claims of the Hockeystick’s veracity continue apace, with people doggedly wanting to believe that the results are “robust”. I…
He’s a special type of genius. One of a kind.
Yeah, the kind of genius that figures telling a lie over and over somehow transforms reality to align with it! Simply amazing!
Mann has been confident from the start that he could get away with his pseudo-science. He was not wrong. Every single scientific society has rolled over.
“Mann’s irascibility is forgivable. I had called a tweet of his “misleading and foolish” and so of course he wanted to strike back at me. More troublesome, though, is his evident willingness to mislead.”
He’s rude and dismissive of even polite dissent. He recently wrote an ridiculously simplistic article in the Graun about how the recent bushfires in Australia were an example of climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/02/australia-your-country-is-burning-dangerous-climate-change-is-here-with-you-now
He is either dishonest or ignorant. And given his position, the latter seems unlikely.
Observer,
“He’s rude and dismissive of even polite dissent.” – which means he is angry AND scared!
Compare the story of “the piltdown man” resp. his “Inventer”; his Invention made him GREAT! – yet livelong rude and dismissive, angry and scared:
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+piltdown+man&oq=the+piltdown+man&aqs=chrome.
Jeff?
He’s an anti-genius.
Manniacal explodes (or is that implodes?) when he encounters genuine experts or geniuses.
You do have to admire his energy.
But then, he is protecting his golden rice bowl.
Mann was quoted in a recent article about bushfires in the Australian press as saying –
“hotter, drier, this is what climate change looks like”
So when the next floods occur in Oz, which they surely will, Mann’s words should be served up to him with the question –
“So what is all this water then, ABSENCE of climate change? “
Oh no – floods are ‘climate change as well.
So are high winds, or low winds, or no winds. A period of absolutely no weather would be untypical, and hence due to climate change, as well as a period of typical weather, which is obviously ‘wrong’ because the models predict that we should be having atypical weather….
A little while ago I heard that the ‘signal’ of climate change could be detected in all current weather data. When you looked at the paper, you found that what the author had done was use a model to describe what he weather OUGHT to be, and define any variation from this as the CO2 ‘signal’……
“Oh no – floods are ‘climate change as well.”
Indeed.
Here in Toronto we had a very high spring run off two years ago. The inevitable happened, and the “Toronto Islands” were flooded. These islands were formed from debris pushed there by the Niagara River so aren’t exactly what you’d call overly high. Storms in the 1800s actually created the islands from what was an archipelago by blasting out a few gaps, so we aren’t talking a geologically stable area.
The inevitable apocalyptic blather was released by the Usual Suspects, and of course they could find a “model” that said, indeed, this is the New Normal: more spring run off due to X, Y and Z. WE NEED ACTION NOW!!!.
Ahem.
But us old timers who have often faulty, but long memories could remember way, way back to 2014 when…the Great Lakes were in danger due to LOWER water levels.
Even Scientific American noticed:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-levels-of-the-great-lakes-are-declining/
Of course, THIS was also apocalyptic. Why, we’d have to spend KABILLIONS dredging channels so the lakers could get through. The pleasure boating industry was worried as people’s boats didn’t fit on their docks (first world problem that…).
Of course…there was a model. That said that this was the New Normal. That water levels were going to drop because, of course, we’d have less precipitation.
So if you’re following so far:
2014: low levels – apocalypse due to climate change – the science says so – MSM headlines
2015: normal levels – yawn – what are the Kardashians doing?
2016: ditto
2017: ditto
2018: low levels – apocalypse due to climate change – the science says so – MSM headlines
And, of course if you average low, normal, normal, normal, high you get…normal.
Lake Ontario waters keep getting higher and higher because of climate change.
NO!! Because the International Joint Commission decided to raise the lake levels to flood marshlands around the lake to accommodate the muskrats who have been suffering from a loss of habitat since they lowered lake levels back to prevent flooding back in the 1970s. Another human-caused climate catastrophe suddenly pops into existence.
…it keeps the bureaucrats busy and your tax dollars at… work?
I predict Manns response will be:
“cooler, wetter, this is what climate change looks like”
He is a principled man. The principle is
FLEXIBILITY
Chaos comes to mind! Opportunistic, too! Add nefarious plus anti-scientific!
If he didn’t have double standards, he’d have no standards at all.
I believe that flexibility is actually, lie until one’s pants catch fire.
ALL weather events are caused by CAGW – do keep up!
I think you have jumped the sarc!
The Australian media have a long track record of blaming every weather anomaly on climate change because climate change is an unknown, a little worrying, a little bit scary which is important if you want people to pay for news. If people feel safe and secure and there are no unknowns and no surprises they don’t feel the need to be constantly informed.
” If people feel safe and secure and there are no unknowns and no surprises they don’t feel the need to be constantly DISinformed.”
Fixed!
Climate delusion has all the signs of mental illness. A simple examination of measured temperature trends and sea level rise trends demonstrates that at current rates, IF current trends continue, that anything resembling a “climate catastrophe” is centuries in the future. And right now, life is getting better all the time, unless you spend most of your time obsessing on bad news and imagining the risks of bad stuff happening completely out of proportion to reality.
I understand where you are coming from regarding your opening statement! However, as a semi-retired engineer, may I suggest you refrain from such analogies as this was a lynch-pin of argument by Greenalists & eco-extremists here in the UK around 10 years ago, that Climate Change denial was a mental illness & should be treated as such! This was the kind of tactics utilised by Totalitarians the World over, to villify & degrade ones oponents, a’la the murderous National Socialists Workers Party of Germany in the 1930s, & throughout the Soviet Union’s entire ghastly & equally (they were the same people) murderous existance! AtB
When Mann is given space to vent, you know there is inherent bias in the editorial office. I am surprised at how weak his arguments are.
Unfortunately his audience doesn’t care about the strength or weakness of his arguments only the emotions they raise.
“When Mann is given space to vent, you know there is inherent bias in the editorial office.”
Here’s Aunty with the teleprompter-
https://www.reddit.com/r/AustraliaLeftPolitics/comments/ej8q2r/abc_interviews_climate_scientist_michael_mann/
They probably don’t even need to rehearse anymore as it comes naturally with experience.
‘… He took the case for climate catastrophism to be so simple and straightforward that even a “sixteen-year-old can understand it” …’
Too true, one needs the mental capacity and life experience of a sixteen-year-old in order to believe it.
Not really. A 16 year old is getting to the stage where they question everything.
You really need a 3 year old. They have lived their entire life in a supportive environment where they are simply provided for and told what to do at every stage by a couple of god-like parents. You could get them to believe in climate change. And Santa….
That’s why the governments teach this nonsense in elementary schools. By the time children are mature enough to be critical thinkers, climate change belief is as deeply embedded as Christian, Jewish, Muslim teaching was when other religious people controlled education. This is a religion, and we are heretics who must be burned.
Not burned, though, because… you know… emissions.
“You really need a 3 yr old.” True, unless you have Greta and her potential ‘special needs’
I think he was referring to one particular 16 year old with a long history of quite severe mental illness, as well as a severe developmental disorder.
Hey Phillip… great that you even got your piece published, but not the follow-up. If you are really keen on getting your side of the story out there, and highlighting the problems with the case Mann made, I would suggest trying to buy ads through Google or one of the other ad platforms that Kentucky.com uses. Through Google display ads, you can get thousands of impressions and clicks through to an article/ad that says “The reply to Michael Mann that Kentucky.com won’t print” or something like that. It should cost only a few dollars. It may get flagged and taken down, but not for a while. I have done this before successfully – not sure if it would work this time, but it would be fun to try.
The problem is that the MSM, and indeed most politicians, have painted themselves into the corner of seeming to believe in CO2 caused CAGW and think that if they now recant they will look stupid. What is needed is an honest MSM owner.
Problem is they, the democrats, are donated millions by the so called green industry. Listen to them talk, they all say the same things word for word. All about money.
A “debate” with the Pillsbury Dough Mann is like attacking a giant marshmallow of bias and duplicity which has had its ego fed and has grown to enormous proportions.
Just another reason for parents to steer their kids away from PSU.
Look, Scott Adams said that facts don’t matter. I believe it, based on continuing results. What we are faced with is simply regurgitating the scientific facts which we think are solid. Emotionalism reigns, and we have to deal with it. People that do not have a scientific background are overwhelmed with facts, and is confused by any additional “facts”. In such a situation whoever seems more passionate, wins. That is what Mann does. That is why scientific facts presented don’t matter anymore and why people can use science to their advantage which is quite wrong.
I think he is mostly correct. It’s like we are reliving the Salem witch trials and Mann plays a dual role as one of the accusers and authority figures.
BillyV
“… regurgitating the scientific [pseudo]facts …”
What doesn’t help the debate comes from the first line of this article…
‘I argued that climate skepticism was a sensible position’
In reality there are no climate skeptics, we all know there is such a thing as climate we also all accept that the climate changes. Where the skepticism comes in is in the driving forces of climate change and we need to be exact with our language. We must not settle for the label ‘climate skeptic’ – it’s man-made climate change we are skeptical of and that needs to be reinforced at every opportunity.
Apart from that, great article
Many of us are not even sceptical of man-made climate change as such, but uncertain of the degree to which it is man made, and find the catastrophic projections insufficiently supported by hard evidence. At the same time we find the proposed remedies worse than the disease, even if we were to accept most of not all of the worst-case scenarios. I speak, like the writer, as an informed layperson not a specialist.
…if not all… Sorry.
Mann remains ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ for 100 world class scientists as collected in Mark Steyn’s book available on Kindle for £4.80
Mann combines a thin skins with massive ego and a lot less ability than he thinks he has.
That is not a good combination .
Meanwhile the ‘quality’ of Mann can be seen not in how sceptics view him but his own side, and what we find is they have little time for him too. He will get thrown under the bus to save themselves, and that bus canno arrive too soon.
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
Socrates the Greek not the Brazilian footballer.
‘Charlatan’ is the word you are looking for.
When Dr. Ball joked that Dr. Mann belonged in state pen rather than Penn State, Mann sued Ball. Mann managed to drag it out forever without actually appearing in court to face questioning and present evidence. The judge finally tossed the case out based on Mann’s inexcusable delays. Mann portrayed that as a victory for him.
By not appearing in court, Mann remained silent on the evidence. That silence gives rise to adverse inference. Ball, and anyone else, can draw a reasonable inference from Mann’s silence. That reasonable inference is, of course, that Mann has something to hide. In other words, Mann has admitted that he does belong in the state pen. He is a self admitted fraud.
Mann loser, adverse inference
Good on you Phillip, for getting involved. You have discovered a huge collection of like-minded liberals that know what the truth is, instinctivly, and they tend to lump in with political views, like sure the Trump economy is good but he inherited it from Obama! The thing for concern about these liberals is adding in arson/sabotage as useful tools to emphasize the dire nature of not listening to them.
His work was focused on temperature reconstructions for the previous 1,000 years or so. The techniques he used and the analysis of the data managed to miss the medieval warm period and the little ice age. If that doesn’t tell anyone what a sh!t scientist he is …… it’s on you.
If his proxy data do not indicate the MWP, RWP, or LIA, all of which are measurable on every continent, then his proxy sources do not measure a direct response to temperatures as presumed but rather a stronger response to factors other than temperature.
Much of the proxy data was all over the place, but he found the magic grove of stripbark pines that showed the signal he was looking for. So, he overweighted them by 400 or so times, so as to overwhelm all the others. Voila, hockey stick.
His “data”, and I use that word loosely, doesn’t go back to the RWP but you can take a nice trip to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest and look at the tree stumps that were alive in the RWP …. UP the hill.
If he’s going to be blocking anything, it should be the voices in his head. Aren’t there medications for that?
The case is not one of whether man-made climate change is what Mann claims it is or is non-existent. The blade part of the Hockey Stick is true, but not inconsistent with what Dr. Judith Curry and Nic Lewis seem to think is happening, which is mold warming from increase of CO2 with a low climate sensitivity around 1.5-1.6 degrees C per 2xCO2. Presence of man-made global warming does not mean most forms of extreme weather getting worse, as explained by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr , who says AGW is real and should be mitigated because of threat of worsening sea level rise but that actual meteorological data shows droughts not getting worse, floods not getting much worse and tropical cyclones not getting much worse. The percentage of scientists who believe AGW exists is high, the percentage (especially of meteorologists and geologists) who believe it will be catastrophic without drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is something less.
“The blade part of the Hockey Stick is true”
No it isn’t.
All recent science (as opposed to broken computer models) put climate sensitivity at below 1C, most put it below 0.5C.
MarkW: “All recent science (as opposed to broken computer models) put climate sensitivity at below 1C, most put it below 0.5C”: Far from true. Lewis & Curry 2018, cited twice recently in WUWT (including comments) with a false claim of about 1 degree C or max of about 1 degree C per 2xCO2, says median climate sensitivity of 1.50 or 1.66 degrees C, depending on whether infilled Arctic data is excluded or included. Christy & McNider (2017), cited earlier today in a comment in a WUWT article, says transient climate response is 1.1 +/- .26 degree C per 2xCO2, implying equilibrium climate sensitivity is somewhat more. A couple recent workings by Dr. Roy Spencer in drroyspencer.com put climate sensitivity in the range of 1.4 to 1.85 degrees C per 2xCO2.
“The blade part of the Hockey Stick is true”
Really Donald. Have you extrapolated it? Fortunately there are long rolls of paper you can buy easily in many stores should you want do that manually.
Let us know if we’re past the temperature of the sun yet.
Some of them are even double ply and embossed.
…… and, reusable in this instance.
Actually, has anyone extrapolated it to the present, and I’m not talking about the bogroll method. I’d be curious to see where we are now with Mann’s and Marcott et al’s methods.
Donald
You said, “… the percentage (especially of meteorologists and geologists) who believe it will be catastrophic without drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is something less.”
My sense is that there is an inordinate number of geologists commenting on this blog. My impression is that few, if any, support the concept of CAGW.
As a subscriber to Weatherbell Analytics Joe Bastardi frequently comments on dialogue he has tried to maintain with Mann because they have the Penn State affiliation although Bastardi is a real Penn State Alum.
Mann was brought in because of his grant capability by Spanier the disgraced President, probably instrumental in the whitewash after ClimateGate.
Joe doesn’t realize ( maybe he does ) that Mann is playing him and considers Joe a lowly Meteorologist.
Never argue with a sick mind– you’ll never win.
“Mann was brought in because of his grant capability by Spanier the disgraced President, probably instrumental in the whitewash after ClimateGate.”
A previous Penn State investigation had cleared Mr Sandusky as well.
Hey hey hey , all those derogatory comments about Michael Mann.. . .
A bit more respect , let’s not forget he’s a Nobel price winner.
🙂
Some of my favorite people have too.
Back in 2005 when I first ran across Mikey’s blog (“Real Climate”), he dissed the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware because, per his opinion, rivers don’t get growlers (chunk ice). Well, they do. They get ice dams when the breakups come and those are broken down into chunk ice when the ice dam breaks. I knew from what he said that he doesn’t ever leave the comforting warmth of his office and everything he did was “modeling”, which was biased and based on speculation to get his results.
How anyone could willingly follow someone whose view is so narrow and biased was then and still is beyond me, but I took into account that fact that his grants were enriching Penn State because they get half of the grant money so they don’t care what he says or does, as long as he brings in cash. He’s a butthead and nothing will change what he says or thinks, as long as he gets cash and attention. That ego trip of his must be quite a fallback position, but you’ll NEVER get him to change what he says or publishes.
Sara–Log jams were more common on Gulf of Mexico rivers but send them this–“Large blocks of ice…” went past New Orleans on February 17, reaching the Gulf two days later.
Berry, J. 1899. Climate and crop service. Monthly Weather Review. 27(2):53-55.
Henry, A. J. 1899. The weather of the month. Monthly Weather Review. 27(2):50-53.
I have photos of ice on a Louisiana Bay taken nine decades later. Fishermen were going around picking up dead trout where the lack of ice allowed it, also reported in Texas in 1685 and in between.
Thanks, HD. The Kankakee River frequently gets ice dams during spring breakup and when those break, it is spectacular. The Des Plaines River also gets them, but I have yet to get a chance to get photos of them.
And besides, we all know that Mikey Mann is full of enough hot air and baloney to start his own local global warming episode, don’t we?
Hi Phillip.
You are being abused with classic leftist propaganda tactics as described by Josef Goebbels and later simplified by Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals”:
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.“ Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.“ It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.“ Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.“ If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.“ There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.“ They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.“ Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.“ Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.“ Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10.“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.“ Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.“ Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.“ Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
________________________________________
See also this treatise on the leftists’ decades-long program to corrupt our institutions:
https://centerforindividualism.org/the-lefts-long-march-through-the-institutions-is-now-pretty-much-complete-and-its-a-disaster/
______________________________________
In Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov’s 1984 interview he predicts everything that is happening now.
https://youtu.be/bX3EZCVj2XA
This history of these tactics goes back further, as described below by Vladimir Lenin.
The Democrats’ policy is straight out of Lenin’s quotes.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/8716-Vladimir_Lenin
“Truth is the most precious thing. That’s why we should ration it.”
“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”
“Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.”
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”
“People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.”
“It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.”
“Democracy is indispensable to socialism.”
“The goal of socialism is communism.”
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
“Trust is good, but control is better.”
“As an ultimate objective, “peace” simply means communist world control.”
“One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.”
“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”
___________________________________
WHAT THE GREEN NEW DEAL IS REALLY ABOUT — AND IT’S NOT THE CLIMATE
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., July 19, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/20/what-the-green-new-deal-is-really-about-and-its-not-the-climate/
What you have said is very true. The Left want to be thought of as a normality as opposed to their actuality of going against the basic instinct of any sentient species which is to preserve and maintain well-being of self, spouse and offspring. The election of Donald Trump in the US, Brexit and the annihilation of the Labour Party here, have severely damaged the relentless progress of the Left. This progress can be reversed, if the truth about the politics behind AGW exposing the motives, lies and deceit becomes general knowledge. As a lifelong Conservative voter, I am particularly disturbed that my grown up children and their friends think that Corbyn with the almost communist Labour party should have formed a government and they are vociferous in their condemnation in my views of climate change. Let us hope and pray that this is the beginning of the end for the extreme Left
Hi Andrew,
Suggested reading for children of all ages.
Best, Allan
WHAT THE GREEN NEW DEAL IS REALLY ABOUT — AND IT’S NOT THE CLIMATE
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., July 19, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/20/what-the-green-new-deal-is-really-about-and-its-not-the-climate/
THE COST TO SOCIETY OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., July 4, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/04/the-cost-to-society-of-radical-environmentalism/
CO2, GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE AND ENERGY
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., June 15, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/15/co2-global-warming-climate-and-energy-2/
Excel: https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Rev_CO2-Global-Warming-Climate-and-Energy-June2019-FINAL.xlsx
From the article: “Also, the graphs showing hockey stick changes in global temperatures are based on controversial data. The fact that climate activists routinely cite this data with no mention of the controversy is, in itself, a reason not to trust them.”
Excellent point! When the alarmists, or anyone else who uses bogus Hockey Stick charts, don’t mention the controversy surrounding these altered temperature charts, they are, in effect, lying to you. They are pretending these charts are “observations” when they are anything but.
From the article: “My lead-in for this column was a provocative statement by Michael Mann urging people to ignore climate skeptics. Don’t try to argue with them, he said; report them and block them.”
Mann, just like all the other alarmists, is afraid to debate the subject. He wants to shut the skeptics up. If Mann had a case, he would want the skeptics to talk all they want and make fools of themselves. But Mann doesn’t have a case to make, and he doesn’t want you listening to people who point that out, so he wants you to “block” them.
Climate Alarmists are a bunch of cowards when it comes to discussing their specialty. Run, run, run, Michael Mann! That’s the only way you can keep this fraud going, and even that may not be enough. The “hotter and hotter” lie is running out of gas.
As I live in Lexington I find this pretty funny. My late grandfather was a political reporter for the Herald-Leader and the Republican party chairman. That didn’t prevent the paper from teaching me many years before it became mainstream what the term shadow banning meant. I was one of the first, for daring to question their perspective on 9/11. I’m one of the reasons they stopped allowing the public to comment on their stories. Now you have to comment through a facebook account, which I don’t and will never have. Still nothing that challenges the establishment is allowed, and few comments arw offeredbin anything anymore. They also interviewed me about my not vaccinating and, as expected, twisted and distorted my words to try to make me look stupid. The icing on the cake was that I had had many letters and a few editorials published and then they scrubbed them from their digital archives! All this was over 15 years ago. The Herald-Leader is a corporate propaganda rag, barely good enough for the bottom of a bird cage. THIS is what I meant by this being funny—expecting any kind of truth or fairness from them is as silly as expecting Congress to impose term limits on themselves and stoo wasting our money. Mr Goggans should do what I did long ago. Walk away from the lying, manipulative Mockingbird msm and don’t ever look back.
Did you mean to say ‘not vacillating ‘? If not were You vaccinated as a child and have chosen Not to have vaccines administered to yourself as an adult? Does this prohibition extend to family members, pets and livestock?
From the article: “Mann calls the 70’s cooling scare a myth rooted in a controversy about the cooling effects of certain pollutants. Could he really believe this? Fear of an impending ice age at that time is thoroughly documented.”
A myth! What an idiot!
I lived through this so-called myth and it was excruciating! In the 1970’s climate scientists were alarmed about the Earth possibly heading into another Ice Age. That’s a fact.
It was an excruciating experience because, just like today’s climate science of Global Warming, the climate science of Global Cooling was full of speculation and very few facts.
Global Cooling was covered in all the scientific publications of the time, which can be verified using internet search so I don’t know what Michael Mann is doing calling it a myth. Well, yes I do know what he is doing, he’s lying to us again in an effort to promote his human-caused climate change catastrophe speculation.
When this Human-caused Global Cooling theory first appeared I had no reason to doubt it. I thought the scientists proposing this idea had some evidence of something and knew what they were talking about. The only problem was, just like today, all these scientific articles were just full of speculation about things, but were devoid of facts or evidence to support all this speculation. And as it turned out, they were wrong in their speculation.
The Human-caused Global Cooling speculation got so bad (just like today with Global Warming) that I ended up cancelling my subscriptions to most of the scientific publications I recieved because I would get furious everytime I would see one of these speculative science articles passed off as established fact. I don’t like getting furious, so I eliminated the cause.
Oh how I wish I had the internet available to me back then in the 1970’s. I would have blistered the ears of a whole lot of science publication editors!!! Passing speculation off as established facts was and is a travesty of climate science.
The 1970s Global Cooling Consensus was not a Myth
By Angus McFarlane / November 19, 2018
There was an overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was heading into a period of significant cooling. The possibility of anthropogenic warming was relegated to a minority of the papers in the peer-reviewed literature.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/19/the-1970s-global-cooling-consensus-was-not-a-myth/
From the article: “He smeared Tony Heller as a Sandy Hook “truther.” My mention of documents from Climategate provoked his indignant response that “something like 10 different investigations” cleared the implicated scientists of any wrongdoing.”
Tony Heller is going to be Mann’s undoing.
How can he claim he was cleared of any wrongdoing when the Climategate emails show they conspired to erase the “1940’s blip” (the inconvenient fact that the 1930’s were just as warm as today, which destroys the human-caused climate change catastrophe claim), and there is no doubt they erased this “blip” from the official temperature records. It’s plain to see. So he has not been cleared.
We have all sorts of charts from all over the world which show the 1930’s as being just as warm as today and then we have those same charts after the Climategate Charlatans changed them into Hockey Stick charts that erase the warmth of the 1930’s and the cool of the 1970’s.
Here’s an example of changes they made to regional temperature charts where they cooled the past and warmed the present in an effort to make it look like temperatures were getting hotter and hotter and hotter, but they couldn’t make that claim if it was just as hot in the 1930’s, so they erased this inconvenient data:
The Climategate Charlatans pulled this trick all over the world and now they want us to spend TRILLIONS of dollars to fix this science fiction story.
The Bogus, Bastardized Hockey Stick chart:
The Hockey Stick chart makes things look like temperatures have been getting hotter and hotter for decades and the temperatures are now the hottest in recorded history. It’s all a Big Lie created by the Climategate Charlatans.
Here’s what the real temperature profile of the world is: the 1930’s were just as warm as today, which means the catastrophic CO2 speculation is disconfirmed and CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s atmosphere:
Tmax charts
US chart:
China chart:
India chart:
Norway chart:
Australia chart:
The Climategate Charlatans have successfully fooled a large proportion of the Western world, but that won’t last forever. One of these days some fool will say the Human-caused Global Warming scare was just a myth.
“The Bogus, Bastardized Hockey Stick chart:
That’s not “the Hockey Stick”.
Well, that’s what *I* call the Hockey Stick. Actually, there are two Hockey Sticks, the one Mann created erasing the Medieval Warm Period and other warm periods in the past, and the “Modern” Hockey Stick, the one that erases the warmth of the 1930’s.
The Modern Hockey Stick *does* look like a Hockey Stick, wouldn’t you agree?
And I have made this distinction about the Modern-era Hockey Stick in the past, on more than one occasion.
“The Climategate Charlatans pulled this trick all over the world and now they want us to spend TRILLIONS of dollars to fix this science fiction story.”
Sort of. They actually wanted us to spend BILLIONS that went into their bank accounts but, as someone pointed out on here a couple of weeks ago, this turned into the Sorcerers Apprentice, so now it’s TRILLIONS.
I, and I am guessing many others of similar mindset as Mr. Goggins, who have dared to submit articles questioning climate alarmism to their local newspaper have also experienced rejection and ridicule. This happened to me recently in one of the St. Louis area weekly newspapers that readily print anything from anyone who supports “Climate Change” dogma. If the media, even at the local level, is blocking public discourse it is obvious that something more than understanding the science is at play.
Never debate with those crooks !
These coarse henchmen will always win against any honest opponent because they care about facts, logic and science as much as they care about honesty, integrity and decent behavior :
– they do not give a damn.
Serious question. How do we stop the phenomenon of buddy system peer review and censorship of dissenting or replicating studies?
Is there a way?
Does not matter, this is about politics, not science. Time for sceptics to realise this.
“>>> Don’t try to argue with them […] ; report them and block them. <<<"
Right. So, here I report: "Dr" Michael Mann of Penn State peddles eco-fascist demagoguery and propaganda. Block him.
Here’s a link to Mann’s original MBH 98 paper:
https://iri.columbia.edu/~goddard/EESC_W4400/CC/mann_etal_1998.pdf
He didn’t give his verification stats, but Wahl and Amman, in reproduicing and “verifying” his paper in 2006 DID so,
https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/rc4a/millennium/refs/Wahl_ClimChange2007.pdf
They used data, and Principal Component Analysis, to produce their model, then ran the model against withheld date for verification purposes,
Check out their “verification stats” in table 1S page 63 ,
r² for 1400 through 1759 in the “verification period” were all below 0,02 – pretty low- only in “climate science” could such results be publishable,
For comparison, if you gave an IQ test with similar 0,02 reliabiliy to Albert Einstein, with 160 results, and to Curly Howard of the Three Stooges, with maybe results of 60, based on that low reliability, your best guess as to Einstein’s IQ would be 100 + ,02*60 = 101,2,
and your best guess for Curly Howard’s IQ would be 100 -,02*,40 = 99,2
Such a crummy test, with such low reliability, would not be worth giving,
Curley was an effing genius!!!
Regarding Phillip’s comment: ‘I wrote a brief, civil reply correcting his mistakes and going a little way towards defending myself against his insults. The Herald-Leader had blindsided me with Mann’s attack and so I thought they owed me a little space to respond. More importantly, they owed their readers a correction of Mann’s misinformation. They would not publish my reply and would not explain why. I suppose they are certain that we are in a climate crisis and that, under these circumstances, normal journalistic scruples do not apply.’
This is exactly the sort of thing that happens in British newspapers. I’ve never managed to get a letter on ‘climate change’ into one of the national daily papers, despite presenting data in support of my comments. Local newspapers have printed my letters, but then they’ll publish so-called rebuttals by clowns who’ve obviously never bothered to research the subject in any detail, but parrot the proverbial party line along with ad hominems. One idiot in his letter even insulted Dr Roy Spencer rather than comment on satellite data that I’d referred to.
I’ve given up bothering – people believe what they want to, and at age 71 I now have other more enjoyable things I want to to than waste my time trying to reason with the likes of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and Greta Thunberg Supporters .
You and I can say one thing about terrible flooding from the sea when we were both young. The last time there was serious flooding in the Netherlands was early in 1953. This has never been repeated – due to the ingenuity of the Dutch people and the system of dykes that were built. Do we spend trillions on trying to engineer the climate – a futile exercise – or use our resources to adapt to and even utilize the changes? I think only an eejit (a word used quite often in Ireland) would bet his money on climate engineering. Unfortunately too many Irish love betting.
Same here in New Zealand, with the refusal of the Editor of the New Zealand Herald never printing anything contradicting their CAGW nonsense. That is reflected in the nonsense spouted on Television New Zealand, supported by our nonsensical NIWA. But at least their reporters are young blonde females! Apparently!
I once again visited the Wiki page on ME Mann to see if there was any revision of the glowing tributes noticed when I first read the profile. However I was left, once again, with the sense of an injustice that Mann has not (yet) been awarded a proper (ie Physics) Nobel prize for his contribution to climate science – a conclusion at odds with the views of some here I suspect.
2 other things that I picked up on : he has published numerous papers, but given that the Wiki article states that he devised new statistical methods to drive signals from sparse or noisy data the only books he has published are of a polemical nature, not textbooks describing his techniques for students, or the interested general reader. For such a distinguished academic that is a bit unusual in my experience of that species.
The other oddity concerns the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation). The wiki article gives the impression that although noticed previously, it was Mann who named it and published papers on it. Well following a previous paper and the future work referenced led to the most recent paper by Mann (2020) in which it seems that he is now saying that the AMO does not exist, that the cooling from 1940 to about 1975 is not part of an earlier cycle, but due to aerosol effects .
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13823-w
Absence of internal multidecadal and interdecadal oscillations in climate model simulations
(open access)
This is a bit of a disappointment because the AMO graphs I have seen suggest that the current cycle peaked at about 2010 -2015 and we should now see slight cooling (modified by an underlying weak AGW effect) which would indicate to the more extreme alarmists that the situation is more complex than they advocate.
I must confess the maths in the paper is beyond me, so perhaps I misunderstood his arguments. Perhaps others could enlighten me.
Here is the AMO chart
And here is a minimally bastardized U.S. surface temperature chart (Hansen 1999):
Both charts show the 1930’s as being as warm as today, and both charts show the cooling of the period from 1940 to 1980, the cooling period Mann claims doesn’t exist.
I guess the criticism that the bogus, bastardized “Modern-Era” Hockey Stick chart manipulates and erases the cool 1970’s causes Mann to come out and try to justify this erasure now. We are going to have to give Mann the nickname of “Eraserman”. His goal seems to be to erase all our climate history and make up a new one out of whole cloth.
I think he is going to have a very hard time erasing the cool 1970’s. Too many people who lived through the 1970’s are still alive today and don’t remember it that way. Besides, we have documentation from the era! It’s all there in black and white for anyone to read. 🙂
How delusional do you have to be to try to erase the “Ice Age Cometh” 1970’s? Maybe it’s not delusional to try, but it is delusional if you think you will be successful in promoting this lie.
Tom, Thank you for the reply . I am intrigued that Mann is responsible for naming the phenomenon, but now seems to be trying to eliminate it. I am going to quietly dig into this effect a bit more – not least because it is likely to be a significant effect on the present and future climate here in England. If it is real, of course!
Follow the “celebrity” money, though this is only conjecture:
https://networthpost.org/net-worth/michael-mann-net-worth-23/
“He took the case for climate catastrophism to be so simple and straightforward that even a “sixteen-year-old can understand it.” ”
Was the attorney who wrote the article referring to 16-year-old Greta Thunberg? It’s relatively easy to convince many 16-year-olds to jump on a bandwagon for a supposedly “revolutionary” cause, which usually leads to disillusion when former teenagers reach 30 years of age or so. (Maybe that’s why America’s founders required Presidents to be over 35, Senators to be over 30, and Reps to be over 25 years old). Those of us who have seen 40 years or more of the “same old” weather and climate models failing to predict the past tend to be more difficult to convince. If a trend is so slow that it might cause a problem centuries in the future, most people will let their descendants deal with the problem.
As for Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph, there is no question that it was deliberately misleading. Mann used proxy data from tree rings to draw the portion of the graph from 1450 to 1950, then used warming thermometer data after 1950 (when the tree rings would have shown cooling). The only thing Mann’s data proved was that tree rings do not correlate well with temperature (they are obviously affected by other factors such as rainfall during the growing season, and give no indication of the climate during late autumn and winter when trees are dormant).
Mann also used data from only a single tree which started growing in the 15th century as a proxy for the entire period from AD 1000 to 1500, completely ignoring the Medieval Warm Period (estimated at AD 1000 through 1350) during which Mann’s proxy tree did not yet exist! Yet the hockey stick graph extends backward to AD 1000, even though Mann has NO DATA for the first 400 years of his graph!
It is a terrible shame that many people in the mainstream press believe they need to “Mann” everyone who disagrees with their scary apocalyptic predictions, when it is really Mann who deserves to be “McKitricked”.
But when all the climate scaremongers hold an international meeting, they never agree to really do anything, because they know that the largest CO2 emitters will never agree to the huge sacrifices needed to reduce CO2 emissions. Basically lots of crying wolf without any effort to protect the sheep.
We climate skeptics need to know that time is on our side, and we can wait out the scaremongers. If the climate doesn’t change drastically over the next several decades and contradicts all the predictions, and coastal cities are still high and dry, people will learn to ignore the scaremongers.
The ONLY way the climate catastrophe debate will end is if we stop all public funding going to the institutions and people that write the drivel. Make funding dependent on methodology that requires raw data be preserved and published (immediately), changed data be explained, reviewed, critiqued and published, and any findings must be reproducible by peers, including those not “friendly” to the finding. If you enforce this, most of these activists will be de-funded as they don’t have the time, patience, or intelligence to do any of this.
We can no longer trust people in certain “soft sciences” to police themselves. Their work needs to come under deep scrutiny by real scientists (hard sciences). We certainly can no longer trust our universities to tell, or even recognize the truth.
Herein lies the rub…
Is Global Warming caused by humans…
Well, maybe a little… which means that yes most likely some of it is ’caused’ by mankind. So does that mean that I agree in that humans are responsible for SOME warming… YES.
Does that mean that I think nature is not a culprit, big or small, No I think that nature is a big portion of it.
Is CO2 the main contributor… My answer would be most likely not.
Can CO2 cause an increase in temperature – Yes it totally can.
Do these statements seem muddled? Yes, but that is because the truth is not SIMPLE. There are a slew of caveats and additional parts to the science that a simple statement, Humans are increasing the temperature. Or CO2 is the primary cause, or anything else said really gets my goat on.
I wish that the argument was one of simple cause and effect. And that is WHAT some people like Mann et al. seem to push. Which is wrong. But if Mann looked at what I just said technically he can say that I agree in “Man-made” global warming and he would not be wrong.
People out there do not have time for the nuanced argument. Are you Red or Blue? Are you Progressive or Conservative? Are you Racist or not? You are categorized into either or statements and condemned/uplifted/whatever by the group dejour because of it.
The science seems simple… Warming has happened since the end of the little ice age… But the understanding as to the reasons, what is correct, how much is from what, is not.
Doesn’t matter. Only skeptics will read with sufficient attention to pick up on the falsehood. Believers will skim over it and accept his fallacious assertion because – well – the science is settled, isn’t it? Why bother with silly little details that get in the way?
Unfortunately for us, Mann is a fairly good public speaker, and is never fazed by a lack of supporting facts. There are good speakers on the skeptic side of the fence too, but they never seem to get much air time. I wonder why?
At some level (assuming he’s not a total psychopath), Michael Mann must know he’s going to be proven wrong, but he’s riding a tiger and can’t get off. One day, hopefully in the not too distant future, he will fall off and get eaten.
“At some level (assuming he’s not a total psychopath), Michael Mann must know he’s going to be proven wrong, but he’s riding a tiger and can’t get off.”
I think that describes the situation. The only thing Michael Mann can do is double-down on the distortions of the temperature record, or admit the distortions. Obviously, Mann is doublling down.
When facts are not on your side, bullying and degrading are your only options….
Once you get away from Louisville, inbreeding becomes an issue throughout much of KY. Mann fits right-in.
Intellectual property attorneys and newspaper editors are climate science experts by Lexington standards.
Coblenz intended to run for Congress in 2014…and failed to file ahead of the deadline. He started a campaign in 2016 and quit. Wanna-be politicians are just as smart on science issue as actual politicians.
Consensus only shows that an idea is popular or its approval rating. It confers no legitimacy on the idea itself. Having worked in verification / validation for a long time now, I have adopted the Royal Society’s motto: Nullius in Verba. (take nobody’s word for it).
A scientific or engineering conclusion is not valid because of how many people favor the conclusion, but because the data supports that conclusion. Data does not support the conclusion that the planet is experiencing man-caused climate catastrophe.
I have additionally found that when filtered through Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit, the result is: the cult of man-caused climate change is baloney-driven nonsense. Real science welcomes skepticism and debate. Cultish dogma-driven pseudo-science avoids debate and silences critics. Warmism is a dogma-driven cult, not a valid scientific conclusion.
What really gets up my nose about all of this is that reasonable questions are met, not with measured answers, but fury that the questions were asked in the first place. If you just say, wait a minute, how do you know that, this is taken as a hostile attack on The Science, funded by Big Oil. (The term, Big Oil is of course a pejorative.) It’s not just, you’re wrong. It’s, you’re deliberately lying in the service of profit, and with callous disregard for the wellbeing of future generations.
I myself, on other sites, have questioned the catastrophic climate change narrative and somebody else has posted that I am “obviously” a spokesperson for an oil company. And I ain’t. Even so, if an oil company would like to pay me money to post what I will anyway, send it along boys. You can’t bribe me to do what I already plan to do.
You should be insulted by what Mr Mann has said about you. I think what he said about you is comparable to what Mark Styne and Dr Tim Ball said about him. He sued them in the courts for defamation. Maybe you should consider doing the same.
Yeah, and it sounds like Mr. Mann defamed Tony Heller, too.
Phillip, tell them well reputed scientist Mickey Mouse signed the “Climate Emergency” list:
https://www.google.com/search?q=11000+scientists+list+mickey+mouse&oq=scientists+mickey+mouse&aqs=chrome.