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
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.