mariacostel
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Australian Politics
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The Fall of the Stick
MICHAEL E MANN is the bristlecone pine of scientists. Just as removing the bristlecones makes his hockey stick collapse, so removing Mann from the climate conversation would make a lot of the drama and hysteria and sheer unpleasantness disappear.
For example, why do we have leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet. He started that countdown in 2009, by the way. The 96 months is up in July 2017. On the other hand, it gives us an extra 18 months on January 2016, which is the official final storewide-clearance date for Al Gore’s 2006 prediction of the end of the world.
This sort of thing was once reserved for amiable lunatics with sandwich boards passing out leaflets in the street. What made it suddenly respectable for princes and presidents?
Answer: The declaration by the IPCC that this is the hottest year of the hottest decade of the hottest century since hotness began. And who provided the underlying “science” for that? Mann.
Another question: Why is Big Climate so weirdly defensive? To the point where an entire sub-discipline of junk science has sprung up in which supposed “academics” publish papers purporting to show that 99.99999 per cent of all scientists agree with them338, and producing “studies” to prove that anyone minded to disagree is a conspiracy theorist who believes the moon landings were faked. 339 (In fact, two of the very few men who’ve set foot on the moon are, in Mann terms, climate deniers: Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt.)
Why are they doing this? Answer: They’re playing by Mann rules. Don’t address the argument, destroy the guy making it - he’s a “denier”, he’s in the pay of the Koch brothers. Clearly this Buzz Aldrin kook is just some wackjob who believes the moon landings were filmed in Nevada.
Those who think that the very real disputes within climate science should nevertheless be debated within civilized norms have argued that, in Dr Richard Betts’ words, “the whole climate conversation would be better off with the word ‘denier’ being dropped completely.” But no climatologist promotes this witless slur as zealously as Mann: He lends a gang insult the imprimatur of science, and his thuggish acolytes have enthusiastically embraced it. Because what they’re defending - the hockey stick - is indefensible, their best defense is a good offensiveness, remorseless and virulent.
Much has flowed from the decision to stick with the stick. You’ll recall Professor Richard Tol’s words a few pages ago:
Who does most damage to the climate movement? Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Jim Hansen, Peter Gleick, Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri (not necessarily in that order).
James Hansen was the most influential climate-change promoter pre-Mann. In June 1988 his dramatic testimony to the US Senate was reported by the following day’s New York Times under the headline “Global Warming Has Begun”. Certainly, the global-warming movement had begun. Hansen pushed the boundaries between scientist and propagandist, but, unlike Mann, he did not push the science itself into outright propaganda. Peter Gleick is a climatologist who stole the identity of a director of the (skeptic) Heartland Institute and released several confidential documents plus a “strategy” paper that he forged outright. He remains a respected figure in his field, and he and Mann are mutual admirers, with Mann comparing Gleick favorably to whoever “hacked” into the CRU. In reality, the Climategate emails were almost certainly leaked by a disgusted CRU employee - and are not forged.
But put Hansen and Gleick aside. Everyone else on Professor Tol’s list of those who do “most damage to the climate movement” is a Mann promoter: Rajendra Pachauri was the head of the organization that made the hockey stick the most famous “science” graph of the 21st century; Al Gore is the climate crusader who made the stick the star of his Oscar-winning movie and the lodestar of a new school of cartoon science force-fed to a generation of western schoolchildren; Phil Jones is the older, respected scientist who put a distinguished institution in the service of hockey-stick science, colluded with Mann in obstructing legitimate requests for data, and would have been criminally prosecuted for breach of the Freedom of Information Act were it not for the statute of limitations.
In other words, take away Mann and the hockey stick, and a lot of the other bad stuff goes away, too. Embracing the stick corrupted the heart of climate science, from Nature to peer review to the CRU to the IPCC to government policy around the world. If scientists of integrity are not willing to, in Jonathan Jones’ phrase, “publicly denounce the hockey stick as obvious drivel”, they do need, in the interests of a fresh start for a very damaged brand, to acknowledge the damage it did. They owe it to their own integrity to repudiate the stick. In this section are some of the scientists who spoke up, without fear, very early.
Steyn, Mark (2015-09-01). "A Disgrace to the Profession" . Stockade Books. Kindle Edition.
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