Discovery can be a bitch - Michael Mann
Michael Mann is the Penn State researcher whose
political hit piece 'research' came up with the
hockey stick of global temperature over time that documents the incredible global warming we are now experiencing while simultaneously leaving out the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age -- historically documented events.
Dr. Mann has filed a libel law suit to defend his professional reputation, and he now threatens to launch another. He has engaged as council the same lawyer who defended Joe Camel in a case filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
From
Forbes:
ClimateGate Star Michael Mann Courts Legal Disaster
The climate crisis parade’s leading drum major may have led his band down a dangerous legal road. Claiming exoneration by previous scientific conduct investigations, Dr. Michael Mann, of ClimateGate fame, subsequently filed a libel law suit to defend his professional reputation, and he now threatens to launch another. Many believe he got a free pass from perfunctory earlier hearings, and they welcome these new opportunities to have him face the music of serious inquiry.
The first law suit was filed against Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball who humorously commented in an interview published by the Frontier Center for Public Policy, a Winnipeg think tank, that Penn State researcher Mann should, instead, be in the state pen. Then, when Mann threatened to sue National Review editor Rich Lowry for printing a post by Mark Steyn for calling the beleaguered scientist’s infamous “hockey stick” graph “fraudulent”, Lowry’s response was succinct…”Get lost!”
Lowry said that he welcomes such a suit, and is willing to go to the mat and use the discovery process to unearth every last jot and tittle of deception by Mann and his partners in fraud. As reported in Investor’s Business Daily, Lowry went on to say that Mann’s “… going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world…In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn’t stopped him before.”
About the hockey stick -- some more:
The hockey stick graph at the center of this dispute was based heavily upon data taken from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Created by Mann and his colleagues, it supposedly proved that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years until the 20th century, and then suddenly rocketed off the charts (attributing this to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions). That image was featured to support urgency of a cap on carbon dioxide through the Kyoto Protocol which was being pushed at the time by Al Gore and the United Nations. It prominently and repeatedly appeared in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
But there were some problems with that graph and the research behind it. Some very big problems. One was that the Medieval Warm Period which occurred between about AD 800 and 1100 along with the Little Ice Age (not a true Ice Age) which occurred between about AD 1350-1850 somehow turned up missing. And as for those Yamal tree samples, they came from only 12 specimens of 252 in the data set… while a larger data set of 34 trees from the same vicinity that weren’t used showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages.
The article talks about the ClimateGate email leak and then goes on to talk about the ClimateGate II email leak last Fall:
Then, in November 2011, another raft of ClimateGate e-mails was released which revealed that certain researchers believed well-intentioned ideology trumped objective science. Some scientists candidly criticized Mann’s research competency and objectivity. John Mitchell of the U.K. Hadley Center’s Met Office rhetorically asked: “Is the PCA [principal components analysis] approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems in the case of MBH [one of the key hockey stick articles authored by Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes] the answer in each is no.”
Even Raymond Bradley, Mann’s co-author for his hockey stick paper, took issue with another article jointly published by Mann and Jones, stating: “I’m sure you agree…The Mann/Jones GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year reconstruction.” Rutgers University scientist G.H. Cook commented: “I am afraid that Mike [Mann] is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.”
Heh - Dr. Mann is about to discover what discovery really means and it will be wonderful to see -- Mann has not been open to requests for his source data. The research is Federally funded therefore us taxpayers have every right to all the results including raw data.
Laying in a few pounds of popcorn for this one...
Posted by DaveH at September 19, 2012 8:16 PM