Impressions of Michael Mann

This has been bubbling inside me for quite some time now. Maybe it started some years back when Dr. Michael Mann, the hockey stick guy, was on a TV panel show and someone suggested that climate affairs were so bad that it made her/him want to cry. As if on cue, Mann generated crocodile tears, pretending to lament the situation of our climate. It made me want to puke.

But I have a lot of impressions of Mann … perhaps foremost, that while his so-called Hockey Stick is pseudoscience at best, it is very detailed work that requires a great deal of intelligence and effort, even if he was probably exaggerating his case, perhaps even engaging in creative accounting. Steve McIntyre, the Canadian mining engineer who took apart the stick piece by piece, had to devote tremendous effort to replicate Mann’s efforts, not easily dissembled and beyond the reach of us mere mortals. What we found was that tree rings are a complicated science, and without a strong working knowledge of statistics cannot be assembled in a way that sends a “temperature signal” from the past to the present.

Think of it this way: During a typical baseball season, millions of numerical statistics are gathered. For most of my life, these stats, like batting average and ERA, were all we had and Cy Young and MVP awards were based on them. Along came the personal computer and some young Turks, and new and better stats were developed, and players were exposed as less or more valuable than their numbers indicated. All it took was a PC and a statistician.

For instance, down in Denver, hitters appear better and pitchers worse due to thinner air and higher altitude at Coors Field. Colorado Rockies hitters historically do better at home than on the road. AT&T Park (Now Oracle) in San Francisco is the opposite, a place where long fly balls are easily caught instead of leaving the park. Any statistician has to learn how to factor out the ball park factors when evaluating players.

In the same manner, a dendrochronologist (one who studies tree rings) has to know which tree rings are most indicative and likely to send a temperature signal to the future  … the method used by statisticians is called “principle component analysis”. By that method they take the mass of statistical evidence and use the most reliable, ignoring the rest. Mann claims to have relied on PCA in his hockey stick, and honestly, who can argue with him?

Well, for one, Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics at Wharton, claimed that Mann had cherry picked his data. He testified at the Mann V Steyn defamation trial. Steve McIntyre as well testified. He has been a thorn in Mann’s foot for decades now, as he claims that any set of data used by Mann would produce a hockey stick, include things completely unrelated, like stock market closings. That was the rub, and famously indicates that Mann was engaged, knowing or not, in pseudoscience.

But honestly, no one cares. The Hocky Stick, thoroughly discredited as it is, stands as proof of the claim that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and no Little Ice Age. Even as we know that in England grapes were grown for wine during the MWP, that Vikings farmed both Iceland and Greenland as well during the period, due to Mann’s nature trick, the MWP was claimed to be a local phenomenon, nothing more. Just as well, we know that Vikings were forced to leave Greenland, and that the Thames froze over each winter during the LIA, but Mann wrote that off too – a local matter only.

David Deming, a geoscientist from the University of Oklahoma, gained notoriety when he gathered a 150-year study of North American temperatures using boreholes. He claimed that temperatures were driven upward since 1850 or so (true enough and coincidentally aligning with the end of the Little Ice Age).  Climate alarmists thought he was one of them, and was aligned with the CO2/anthropogenic school. Jonathon Overpeck of the University of Arizona carelessly spoke out of school in an email to Deming, saying “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

Why? Because if the MWP was real, then temperatures then were higher than today, and AGW would go out the window.

The Medieval Warm Period was real, by the way, and we have plenty of evidence to support it and the Little Ice Age, including Vikings and grapes and Thames winter festivals mentioned above. But something far more interesting was going on … facts and evidence are cast aside by warmists. That would not matter except that the whole of the “respectable” climatology community goes along with the cast-aside MWP and LIA, along with all of the news media, the vast majority of the Democratic Party, and both Presidents Obama and Biden (whose reelection appears imminent since – we do not count votes, really).

It’s an odd situation, not uncommon, but just odd. Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei, or just Galileo to us,  faced similar circumstances when he posited a heliocentric galaxy, crossing the power of the Catholic Church and earning him life imprisonment. One pundit has suggested  that he was merely an early victim of peer review, but I am more inclined to believe that he discovered something true to this day, that power owns truth.

In other words, anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change, while utter bullshit science, is backed by tremendous power. It is affirmed daily in the news media, and taught to our school kids as real, destroying their hope for the future (a form a child abuse). One can easily gather evidence that AGW is fake, but every form of science regarding it is in vogue, and the power of the federal government, which hands out grants for studies on the subject, only offers those dollars to known warmists. Our science in this area today is utterly corrupt.

Which brings me back to Mann. I ran across the following quote recently in a book by A.W. Montford called The Hocky Stick Illusion. Just prior to his stunning Stick success, “Mann was just starting out on his scientific career, receiving his PhD in 1998 at the age of 33.” As the informal title of his first Hockey Stick paper, MBH98, indicates, 1998 was the year he published his paper. He went from late blooming to world wide acclaim and success on the basis of what Wyner above labeled in court testimony as use of selected data to the exclusion of all else, aka cherry-picking.

I do not imagine that that number, 33, means as much to others as it does me. It indicates to me that Michael Mann is most likely a Freemason, or at least in service of Freemasons. Mann is said, due to his late age in attaining his PhD, to be a “late bloomer.” I am more suspicious that perhaps he never attained it at all, and that his record is glorified beyond his real abilities. Think that crazy? I take it one step further: For eight years, we had a president who refused to release his college transcripts showing that he graduated from Columbia and earned his juris doctor degree. Anything is possible when real power rests behind that throne.

Mann was, as I see it, hired to produce a hockey stick and to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period in service of power, the incredible power behind the AGW movement. To advance that cause he was either fast-tracked on finishing up his PhD, or perhaps just handed one. Anything is possible when power is on the loose. I’d like to see his college transcripts.

That is an assertion of opinion on my part, not fact, and I am pretty sure I cannot be sued for expressing an opinion, but we never know with Mann. His lawsuits are legendary. He sued Canadian Dr. Tim Ball over a quip, that rather than being at Penn State, he should be in the State Penn. It’s an old joke. That lawsuit went on for years, and in the end, because Mann was doing nothing to advance his case, it was thrown out by a Canadian high court, and Ball was awarded legal costs. Mann merely turned his back and walked away, paying Ball nary a cent. Dr. Ball later died in “penury,” or poverty. He could not enforce a Canadian verdict on an non-Canadian. (I trust Mann will not soon vacation up north.)

Mann also sued the magazine National Review, and Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg for allegedly defamatory statements on a blog and in that magazine. As with Dr. Ball, the intent of the lawsuits was apparently to simply drain resources, as NR spent a bundle to get released from the suit, and it took 12 years for the Steyn/Simberg matter to come to court. To my and everyone’s astonishment, after presenting virtually no prosecution at all in the face of pro se defense by Steyn, Mann was awarded $1 million in punitive damages. This even as he did not prove he suffered any damages at all! Watching that trial and reading the transcripts, I had the feeling we were in kangaroo court – it seemed unprofessional, illogical, and farcical. Steyn has appealed, but no doubt his appeal will die with him, as he is in poor health. The DC court system is notoriously slow.

Incredibly, Mann testified in the Mann v Steyn/Simberg case that he has never paid a penny in legal costs for his lawsuits, all done on his behalf by mysterious patrons.

Down to the personal level, Michael Mann seems quite an unpleasant fellow. He is legendary for outbursts against anyone who crosses him, including Steve McIntyre, Roger Pielke Jr., and Dr. Judith Curry. About Curry, Mann said that she had “slept her way to the top” at Penn State, even as Curry was already employed on faculty there, and was dating a long-divorced man. The Curry insult was contained in an email from Mann sent to a public server of a colleague of Mann’s at NASA, and was therefore public record. As with lies traveling the world while truth is tying its shoes, Curry was libeled and could not undo it … in the end she resigned and is now self-employed. Mann had destroyed her career.

If ever there was a case for a libel suit, that was it. But Dr. Curry bit her tongue and moved forward.

I think of the nursery rhyme attributed to English poet Tom Brown:

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.

Make up your own rhyme, making sure the last three lines rhyme with “Mann.” And watch out, as you might get your proud ass sued by his sorry ass.