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.
I was maybe 21 years old, which would be 1971, and I do not know how I came to be aware of a magazine called National Review, but I suspect it was my mother’s admiration for William F. Buckley, Jr., who had a weekly TV show called Firing Line. I was living on my own with two friends in a rented house, but was still in failure-to-launch mode. For some reason I decided to send a check for what (in those days), $7? to subscribe. I began receiving the magazine, and would be a regular subscriber for the next 20+ years. I think around 1990 or so, when I underwent a titanic shakeup in outlook, I dropped it. Now I am back.
Piece of Mindful 