Another court victory for Michael Mann and climate science

There's been another victory for science and climate scientists everywhere. In case you missed it, Michael Mann is suing for defamation, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has just now removed yet another obstacle some of the alleged defamers put in his way.

Acting with reckless disregard

The decision is worth reading. One of the key paragraphs is, as Professor Mann wrote on his Facebook page:

" [The defendants' statement that] Dr. Mann has engaged in misconduct has been so definitively discredited, a reasonable jury could, if it so chooses, doubt the veracity of appellants’ claimed honest belief in that very notion. A jury could find, by clear and convincing evidence, that appellants “in fact entertained serious doubts” or had a “high degree of awareness” that the accusations that Dr. Mann engaged in scientific misconduct, fraud, and deception, were false, and, as a result, acted “with reckless disregard” for the statements’ truth when they were published." (p. 101)

Michael Mann is suing the following for defamation based on articles appearing on websites: Mark Steyn, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg, and The National Review, Inc. All but Mark Steyn tried to get the case tossed under Anti-SLAPP Act. They tried this in a trial court and lost, so took it to the Appeals Court, where Michael Mann prevailed again.

The way is now cleared for Professor Mann to pursue his case for defamation.

Double standards at WUWT. When is a witch hunt a witch hunt?

Anthony Watts' blog WUWT is known for inconsistency, its collation of pseudo-science claptrap from around the climate deniosphere, attacks on climate scientists and double standards. I've not posted much from there the past few days because I've been busy. Also because many of the recent WUWT articles are bemoaning a witch hunt, or what passes for a witch hunt at WUWT.

Are climate contrarians witches?

So what is the WUWT definition of a witch hunt? Is it the endless requests for personal emails by right wing lobby groups that Anthony Watts frequently hails on his blog? Is it court cases to push for release of personal emails from climate scientists, like of Michael Mann here and here and here and lots more. Is it harassment of James Hansen to list all his payments from speaking engagements - like here?

On opprobrium and disrespect

See below for an addendum.

A convoluted mixed up quote from the Curry files, as seen at WUWT:

In the climate wars, those that use pejorative names for people that they disagree with are the equivalents of racists and anti-semites, and deserve opprobrium and disrespect. 

Quit calling us racist and anti-semitic, Judith, or you'll get my opprobrium and disrespect.

On second thoughts, too late.

Deniers are milking the free speech thing for all they think it's worth. I gather from their mixed up, convoluted articles, that they want to be free to say whatever nonsense pops into their head without being criticised for it. But they don't want anyone else to say whatever pops into their head.

Or maybe they are lauding the right of anyone to say whatever pops into their head. It's hard to know. At WUWT there's a stack of quotes ranging from 'deniers should be hung, drawn and quartered' (or equivalent) to 'aren't people just simply too, too awful for saying deniers should be hung, drawn and quartered' (or equivalent). It's not been made clear whether WUWT is approving all the quotes or only some of them are permitted in their own quaint version of "free speech".

Oh, and various denialist lobby groups (well, one anyway - you can guess which one) want to be invited to talk on BBC radio programs. I expect the BBC could arrange a special radio segment for climate science deniers, along with the anti-vaxxers, the pro-smoking lobby and the flat earthers.

A few years ago I had the ABC radio on while driving, and there was a long segment devoted to ghost hunters. It wasn't April 1 and the interviewer treated the shysters with courtesy and respect.

So my advice to deniers is don't give up. Push for a fake sceptic segment on your local radio station. Failing that, there's always Prison Planet and Jesse Ventura and David Icke and Breitbart and WattsUpWithThat and ClimateEtc.

(If you haven't guessed, WUWT has slowed down a lot lately, which is fine by me. The average daily post count since New Years' Day is 2.5, a long way shy of the eight or nine a day in recent months. Anthony Watts himself has all but vanished from the scene. The other nutters are left to run the nuttery.)

Addendum

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't read it myself - archived here. IMO Judith Curry has behaved more badly than Anthony Watts at his worst. If you can stomach it, read the archive. Do a search for her weird comments.

She uses the murders of cartoonists in Paris as a pretense to take another shot at Michael Mann. She calls alleged defamation "satire", arguing people who defame are merely exercising their right to free speech. She doesn't have a clue about what is allowable as free speech. Would she think the same if someone wrote an article in the press claiming she committed scientific fraud? Multiple times? What if they added an aside about child molesters?

She labels as the equivalent of racist and anti-semitic, people who refer to climate science deniers as such and says it is "very sad" to see scientists behaving like that. She seems to be oblivious to the inconsistency. She refers to people who accept science as "warmists" and "alarmists" and then goes on to write: "When person A calls person B a ‘denier’ or any other pejorative word, in my opinion they deserve disrespect, in the context of the broader discussion in my piece."

Even hard-boiled deniers recognise the difference between murdering people, defamation and free speech, and have tried to point this out to Judith. Judith is so mired in her personal dislike of Michael Mann that she can no longer see straight. That plus her ideology looks to have taken such a hold that she has lost her grasp of science.

Perhaps the biggest visible sign of how low Judith has sunk is that she left this gross disgusting cartoon up on her blog for more than a day. I didn't comment on it earlier because I assumed she would remove it when she saw it. She didn't. Even her fans thought she would remove it.

It appears that nothing is too gross or vulgar for Judith these days. If you thought she'd lost it before, then see where she is now.

Finally, she is being caught out by her own words and has succumbed to criticism of inconsistency or whatever, and put back up her sky dragon slayer articles, which she'd removed some time ago.

Sou 14 January 2015

Anthony Watts pokes fun at ATI

Anthony Watts takes a shot at the“American Traditions Institute” now known as the “Energy & Environment Legal Institute”. Thing is, he doesn't even know it (or if he does he didn't tell his readers).

Today he posted an out of focus photo he took of the cheque Michael Mann gave to the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The cheque was the damages awarded by the court when ATI/EELI tried to get his personal emails. You may remember the case (see Washington Post article). The judge saw it for the harassment it was and awarded damages of $250 dollars to Michael Mann. Dr Mann wasn't looking for a payout. All he wanted was justice and to prove a point that he will not tolerate the sort of vexatious law suits that disinformers bring from time to time, when they harass and try to intimidate research scientists.

Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks has the story and a much better photograph :D

Dr. Michael Mann displays his court awarded damages check, won against the climate and science denying, fossil fuel funded “think” tank,  “American Traditions Institute” aka, the “Energy & Environment Legal Institute”, after judges realized that actions against Dr. Mann were pure anti-science harassment and had no basis in fact.
From left to right, CSLDF Executive Director Lauren Kurtz, and Board members Charles Zeller, Scott Mandia, and Josh Wolfe. The picture was taken December 18, 2014, in San Francisco, at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting
Source: Peter Sinclair/ClimateCrocks

How the unethical Anthony Watts goes for the ethical Michael Mann

You might have noticed I've not written about the numerous Anthony Watts' articles from AGU14 yet. That's because there aren't any. From Day 1 the only "reports" from Anthony are two tweets - here and here, unless you count his latest Michael Mann bashing (archived here), which looks as if it was written before Anthony went to AGU.

At WUWT a day or so ago, the ethically-challenged Anthony Watts thought it's "hilarious" that Professor Mann should give a talk about professional ethics. Anthony doesn't have an ethical bone in his body when it comes to climate discourse. I doubt he understands the meaning of the word "ethics".

Yesterday, Michael Mann and Kent Peacock gave an invited talk: ED11D-02 Professional Ethics for Climate Scientists. It wasn't posted on the virtual options website, which is a shame because it's an important topic. Below is the description:

Crimes against humanity by the fools and tools of climate denial

Sometimes I regard deniers as fools and tools. Other times I see the dark side of them. Their wilful crimes against humanity. You think I'm over-reacting? I don't. I'm just saying what should be said from time to time.

Deniers are hypocritical bigots

These same hypocrites will even claim that the "poor" need fossil fuels. This is when they know full well that the people who will suffer first and most from global warming are those living in less developed nations. They just want the world all for themselves. They think they don't need people in Africa and Asia. Given that most deniers are conservative, bigoted old white men, they are quite comfortable that it's people who live at a distance from them, and mostly people of a different race to them, people who they regard as "failures", as "unsuccessful" for not being as wealthy as they are - therefore "unworthy" of life, who will bear the brunt of global warming initially.

That WMO illustration was correctly labelled

I started to write a comment in reply to Phil Clarke, who was commenting on the appalling article by Christopher Monckton at WUWT (archived here). Christopher was doing his best to be added to a defamation lawsuit and to bring Anthony Watts along with him. Oh, I would like to see that happen. But I doubt it will. They are small fish who live in a fishbowl that's closed to most of the world. By their own choice I might add. Sane people don't go for conspiracy websites as a general rule.

(Anthony might think he can get away with defamation by describing the article as "opinion". He can't. He's the publisher and promoter of that filth.)

This is the gist of what I was going to put in my reply to Phil Clarke's comment. (Go read it. Phil made good points.)

Thanks, Phil. I've also written about this briefly on other occasions, here for example. The cover illustration was described adequately in the WMO report. I'll stress that again. The illustration was described properly for what it was in the WMO report. It's a crying shame that Muir Russell didn't acknowledge that. Maybe they felt obliged to give the fake sceptics a small bone. They were wrong.

First up, Michael Mann didn't prepare the illustration, he merely commented to the people who did. Secondly, the WMO report described the illustration properly:

WMO-No. 913
© 2000, World Meteorological Organization
ISBN 92-63-10913-3
Front cover: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal.

Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).

(Sources of data: P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa and T.J. Osborn, University of East Anglia, UK; M.E. Mann, University of Virginia, USA; R.S. Bradley, University of Massachusetts, USA; M.K. Hughes, University of Arizona, USA; and the Hadley Centre, The Met. Office).

Christopher Monckton is rehashing tired postings of that other miserable excuse for a human being, the auditor, who has nothing else to write about these days but is still doing his best to make sure the world suffers badly from global warming. Even Christopher Monckton, entertainer denier, can't come up with any new material of his own.

Defamation is a tool in the denier's arsenal

It's a pathetic that these despicable deniers resort to defamation of people of good character. They know they can't refute the science so they try to shoot the messengers. The people who are working their butts off to help save the world from itself.

Relegated to a footnote in the history of the climate wars

We know who some of these miserable creatures are, at least. The ones who come out of the shadows in public. We might not know all the people behind the various curtains who are pulling the strings of the denialati. However we do know who the puppets are. And someone will list their names in some footnote when writing the history of the climate wars (yet to occur). I hope that there is no excuse given them when it's written. No leeway. No mistake made that they were committing crimes against humanity. That they played a small role in the lead up to the climate wars.

The motley band of science deniers are making martyrs and heros of climate scientists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann - all because they know that in the long run, they can't beat science with science denial. (When NYC is under water again, will it be the Christopher Monckton's who'll be hailed as heroes or will people (grudgingly) acknowledge the James Hansen's who sounded the warnings.)

Oodles of hockey sticks on display for WUWT

Poor old WUWT is in the doldrums. Now that temperatures are shooting to unprecedented heights again, deniers don't know what to say or do. So they've fallen back on an old faithful.


Just when I was thinking it's been a while since WUWT took a shot at Professor Michael Mann, he makes another appearance. This time in an article by climate disinformer Doug L. Hoffman. Doug mistakenly thinks that the days of hockey sticks have passed. I'm here to tell him he's wrong - and to show him oodles of hockey sticks.

Doug's article is very long considering the point he is trying to make. He's arguing that the MBH98 hockey stick chart, which shows that modern temperatures have shot up suddenly from what they were for most of human civilisation, is "dead".  He's dead wrong!

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines)....b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2σ uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. From MBH98

Tree ring growth vs latewood density: Pat'n Chip get lost in the forest at WUWT

Anthony Watts has a "guest essay" by Pat'n Chip (archived here, latest update here), the duo from the CATO Institute. (Part of their job seems to be to spread disinformation about climate science. It's a good lark. Money for jam. They don't have to do much except spend a few minutes every now and then writing stuff and nonsense.)

Today's serving has a woody flavour. They are claiming that a new paper in GRL, by Martin Tingley and colleagues, contradicts a paper by Michael Mann. Michael Mann says, no. That's wrong.

To summarise

As suggested by Steve Bloom in the comments, here are the main points as I see them:

• Tree ring growth reconstructions do not register the sudden (short-lived) drop in temperature following very large volcanic eruptions of the past millennia. This has implications for estimates of climate sensitivity based on paleoclimatology. (Mann12)
• Latewood density measures exaggerate the drop in temperature following large-ish recent volcanic eruptions, Krakatau and Novarupta. (Tingley14)
• The new paper by Martin Tingley et al complements, rather than contradicts, the 2012 paper by Mann et al. 
• In dendrochronology, density is not the same as tree ring growth and one does not necessarily follow the same pattern as the other.

Initial impressions

Before I discovered Michael Mann's Huff Post article, I looked at the Mann paper and the abstract of the Tingley paper and at first glance it looked to me as if the papers were about different things. Or at least about different volcanic eruptions. I had some questions, though, because both papers were looking at how the sign of a temperature drop after large volcanic eruptions are manifested in tree rings.

So I went to the Tingley paper itself. It's not open access, so unless you can get hold of a copy, you'll have to take what I write at face value. Or you can read what Michael Mann has written about this at Huffington Post.

Some sciency questions, plus a note on etiquette

Update 2: see below for Anthony's excuses.

Update: see below for Anthony Watts' "report" of Professor Mann's Bristol lecture.

---

Some sciency questions

I added a note about the new stadium wave paper at the end of my last article. I do have some question for readers. On page two of the paper (subs req'd), when talking about their pattern searching, the authors write:

Following Tsonis et al. [2007], Wyatt et al. [2012] considered a network of climate indices associated, geographically and dynamically, with different climatic subsystems, and used an objective filtering method to isolate secular multidecadal variability within this network during the 20th century. On top of a uniform linear trend, they identified an oscillatory-looking wiggle with a common multidecadal time scale, but with different phases across the different indices of the climate network, thus manifesting a signal that propagates in the space of climate indices. The authors termed this propagating signal the “stadium wave,” reflecting a speculation that it dynamically originates in the North Atlantic and spreads over the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere via a hypothesized sequence of delayed dynamical feedbacks. However, search for the stadium wave in a suite of simulations by multiple global climate models only returned stationary, in-phase signals [Wyatt and Peters, 2012], in sharp contrast with the observational analysis of Wyatt et al. [2012].

There were a few questions that popped into my mind when I read that. Perhaps a reader can help out and explain the scientific jargon:

• What is a network of climate indices?  
• What is the difference between an objective filtering method and a non-objective filtering method?
• What does an oscillatory-looking wiggle look like?
• What does a non-oscillatory-looking wiggle look like?
• What makes an oscillatory-looking wiggle distinguishable from an oscillatory-looking waddle?
• How much space is required for climate indices?
• How do you tell the difference between a dynamic origination and a non-dynamic origination?
• What is the difference between a dynamical feedback and a regular feedback?

Thanks in advance, all you science aficionados.

A note on etiquette

On a separate topic, I notice that Anthony Watts is feeling a bit put upon that people have noticed that he doesn't have what it takes when it comes to the crunch. (That's non-science jargon for, well, you can guess.)

Anthony, full of bravado and egged on by his adoring hangers-on, jumped on a plane paid for by those same adoring hangers-on, full of promise to put those supposed miscreant scientists on the spot and ask them some hard-hitting questions.

When Anthony arrived, he found himself confronted, in person, face to face, by the three people in the entire world who, out of all the scientists he rubbishes, he has probably spent more time viciously attacking and telling lies about than any others. (See here and here and here and particularly here for the background.)

Anthony went to water.

Cowed by the reality that there he was, in a university of all places, a place that doesn't just like knowledge it actually creates knowledge. The very antithesis of Anthony Watts' world. Not only that but he was in a foreign country, surrounded by people who not only spoke a different language, they knew a lot more about climate science than he ever could hope to know.  And to top it off he discovered the lectures were being recorded on video. Anthony probably had visions of Paul Nurse and James Delingpole. Cowed, he shrank into his chair and could barely wait until the ordeals ended.

Tail between his legs, he slunk back to his Californian basement, turned on his computer terminal and mumbled: "I only went to watch." Which didn't faze his hard-core supporters, who assured him "You're the man!"

Well, that was too much. Being mocked even by his hard-core supporters. With a monitor shielding him from his nemeses, his cyber-self finally donned the bravado he is known for, he strode over to Facebook and bravely wrote: "May I ask a question?"

He was feeling up again. No longer worried that he might have to look someone in the eye.

Buoyed by his courage at being able to venture into the lion's cyberden, he boldly took a snapshot. Next visited Twitter and boasted to all and sundry that his bravado had returned, now that he didn't have to face anyone in person. Now that he could hide behind his monitor, getting lots of retweets and replies of support from supposed friends and allies. ("That means I must be right" thinks Anthony.)

Now Anthony wasn't invited into the personal log of this scientist. He barged in uninvited. Needless to say he was swiftly and politely shown the door. And just so you know:

If you have a habit of making false, inflammatory, and/or defamatory statements about climate scientists in public then, no, you're not welcome at this facebook page. There are other outlets for you in that case. Thanks!

(Just so you know - it's the same here at HotWhopper.)


Anthony is satisfied. He breathes a sigh of relief. Order has been restored and he didn't even have to think up a dumb question. Saved by etiquette. He is once more king of denialism. He has shown his fans that scientists refuse to debate fake sceptics. He is the Man. (Oops!)


The few climate bloggers who noticed the exchange might have thought of Anthony and his charade: "What a bunch of mindless yobbos".

The rest of the world thinks - umm, nothing. If asked they'd say "Who? Who is Anthony Watts? Oh, you mean the rugby player/bikie/boxer? Not his style."

Update

Anthony Watts has finally written his "report" of Dr Mann's presentation. Showing two things. First: Anthony Watts is incapable of writing a report. Secondly, his fans wouldn't know a report if they tripped over one and are easily pleased. His "report" is nothing more than a collection of photos of Dr Mann's presentation, with very short comment/description underneath.

With no hint that he understands the meaning of intellectual property, under one of his photos he wrote: "I wonder if he got permission from Accu-Weather to use that graphic?" One may ask, "I wonder if Anthony Watts got permission to post all Dr Mann's slides". (In response to a question about this, Anthony claimed it is "fair use". I'd question that. One or two slides maybe, to illustrate a point. But not all of them with barely a word of analysis. I've not linked to the WUWT page or an archived version for obvious reasons.)

And again, with no hint of duplicity he claims, about a photo of Dr Mann's own child: " I don’t think children should be used as props.". This the day after Anthony himself stole a photo of a mother and child to persuade his readers to sign up to a fake religion's repulsive "declaration"! (h/t CM)

Update 2: The gutless wonder - excuses, excuses

Anthony Watts admits he's a gutless wonder (archived here, latest update here). In the process describes his paranoid conspiracy ideation, among other things.

First he tries to foist the blame on Michael Mann claiming he has a "record of hostility". WTF! It's Anthony Watts who hasn't let up on defaming Dr Mann and telling lies about him and his work.  (Didn't he realise when he made the booking that Michael Mann would be there, to answer his "many questions"?)

Next he blames Professor Lewandowsky. [Edit: Just for being there, mind you. Not for anything he did or didn't do there.] Yeah, it's all his fault - not! Remember Anthony's fake bravado when he boasted he was "Headed into ‘Lew-world’" and begged for money? What happened?

Anthony's still behaving exactly as I described above. Words like worthless, slimeball and cowardly come to mind.

He confesses he wasted his readers' money and got it under false pretences, but no-one's asked for a refund, yet.

Anthony was too chicken to admit that his "big brave question" to Michael Mann on Facebook was nothing more than:

"...will you take my question now?"

From Monty Python

.h/t Raoul :)

From the WUWT comments

Anthony's sycophants supported him, boosting his fragile ego, muttering stuff like of course you did the wise thing, oh wise one and I see now you did the right thing. There was one person who had sufficient independence of mind to buck the trend. Velcro wrote:

September 28, 2014 at 10:54 am
The venue was the venue. Nothing Mann could do about the separation between podium and audience. Seems to me that the sceptic community criticise the warmists for not being prepared to debate, yet on this occasion, when there was the opportunity to question, we sceptics passed up the chance. I would have been inclined to ask something like ‘ do you attach any significance to the fact that if one plots annual global temperature against year for the past 18 odd years, one gets a horizontal line? And if you don’t then why not?

This is for Velcro. And this, too. And don't forget this from Gavin Schmidt.


Finally, one slipped by the mods - for everybody, from tz

September 28, 2014 at 1:47 pm
The Mann-o-sphere v.s. Kochtopussy.

Anthony Watts can't help himself. Was he born a liar?

And finally finally, for anyone who has fallen for Anthony's fairytale that he "booted me off WUWT for being overly disruptive". He didn't. He banned me over a fairly mild tweet. This "clueless female eco-nut" who is "isolated, lonely" and petless or is she a "crazy, nasty,spiteful witch" posted only about 30 comments in four years at WUWT, none of which could be described as "overly disruptive" by any stretch of the imagination. Some of my mild comments annoyed Anthony and Smokey/DB Stealey, for some reason. Too sciency I expect. (I'm wondering if Anthony thinks any blogger who ridicules others, be they anti-science or pro-science, must be isolated, lonely and petless.)

[Update to an update: No-one at WUWT commented on what I write but there are lots of theories as to why I write. The latest theory is that I have a all the hallmarks of being a child abuse victim. (Deniers apparently cannot fathom why people would poke fun at their anti-science efforts and pseudo-science and replace it with science. First time I've heard "alarmism" blamed on child abuse though. Is this intended as a milder form of Steyn-abuse?) Sou 29 September 2014]

Nor was I ever kicked off any discussion board for being overly disruptive. (When Anthony wrote in the plural, he was using what passes for blog licence on disinformation blogs. There is no plural. There is only one other instance that he is referring to.) However it wasn't for disruption. I was scarcely ever even modded on that share trading website (a site where deleting comments is the norm, not the exception). They just decided they didn't want a woman in their 'men only' club, after she once commented on the misogyny prevalent there - still, going by the comments here. Much like the way Anthony Watts soon bans almost everyone who prefers climate science to pseudoscience.

All over, almost before it started. Michael Mann and what WUWT won't tell you

Update - see below. The WUWT report is now up.

---

I know that after my last article you'll all have been expecting a new conciliatory tone from Anthony Watts. Well maybe some of you were. Okay, fair enough. No-one was. And it looks as if no-one was wrong. Just as I was able to report some of John Cook's lecture where Anthony Watts, who was paid to attend, failed. Now I can report a bit more about Michael Mann's Cabot Institute lecture in the Victoria Rooms at the University of Bristol yesterday. Anthony hasn't even bothered to write one article about it, or not so far anyway. The lecture was called:

The Hockey Stick and the climate wars - the battle continues

Victoria Rooms, Michael Mann Lecture venue Credit: Katy Duke

Some tweets from the Michael Mann lecture in Bristol

The cautionary tweet:

Does that mean no questions again?

Does it mean Anthony Watts thinks his mates are a bunch of louts who are likely to cause a ruckus?

Does it mean that Anthony Watts is not going to be respectful of the guest speaker?

So many questions.

Switching "sides" - it's official and public

I just spotted this at DailyKos, Judith Curry

...will be featured in a George C. Marshall Institute event at The National Press Club. For those who are unaware, the Marshall Institute is a conservative "think tank" that began lobbying to support Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Over time the Institute shifted from Cold War hype to the downplaying of environmental threats, including the dangers of secondhand smoke, CFCs' effect on the ozone, and now climate change.

This is the same Judith Curry who advocates that advocacy can lead to distrust of scientists.

She's been ramping up of late. Over the past few months she's peddled disinformation to the US Government. In the last day or so she (all but?) wrongly accused her self-selected nemesis, Professor Mann, of fraud. Today we find out that she's presenting to the George C. Marshall Institute.

About the George C. Marshall Institute.

That's all.

When deniers have nothing, they recycle dead arguments....

In the ongoing effort to demonise the work of Professor Michael Mann in particular, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Judith Curry and John Christy are passing around wrong and worn out "arguments", presumably to try to bolster a defense for the people who allegedly libelled Professor Mann.

It's a pathetic effort on behalf of a pathetic lot from the climate science disinformation brigade.

In a repost at WUWT, Steve McIntyre (and Anthony Watts) are arguably wanting to be added to the list of people being sued.  It's as if they think that if they misrepresent history often enough someone will believe them.

I don't know what point they think they are trying to make. It looks as if they are trying to resurrect "trial by email", which has been tried before and failed dismally. (Update: see especially Marco's comment below, and the links to deepclimate's damning indictments of Steve McIntyre here and here).

I've already written about the misrepresentations from John Christy, which Judith Curry resurrected recently and that is now apparently being touted again at Steve McIntyre's blog and WUWT.  Anthony Watts (archived here) copies Steve McIntyre who copies Judith Curry who quoted from John Christy's misleading testimony to the US government:

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Three things.

1. Serengeti Strategy: Singling out one from 850 plus people

Firstly, John Christy was also a lead author of Chapter 2 of TAR, the chapter in question, so he is as culpable as any other lead author of its content.  The other lead authors were: R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J. Salinger, S.-W. Wang.

In addition there were two coordinating lead authors of Chapter 2, C.K. Folland, T.R. Karl, who presumably vetted the final content.

And two review editors:  R. Hallgren, B. Nyenzi who would also have had a say.

Not only that but there were 140 contributing authors:

J. Bates, M. Crowe, P. Frich, P. Groisman, J. Hurrell, P. Jones, D. Parker, T. Peterson, D. Robinson, J. Walsh, M. Abbott, L. Alexander, H. Alexandersson, R. Allan, R. Alley, P. Ambenje, P. Arkin, L. Bajuk, R. Balling, M.Y. Bardin, R. Bradley, R. Brázdil, K.R. Briffa, H. Brooks, R.D. Brown, S. Brown, M. Brunet-India, M. Cane, D. Changnon, S. Changnon, J. Cole, D. Collins, E. Cook, A. Dai, A. Douglas, B. Douglas, J.C. Duplessy, D. Easterling, P. Englehart, R.E. Eskridge, D. Etheridge, D. Fisher, D. Gaffen, K. Gallo, E. Genikhovich, D. Gong, G. Gutman,W. Haeberli, J. Haigh, J. Hansen, D. Hardy, S. Harrison, R. Heino, K. Hennessy,W. Hogg, S. Huang, K. Hughen, M.K. Hughes, M. Hulme, H. Iskenderian, O.M. Johannessen, D. Kaiser, D. Karoly, D. Kley, R. Knight, K.R. Kumar, K. Kunkel, M. Lal, C. Landsea, J. Lawrimore, J. Lean, C. Leovy, H. Lins, R. Livezey, K.M. Lugina, I. Macadam, J.A. Majorowicz, B. Manighetti, J. Marengo, E. Mekis, M.W. Miles, A. Moberg, I. Mokhov, V. Morgan, L. Mysak, M. New, J. Norris, L. Ogallo, J. Overpeck, T. Owen, D. Paillard, T. Palmer, C. Parkinson, C.R. Pfister, N. Plummer, H. Pollack, C. Prentice, R. Quayle, E.Y. Rankova, N. Rayner, V.N. Razuvaev, G. Ren, J. Renwick, R. Reynolds, D. Rind, A. Robock, R. Rosen, S. Rösner, R. Ross, D. Rothrock, J.M. Russell, M. Serreze,W.R. Skinner, J. Slack, D.M. Smith, D. Stahle, M. Stendel, A. Sterin, T. Stocker, B. Sun, V. Swail, V. Thapliyal, L. Thompson,W.J. Thompson, A. Timmermann, R. Toumi, K. Trenberth, H. Tuomenvirta, T. van Ommen, D. Vaughan, K.Y. Vinnikov, U. von Grafenstein, H. von Storch, M. Vuille, P. Wadhams, J.M. Wallace, S. Warren,W. White, P. Xie, P. Zhai 

And nearly 700 "expert reviewers".

So to my way of thinking, to put imagined "wrongs" of any single IPCC report (which has been twice superseded) on the shoulders of one lone individual and neglect the more than 850 other people who played a part, is a bit much!  What it demonstrates is the Serengeti Strategy so beloved of disinformers and deniers. This time they try to isolate one individual from a very large herd.

2. A false claim from the disinformers

Secondly, the chapter did not misrepresent the temperature record of the past 1,000 years. At the time, arguably the paper by Mann and colleagues was indeed the "best estimate". In any case, Chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR included references to other reconstructions with citations and charts.

3. Deniers are out of touch and out of date

Thirdly, there have been two more IPCC reports since TAR and they present more recent research, which has refined knowledge with new data and multiple new temperature reconstructions, all of which lend support to earlier findings.

Box TS.5 Figure 1 Last-millennium simulations and reconstructions Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Disinformers are misleading

Anthony's copy and paste misleadingly includes the following claim:

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”. 

This is misleading! The Muir Russell report referred to the WMO graphic used on the cover of the 1999 report and only indirectly, in parenthesis, to the IPCC TAR, writing about "one of the series" (not the others of the series):

25. The WMO report is a short document produced annually. It does not have the status or importance of the IPCC reports. The figure in question was a frontispiece and there is no major discussion or emphasis on it in the text. The caption of the figure states: "Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records”.

26. Finding: In relation to "hide the decline" we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

The Oxburgh report does not use the word "misleading" in relation to the WMO graphic or any TAR temperature reconstruction.  The only relevant passage I could find was this:

Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

I think it's worth emphasising what the Oxburgh report noted. For example, one of the papers referred to in TAR emphasizes uncertainties and limitations in its title - Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1999: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophys. Res. Lett., 26, 759-762.  Since that paper was published there have been numerous other reconstructions. When you take them together with the instrumental records you end up with a hockey stick!

It's also worth highlighting the Addendum to the Oxburgh report, which clearly states about "any research group in the field of climate change":

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods.

Meanwhile, the world takes its sweet time to act decisively

The main point, though, is that all this is past history.  There has been a lot more work in the thirteen years since then.  While climate science deniers are obsessed with misrepresenting the past, we keep marching on toward hotter global temperatures and rapidly changing climates. The world hasn't even stopped increasing annual CO2 emissions, let alone reduced them.

What pushed Judith Curry over the edge?

Serious question. Look, we've all known that Judith has been getting more and more ratty as time goes on. Just when we think she can't sink any lower she surprises us again.  But this time she's really gone over the edge. I mean really and truly.

I've been a bit busy the last few days and have only just got around to checking out the various denier websites. I was surprised to see Judith Curry (archived here) putting up some old, wacky and long bit of idiocy from John Christy. Back in 2011, John was whining to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, protesting the IPCC, the northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions pre-2001, and all else besides.

Earth is as cold as a summit in Central Greenland?

At face value John, and therefore Judith, were doing a Denier Don Easterbrook, arguing that the temperature of earth is the same as it is on the top of the summit in Greenland.  John was complaining that a paper by Dahl-Jensen et al (1998) wasn't referred to in Section 2.3.2 in Chapter 2 of TAR, Temperature of the Past 1,000 Years. Yes, they are talking about the IPCC WG1 report from 2001, thirteen years ago.  Not the current report, not the 2007 report. The third assessment report from 2001.

Anyway, John complained that instead of discussing the temperature of Greenland's ice sheets over the past 1,000 years as if it represented global temperatures, the authors decided to discuss the temperatures of the whole world over the past 1000 years as far as it was known at the time (weird, huh?).  Turns out that back then (as is still the case to a great extent) there was an emphasis on the northern hemisphere reconstructions because there wasn't a lot of data for the southern hemisphere in 2001.

John Christy even admitted the other authors didn't think much of his idiocy:

To me Dahl-Jensen et al.’s reconstruction was a more robust estimate of past temperatures than one produced from a certain set of western U.S. tree-ring proxies. But as the process stood, the L.A. was not required to acknowledge my suggestions, and I was not able to convince him otherwise. It is perhaps a failure of mine that I did not press the issue even harder or sought agreement from others who might have been likewise aware of the evidence against the Hockey Stick realization.

Note too that there were several paleoclimatologists as lead authors of Chapter 2, so I don't know why John talks about "him" rather than "them". It's a case of the Serengeti Strategy again I guess.

John didn't point out that the paper was referred to in Section 2.4.2, How Stable was the Holocene Climate? Here is the relevant passage (my bold italics):

The early Holocene was generally warmer than the 20th century but the period of maximum warmth depends on the region considered. It is seen at the beginning of the Holocene (about 11 to 10 ky BP) in most ice cores from high latitude regions e.g., north-west Canada (Ritchie et al., 1989), central Antarctica (Ciais et al., 1992; Masson et al., 2000) and in some tropical ice cores such as Huascaran in Peru (Thompson et al., 1995). It is also seen during the early Holocene in the Guliya ice core in China (Thompson et al., 1998) but not in two other Chinese cores (Dunde, Thompson et al., 1989; and Dasuopu, to be published). North Africa experienced a greatly expanded monsoon in the early and mid-Holocene, starting at 11 ky BP (Petit-Maire and Guo, 1996), and declining thereafter. In New Zealand the warmest conditions occurred between about 10 to 8 ky BP, when there was a more complete forest cover than at any other time. Glacial activity was at a minimal level in the Southern Alps and speleothem analyses indicate temperatures were about 2°C warmer than present (Salinger and McGlone, 1989; Williams et al., 1999).

By contrast, central Greenland (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998), and regions downstream of the Laurentide ice sheet, did not warm up until after 8 ky BP (including Europe: COHMAP Members, 1988; eastern North America: Webb et al., 1993). 

Nor did John Christy point out that the temperature reconstructions described in Chapter 2 of TAR were based on many more proxies than just tree rings.  Nor that there were several reconstructions discussed, not just those of Michael Mann and colleagues. Nor that there were lots of caveats in TAR (as always).

Now the fact that John and Judith think that the summit of Greenland on its own is a proxy for global temperatures is wacky enough and way beyond Judith's usual fare. But she not only put forward John's silliness as if it ought to be taken seriously, she threw in snippets of stolen emails as evidence of something or other.

Not only that, but she resurrected her jealousy of Michael Mann, that he was one of eight lead authors of a chapter in the IPCC's third assessment report, whereas she was but a lowly contributing author of Chapter 7. John Christy was a lead author in the same chapter as Michael Mann, so goodness knows why he and Judith were whinging. (Maybe she was miffed that Michael Mann wasn't just a lead author of Chapter 2, he was also a contributing author of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.)

I mean we're talking TAR, the third assessment report. Judith is going back thirteen years.

Here is another reason I think Judith has finally lost it for good. She wrote:

Christy’s assessment, when combined with the UEA emails, provides substantial insight into how this hockey stick travesty occurred.  

John Christy's assessment! Climategate! Sheesh, Judith is scraping the bottom of the barrel isn't she.  What will Judith write about next? The fake Oregon Petition?

Here is a sample of John Christy's conspiracy ideation - and this is only a snippet.  There's more of the same where that came from.  Here he is referring to authors of the IPCC reports, writing:

As time went on, nations would tend to nominate only those authors whose climate change opinions were in line with a national political agenda which sought perceived advantages (i.e. political capital, economic gain, etc.) by promoting the notion of catastrophic human-induced climate change. Scientists with well-known alternative views would not be nominated or selected. Indeed, it became more and more difficult for dissention and skepticism to penetrate the process now run by this establishment. As noted in my IAC testimony, I saw a process in which L.A.s were transformed from serving as Brokers of science (and policy-relevant information) to Gatekeepers of a preferred point of view. 

John Christy is so deluded as to think that politicians throughout the world will gain economically and politically as a result of global warming. Tell that to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard! Tell that to Tony Abbott! Tell that to the James Inhofe and the GOP!

And what "hockey stick travesty"? The hockey stick keeps showing up in all the subseqent IPCC reports.  This is from the latest AR5:

Box TS5 Fig 1 Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 

Doesn't Judith know what the current instrumental record shows compared to the Holocene as a whole?  I don't believe it. She has subsequently written an article about the recent Neukom paper under a weird title: "The inconvenient southern hemisphere".  In that article she "rebuts" the paper by referring her readers to, of all places, WUWT! Yep. She's well and truly gone over the edge. Here is Figure 2 from that paper - guess what it shows. You guessed it, a hockey stick:

Figure 2 Temperature variability over the past millennium. a, 30-year loess filtered ensemble mean temperature reconstruction for the Southern Hemisphere (SH; blue) and Northern Hemisphere (NH; red) relative to the millennium mean for the period 1000–2000. Blue shading based on Southern Hemisphere reconstruction uncertainties (Supplementary Section 2.4). Thin orange lines represent the ensemble means of the nine individual temperature reconstructions making up the Northern Hemisphere dataset5. b, as a but for the 24-member climate model ensemble. Note for consistency with reconstruction data, simulated temperatures are shown as individual simulations for the Northern Hemisphere and a probabilistic range based on ensemble percentiles for the Southern Hemisphere.

Source: Neukom14

Back to basic Curry - the IPCC and Michael Mann

For once Judith isn't being her usual ambiguous self.  She is up front about her motivation. She has it in for Michael Mann and the IPCC. She has ever since I first heard of her - when she "came out" as a denier on Keith Kloor's blog way back when.  This is what she wrote the other day:

Back in April 2011, I had a post on The U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy.  John Christy’s testimony is worth revisiting, in two contexts:

• problems with the IPCC process, most recently highlighted in context of WG3 [link]
• the Steyn versus Mann and Mann versus Steyn lawsuits [link]

So she's back to basics - Judith Curry waging a war on the IPCC and Michael Mann. That's bare bones Judith Curry - in a nutshell. Forget science. Forget politics. For Judith, this is personal.

---

Neukom, Raphael, Joëlle Gergis, David J. Karoly, Heinz Wanner, Mark Curran, Julie Elbert, Fidel González-Rouco et al. "Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium." Nature Climate Change 4, no. 5 (2014): 362-367. doi:10.1038/nclimate2174

A blow to smear merchants and disinformers

Anthony Watts says (archived here) that today's Supreme Court decision (in Virginia) to reject an appeal by the American Tradition Institute to ferret through ancient emails is, as he put it in the headline: "a blow to open science".  I differ, I call it a blow to those who are trying to stifle academic freedom and open science.

Anthony thinks that science is only open if he can read the scientists' emails.  Or more likely, if he can read the interpretation of snippets of other people's emails as made by smear-merchants and disinformers (that was prophetic, see update below).  Anthony is not very knowledgeable when it comes to science.

The issue as I understand it, is an appeal by ATI against a circuit court decision.  It's mainly about ATI wanting to gain access to Michael Mann's emails, that he sent or received during the six years he spent at the University of Virginia.

Here is the summary of the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia (my paras and bold italics):

130934 American Tradition Inst. v. Rector and Visitors 04/17/2014

The circuit court was correct in denying a request for disclosure of certain documents under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The purpose of the higher education research exemption under Code § 2.2-3705.4(4) for "information of a proprietary nature" is to avoid competitive harm, not limited to financial matters.

The definition of "proprietary" in prior case law, that it is "a right customarily associated with ownership, title, and possession, an interest or a right of one who exercises dominion over a thing or property, of one who manages and controls," is consistent with that goal and the circuit court did not err in applying that definition. Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the university that prevailed below, it produced sufficient evidence to meet each of the higher education research exemption’s seven requirements.

Also, in the context of the Code § 2.2-3704(F) provision allowing a public entity to make reasonable charges for its actual cost incurred in accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching for requested records, "searching" includes inquiry into whether a disputed document can be released under federal or state law, and this statute permits a public body to charge a reasonable fee for exclusion review. The circuit court's judgment excluding disputed documents and approving such cost recovery is affirmed, and final judgment is entered in favor of the university.

The full decision is here. It makes for interesting reading. In it, the court noted that:

On January 6, 2011, American Tradition Institute and Robert Marshall (collectively, "ATI") sent a request to UVA, a public university, seeking all of the documents that "Dr. Michael Mann produced and/or received while working for the University . . . and otherwise while using its facilities and resources . . . ."

ATI wanted the lot. It was a pure, unadulterated fishing expedition.  They didn't have a clue what they were looking for or what they might find.  They just wanted all the documents produced or received by Professor Mann. Bear in mind that the newest document would have to be nine years old and the oldest would be fifteen years old. And at the time, to comply with VFOIA, the university would have had to provide the information within five days.

Now Michael Mann was busy during his time at UVA (from 1999 to 2005).  The university wrote to ATI and said they found 34,062 "potentially responsive" documents. They got that down to 8,000 and then worked through 1,000 of those before the ATI's $2,000 prepayment was all used up. They are very efficient workers at UVA.  They said they'd keep going if ATI paid up the balance of the original cost estimate ($8,500).  Which I think it did.

But then there was a bit more to-ing and fro-ing between UVA and ATI.  Before all the material was provided to ATI, Michael Mann intervened.  He argued that the University could not sufficiently protect his interests in privacy, academic freedom, and free speech.  He wasn't objecting to published material and related.  What he was arguing was that his personal correspondence was just that - personal and that his other emails should be exempt under the "proprietary" definition. Or at least that's how I understand it. There's a lot of legalese. There was a lot more to the arguments, including what constitutes "proprietary", which definition the press was keen to narrow. The other argument related to who should bear the costs of getting the information.

Anyway, the upshot seems to be that scientists can continue to communicate by email, at least in Virginia, and be open with their colleagues knowing that the grubby little denier bloggers won't easily purloin snippets of their conversations and twist them beyond recognition. At least until and unless there is a different definition of proprietary in Virginian law.

Moreover, provided no-one steals them.  Anthony Watts yesterday wrote another article on the same subject, in which he said:

With Mann, it’s all about delaying the inevitable, unless of course somebody like the hero of Climategate “FOIA” decides to take matters into their own hands and stop this abuse of the legal system and FOIA law by making an email dump. I don’t underestimate that possibility.

It's heroic to steal personal property in deniersville (just like it's heroic to pretend to be a dog).  But only if you're a science denier.  (I expect Anthony will find his door being knocked upon if anyone does steal emails of climate scientists in the USA.)

Other blog articles

Michael Halpern has written about the Supreme Court decision and the implications, at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

There's also a short discussion of the finding by L. Steven Emmert, who blogs about court findings and appeals. I've archived it here for future reference, because there doesn't seem to be a way to link directly to the article.

Eli Rabett has written about this too.

WUWT update - another email smear

Anthony Watts has just done some more smearing with the help of Eric "eugenics" Worrall.  He's cut and pasted snippets from two stolen private emails, reversing them, to make it appear as one email and to make it look as if it's something it's not.  The two emails don't involve Michael Mann.  They are a query from one scientist to another, asking the first scientist if, under the (then) new FOI laws in Britain, he would be required to hand out to all and sundry computer code prepared (as I understand it) by the second scientist.  The reply was that code might be exempt under property rights provisions. But Anthony and Eric manage to turn it into a smear.  That example is a good illustration of why private emails should be kept private and out of the hands of smear merchants and disinformers. (The article is archived here.)

From the WUWT comments

Many of the commenters at WUWT don't have a clue.  Here are a couple of comments from Anthony's article of yesterday (archived here):

bushbunny has got the situation topsy turvy and says:

April 16, 2014 at 7:21 pm
I thought the university of Virginia were suing him because they want their grant back? Oh the result will be interesting, as it may affect Mark’s case too?

Proud Skeptic is wrong, and needs to learn about what FOIA covers and what is exempt, and maybe think about the result of allowing all government-funded information to be freely available to everyone at any time when he or she says:

April 16, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Maybe I’m naïve but isn’t public money funding Mann’s research? IMHO, when the public is paying the freight then EVERYTHING is public. if you want privacy, then use private money…preferably your own.

 And here are a few from today's article (archived here). Not all WUWT-ers disagree with the decision.

Brad hatches a conspiracy theory about the seven Supreme Court Judges and says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:53 am
Sounds rigged, have to wonder how many judges, or family members, or political contributors, are alumni?

Something stinks…. And Lew-paper won’t make the smell go away.

tim maguire didn't read the decision or the bit about "not limited to financial matters" and says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:42 am
Publicly funded educational research is specifically exempted to protect financial interests? Wouldn’t the right of possession be held by the people of Virginia?
What a strange outcome. 

David in Michigan finds the decision correct and says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:01 am
After reading the decision by the court, I agree that their interpretation is correct. It’s disappointing, yes, but reasonable and coherent. I also note the caveat by one of the judges at the end of the decision write up that there might be unintended consequences of applying the definition of the word “proprietary” to other sections. So it goes….

Paul Coppin says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:06 am
On a quick read through and without looking at the referenced cases, I note two things: ATI probably argued the case badly, and the ruling is a cautious ruling. Th nut of the last part is in the court’s caution over the meaning of “proprietary”, the ambiguous intent of its meaning as derived from the Va legislature in statute (which the court has asked the legislature to clarify), and the consequence, that because of this ambiguity, the court was obliged to follow the narrower definition established by case law in respect of the specific Codes in the VAFOIA. The competitive issue of public schools vs private schools is an interesting wrinkle. The decision is not a failure of the court to uphold access to publicly funded information, it’s a failure of the state legislature to properly construct statutes with consistent common use terminology. 

How Professor Michael Mann started a climate movement - by email...if only we could find it...

Anthony Watts has just discovered something that happened more than four months ago (archived here). There was an amicus brief filed by the Reporters' Committee in the Virginia emails case.  The Reporters' Committee want the court to narrow a definition.  A quick scan suggests they aren't necessarily wanting access to Michael Mann's personal emails, they are just concerned that the decision was worded in a way that may have implications for future FOIA requests and their "freedom" to delve into other people's emails.

The secret email winging its way to the climate movement!

The edifice of science crumbles under an email...eh what?

Anyway, no point in my speculating about that case.  It'll run its course soon enough. What got me was the fact that deniers at WUWT still seem to think that two hundred years of climate science is going to come undone because of one person's emails stored on a server somewhere between nine and fifteen years ago.  Do they honestly think that there is only one climate scientist in the world?  Do they seriously think that the whole edifice of earth, ocean and atmospheric science - paleoclimatology, geology, atmospheric physics, ocean chemistry, ecology, biology, cloud microphysics and the multitude of knowledge accumulated since the early nineteenth century is going to be turned on its head by some right wing lobby group getting access to a bunch of old emails?

Let's see.  Here are some comments.

The climate "movement" ...eh what?

First a ponderous pronouncement from Anthony Watts:

IMHO, the Mann’s days are numbered as a hero of the climate movement.

In those few words, Anthony Watts has both created a "hero" and tried to cut him down. He's also created a "movement".  I don't know what sort of weird lies between those ears - but really - now a study of earth sciences is a "movement"?  WTF!

Thing is, it's deniers who made Michael Mann a "hero" or perhaps their anti-hero.   They protested the temperature of the past and the present.  They couldn't accept that humans have changed the climate and we're still doing it, with a vengeance.  Oddly, most of them don't realise that there is more and more evidence by lots of quite independent teams of scientists that have refined and supported the findings of that early reconstruction.

In fact greenhouse effect denier and Anthony fanboi, dbstealey, takes all the credit on behalf of Anthony and WUWT and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:21 pm
Anthony and WUWT have a lot to do with this.
If relentless pressure was not kept up, Mann might have skated…
Kudos to Anthony and all the contributors who helped bring this about.
Everyone deserves credit. With sunshine, the truth will emerge.

Nick Adams lives a very boring dull life and can't comprehend anyone standing up for a principle. He trots out "a trojan horse" like all those despicable people who try to justify an unjustifiable invasion of privacy and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:01 pm
A man with nothing to hide never tries this hard to hide it.

myrightpenguin is one who has woken up to the fact that Professor Mann isn't the only climate scientist in the world and says he's already fingered the next target for deniers.  What he doesn't seem to realise is just how much science is lined up.  You can guess who that is, most probably, because it was the Number One most protested paper last year.  myrightpenguin is nevertheless deluded:

March 18, 2014 at 12:09 am
Mann may be disposable because of a series of papers inc. Marcott et al., so even if he is thrown under the bus the alarmists and MSM may still say there is a hockey stick regardless. There needs to be readiness for this, including education regarding the issue of splicing datasets with completely different resolutions, something that wouldn’t stand a chance of getting past peer review in scientific fields uncorrupted by special interests.

When deniers have nothing else to offer they unimaginatively call on Nazis. True to form, nicholas tesdorf says:

March 17, 2014 at 9:52 pm
Could this trial turn out to be the Warmistas’ Stalingrad. Before Stalingrad, the Nazis never had a defeat: after Stalingrad, they never had a victory.

Oh, and you'll enjoy this one.  Out of 220,000 stolen emails the deniers found.....nothing!  Anthony loses his cool with dp when he says:

March 17, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Climategate III is mute because nobody with the password has a pair, to draw a phrase from the current post. Too bad it wasn’t given to me as if that had happened the world would have it now. That is an advantage granted those of us who have no expectation of seeing another birthday. Never misunderestimate the fearlessness of motivated senior citizens. There are some jobs nobody else can get done.

REPLY: Hey, “dp” you can have the right to complain about “nobody with the password has a pair” here when you put your own name to your words. Otherwise kindly STFU. Basically there’s nothing new in CG III that hadn’t already been covered in CGI/II. Megabytes of mundane stuff, much like NSA flypaper. The important stuff has been extracted. Dumping the whole file on the net won’t help anybody. Tough noogies if you don’t like the situation but that’s the reality. – Anthony

I'll leave you with the unholy reverend from the Cornwall Alliance, as richardscourtney makes a now-rare appearance at WUWT.  Just some excerpts, you can read the godless mess here:

the ‘war’ to stop the AGW-scare ... WW2...H1tler never had a defeat before the battle of El Alamein...Montgomery won the Second Battle of El Alamein...defend against the AGW scare...Battle of Stalingrad...advance of H1tler’s forces...military might of the Naz1s...AGW-scare...the ‘Kursk’ of the AGW-scare: the ‘bunker’ of the CRU at UEA...etc etc

It's time to visit Alice's Restaurant again, isn't it :)

I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. ... And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a 

...wait for it....

they may think it's a movement.

Read more: Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacre Lyrics | MetroLyrics

.