Since I am mentioned in Mann’s book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and not kindly, it seems necessary to set the record straight.
I do not take credit for any angry posts that follow.
Mann begins discussion of my work on page 187 (see bottom of this post) with the title “The Hockey Fight Continues” where my work is categorized as another assault from the denialosphere, with me being part of the “Hydra” that is hatefully out to get Mann. Simply because I published a paper that does a reconstruction and expressed a view that tree rings might have issues (which the Climategate emails show was a hidden view of many in the field) I was engaging in a “fight” against Mann? Really? I think it is because they didn’t like my results, which is rather post-modernist, no? So, I am lumped in with politically motivated and evil “deniers” and “denialists”. I find these terms and the entire context for discussing my work offensive. I am not a “denialist” and my recent paper (Loehle, C. and N. Scafetta. 2011. Climate Change Attribution Using Empirical Decomposition of Historical Time Series. Open Atmospheric Science Journal 5:74-86) attributes about 40% of recent warming to human activity – estimating that this equates to a no-feedback atmosphere.
What I would deny is that tree rings are good thermometers, but this is a scientific view based on my knowledge of trees, not a political view.
Michael Mann is incapable of arguing science, hence anything he says or writes is mute.
Delusions of grandeur afflict many who are inept and thus serves them to hide it.
By denigrating you he is demonstrating that greatest of all delusions: that he actually knows anything.
I think he is afraid. It will not be long before the survivalists desert him like the plague. He can smell the decline (no pun intended).