The “Mann Kampf” tour continues.
This excerpt is from a Houston Chronicle interview of Michael Mann:
Chronicle: As someone who was a victim of leaked confidential documents, do you have any sympathy for the Heartland Institute, whose internal memos were leaked by Peter Gleick?
Mann: It’s funny, I do in a sense. But it’s only to a point. There has been some tendency to compare these two things and create a moral equivalency between the two, but I don’t think that equivalency actually exists. The leaked e-mails, we’ve now had nine different investigations, and they all came to the conclusion that there was no impropriety. This was a misrepresentation, taking people’s words out of context. There was no attempt to fudge data or hide evidence or any of these claims that have been made. In retrospect it really was a smear campaign that was used to discredit climate science.
On the other hand this really reinforces what we already sort of knew, that Heartland Institute was one of a number of these think tanks or front groups funded by industry or certain right-wing special interests to manufacture false controversy, to attack climate science and individual climate scientists. It reinforced what we already knew, but it also brought out some interesting details that to my knowledge Heartland has actually admitted to. That there was this program to indoctrinate K-9 school children with climate change denial propaganda. To me that is so pernicious, and I am genuinely horrified by it. I’m all too aware that those who will bear the brunt of our emissions today are going to be our children and grandchildren. They’re going to bear the costs of our cheap energy today. So there’s this effort to misinform the very people who will bear the greatest cost of climate change. To me that is so amoral it’s almost hard to put into words…
Name calling only bolsters Dr. Mann’s claim that he was insulted. His Hockey Stick graph speaks loudly that the Earth might be in trouble. Casually dismissing the graph would really be irresponsible, as Dr. Mann asserts.
But Dr. Mann does not tolerate any question of the robustness of his graph. Did the Hockey Stick result from an objective treatment of good data, or did it result as a statistical artifact of dubious data and methods? In my opinion, Mr. McIntyre proved the Hockey Stick to be the later. All of Dr. Mann’s insistence on his persecution by clandestine moneyed interests is trumped by Mr. McIntyre’s solid analysis.
By the way, the NAS looked at peer controlled publications and did not take proper account of Mr. McIntyre’s work. The NAS also made fools of themselves about DNA numbers back in the early 1990s.
This from IMO the one of most ethical and morally bankrupt scientist.