The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Lowry to Climate-Change Zealot: Put Your Hockey Stick Where the Sun Don’t Shine

Posted on | August 23, 2012 | 21 Comments

For my money, the funniest thing in National Review editor Rich Lowry’s reply to global-warming guru Michael Mann is this:

Is it too much to ask that world-renowned climate scientists spend less time on Facebook?

Mann posted a number of enraged Facebook rants because his notorious “hockey stick” graph, projecting a sharp increase in global temperatures caused by CO2 emissions, was brutally mocked by Mark Steyn.

Mann is on the faculty of Penn State, which claimed to have conducted an “investigation” of scientific fraud in Mann’s climate-change studies. Is Mann therefore “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change”? It’s a fair question, said Steyn:

If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?

Since the 2009 release of the ClimateGate e-mails — remember “hide the decline”? — it has become obvious to most lay observers that Mann and his colleagues valued their hypothesis more than they valued facts. Among other things, the ClimateGate e-mails showed that caretakers of the global-warming “consensus” conspired to delegitimize their critics and exclude skeptics from the peer-review process.

In response to Steyn’s post, Mann’s lawyer sent a letter to National Review demanding a retraction and an apology, and citing a number of investigations that had found no proof of deliberate fraud by Mann and his colleagues. Ah, but there’s the rub.

To skeptics, these investigations seemed very much like part of a cover-up, a whitewash intended to protect the climate-change industry, which has become a mammoth academic boondoggle funded almost exclusively through government grants. With hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at stake, with major government agencies having staked their own prestige on the validity of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis, the inherent incentives to suppress the appearance of scandal were obvious enough: Follow the money.

Mann’s threat of a lawsuit is, Lowry recognizes, merely a threat — and an empty one, at that. “Discovery is a bitch,” as the lawyers say:

If Mann sues us, the materials we will need to mount a full defense will be extremely wide-ranging. So if he files a complaint, we will be doing more than fighting a nuisance lawsuit; we will be embarking on a journalistic project of great interest to us and our readers.
And this is where you come in. If Mann goes through with it, we’re probably going to call on you to help fund our legal fight and our investigation of Mann through discovery. If it gets that far, we may eventually even want to hire a dedicated reporter to comb through the materials and regularly post stories on Mann.

Exactly. Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel (or pixels by the terrabyte, as the case may be). Above and beyond handing Lowry the journalistic license to go rooting around in Mann’s life and career, a legal fight with Mann would provide National Review with a lucrative fundraising opportunity and a publicity bonanza. How many Drudge links, talk-radio segments and Fox News interviews would be inspired by such a lawsuit?

By God, I envy Lowry for having received this threat from Mann’s lawyer. If I’d only known that calling Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change” was the Golden Ticket . . . Wait a minute.

Look, I’m not saying that Mann has done anything illegal, OK? But just because something is legal doesn’t mean it isn’t scandalous.

For example, it is apparently legal to have sex with a 17-year-old boy at an interstate rest stop, but a Minnesota Democrats has decided that it’s sufficiently scandalous that he shouldn’t seek re-election.

Michael Mann: The Kerry Gauthier of Climate Science!

Sue me. Please. I need the money.

 





 

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Category: Global Warming

Comments

  • http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

    The whole global warming thing was always just a huge scam. The environmental wackos had the political juice, the climate change scientists provided the bogus scare, and the money began to flow from all the Western governments.

    Pity the poor climate scientists. They had labored in obscurity. Where physicists got the big money and expensive toys, and medical research was flush in funding, they had to labor in small offices on old computers and meet for lunch in tiny lounges with resin chairs and card tables and five-year-old Mr. Coffee drip machines they had to load themselves. Then – BOOM! – the “global warming” scare hits and suddenly media wants to interview them, universities want to hire them, and governments want to fund them.

    It was just too good a con to pass up. And it worked much like The Yellow Kid’s old letter of credit fraud from 100 years ago.

    In those days before instant transfers and transcontinental telephones, wealthy travelers carried letters of credit from their banks guaranteeing any advance against a set limit. When a bank in London advanced $10,000 against half a million, they entered it on the letter, notarized it, and there was $490,000 left to be drawn.

    But once one or two banks bit on the forgery, all the rest never even looked closely at it. Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil only really had to convince the first sucker, the rest were there to be picked.

    Global warming was similar. Once governments started taking it seriously, none would admit they’d been taken, so they were all on the hook for more.

    If not the freedom of information requests on the East Anglia emails, they might never have been caught in their own lifetimes.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    You, Stacy, just reminded me why I like you so damn much [in a manly, John Wayne-ish kind of way, of course] – bravo!

  • scarymatt

    Just to be clear, Mann isn’t a climate scientist. He’s a realclimatescientist. It’s an important distinction.

  • JohnInMA

    For quite some time the warming….I mean climate change effort has been led by scientific politicians. The fact is they have resorted to purely political tactics while forsaking centuries old traditions and methods. The most basic tenet of scientific research and discovery is skepticism. This is one of the driving forces for challenging ideas and proofs. The scientific politicians have criticized those practicing skepticism and resisted honest, “peer” debate for over a decade.

    This is all you need to know about both their intent and their honor, as scientists.

  • JeffS

    These climate change scam artists are not scientists. At the most, they are button sorters and bottle washers. A pox on their names, I say!

  • scarymatt

    You should apologize to button sorters and bottle washers.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MJGP4QXZ5PRW2MFA5E25CV2WNU rosalie

    Actually, the scientists who are doing their job predict a mini ice age. But no matter what kind of weather we end up with, it will always be blamed on global warming.

  • http://2012.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    At least he didn’t call them telephone sanitizers.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Arnold/1259562281 Jack Arnold

    Michael Mann, the Jared Kimberlain of climate science.

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  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    http://www.jockular.com/14263/lawyer-letter-cleveland-brown The Old School way of dealing with this issue.

  • Quartermaster

    Or sewage collection technicians.

  • Garym

    Heynow!! Thats not necessary.

  • Quartermaster

    Mayhaps that’s what he wants to be known as, but his real credentials (his behavior) tell the world he’s a Shyster.

  • scarymatt

    Yes, that’s pretty much what realclimatescientist means. It’s sort of a running joke by Steve McIntyre aimed at all of the jokers associated with the RealClimate blog (not linking). For example, from my link:

    While “ex post screening” by correlation is accepted as a given by realclimatescientists, ex-post screening by correlation is not a statistical procedure that is recommended or discussed in …standard statistical texts.

  • Mortimer Snerd

    Funny!

  • Mortimer Snerd

    Or, worse yet, democrats.

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  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    But…but…but…the…the…SCIENCE IS SETTLED!!!! [drops to floor, foams at the mouth]

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