Creator of discredited “hockey stick” chart caused US, world much harm, say demonstrators

Dr. Michael Mann was welcomed to Minneapolis today by a group of demonstrators who blame Dr. Mann’s research and publications for damage to the US and world economies and fostering distrust in scientists. The demonstrators believe Mann’s oft-referenced work to prove anthropogenic global warming theory is fraudulent and showed up at the Minneapolis convention center where he was speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America to tell him so.

Mann was made infamous by discredited tree ring research used to create the so-called “hockey stick chart” that purported to demonstrate recent, runaway man-caused global warming. His name came up in the “climategate” email scandal that emerged out of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, in connection to a “trick” employed by Dr. Mann for a paper published in Nature Magazine. That trick involved obfuscating the results of proxy temperature data when it didn’t match actual temperatures recorded by instrumentation. Discovery of that trick called into question the validity of the entire pre-instrumentation climate history constructed from Mann’s work.

The hockey stick chart was the key element in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the United Nations’ 1997 Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s 4th Assessment. The IPCC report has been the underpinning of United States and global warming policy for over a decade. Based upon it’s conclusions, governments have implemented expensive carbon taxes and new overbearing regulations designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, cap and trade schemes, a phased-in ban on incandescent light bulbs, the forced relocation of whole populations of people to make room for carbon credit producing plantations and numerous other far reaching and expensive initiatives.

“There are several reasons for the current economic crisis we’re facing in the United States and globally, but a major contributor has been the suppression of energy production and economic activity by overbearing new regulations, taxes and carbon trading resulting from the misguided belief that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing extraordinary warming of the planet,” said Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis. “We feel Dr. Mann’s work has contributed to tremendous economic and societal harm,” he said.

“Where did the medieval warming period go? What decline did he hide? What’s the Nature trick?” are the questions Minnesota Free Market Institute president Kim Crockett wants answers to.

Mann wasn’t available with answers.

Instead, Dr. Mann ironically spoke to the Geologic Society about how some climate scientists in the public arena are “attacked” by their opponents and about how climate scientists are “massively out-manned and out-funded in this battle.”

“His ‘poor me’ routine would be laughable in the face of the trillions of public dollars being poured into the green global warming toilet, if it weren’t for the part about trillions of public dollars being poured into the toilet,” said Davis. “These demonstrators aren’t being paid. In truth, they’re paying people like Mann and they’re turning our tax dollars against us, trying to get even more of our money.”

Dr. Michael Mann will be at the Minneapolis Convention Center Wednesday to give a short lecture to the American Geological Society’s annual meeting.

Mann is probably best known as the infamous creator of the “hockey stick” graph designed to show a rapid, recent deviation from “normal” global temperatures,

Mann’s other notable contribution to climate science was his so-called “Nature trick,” in which he obfuscated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures his own flawed tree ring research indicated. Mann had essentially disproved the reliability of his own work, which was the basis for reconstructing the Earth’s past climate record, the very foundation of the theory that the warming period experienced in the 1990s was outside the Earth’s norms.

Mann will address the geologists with a short talk titled, “Climate Scientists in the Public Arena: Who’s Got Our Backs?” at 1:45 PM.

From the synopsis of the talk posted on the AGS website, it appears that Mann will complain about warmists like himself being singled out and lament that scientists of his ilk are “massively out-funded in this battle” (not) over the realities of anthropogenic climate change.

It’s true that Mann has often been the subject of ridicule. In the wake of the “climategate” email scandals, his “Nature trick” of graph-scrubbing received a lot of attention and his hockey stick chart which was the basis for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been proven false. Both of these facts have made him a target for satire, prompting him to threaten lawsuits against his detractors in the past. Now it seems, he’s hoping to grab some sympathetic ears among the geologists meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday.

Perhaps Dr. Mann could use a welcoming committee. If you feel like welcoming one of the inner sanctum of warmist climate scientists to Minneapolis with a hand-made sign of some sort, drop by outside the Convention Center around 1:00 on Wednesday, October 12th. Can’t make it that early in the day? The meeting wraps up at 5:30 – 6:00 PM. You could drop by to bid adieu after work instead.

Update: Two facebook events have been established for a Michael Mann Welcoming Committee.

• See here for the 1:00-2:00 demonstration.
• Minnesotans for Global Warming has set up a facebook event for the 5:00-6:00 demonstration.

From Fox News

The global warming theory left him out in the cold.

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that “global warming is occurring.”

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man’s actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide. 

Giaever does not agree — and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

“I resign from APS,” Giaever wrote.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that “the evidence is incontrovertible.”

“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.

Read the rest at Fox News.

Former Vice President Al Gore will renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multi-media event.

From Reuters

“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore’s message.

“There will be 200 new slides arguing the connection between more extreme weather and climate change,” Trewin Restorick, chief executive of the event’s UK partner Global Action Plan, told Reuters on Monday.

“There will be a full-on assault on climate skeptics, exploring where they get their funding from.”

Read the rest at Reuters.

By James Delingpole

If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many people – alarmist scientists, huckster politicians,  rent-seeking landowners like (the late Michael Crichton’s brilliant and, of course, entirely fictional creation) the absurd, pompous Sir Reginald Leeds Bt, green activists, eco-fund managers, EU technocrats, MSM environmental correspondents – stand to gain from the Man Made “Climate Change” industry. Their discovery must be suppressed at all costs. So, one by one, the scientists on the cosmic ray project find themselves being bumped off, until only one man remains and must race against time to prove, etc, etc…

Except of course in the real world the second part wouldn’t happen. No one would need to go to the trouble of bumping off those pesky scientists with their awkward, annoying facts and their proper actual research. That’s because the MSM and the scientific “community” would find it perfectly easy to suppress the story anyway, without recourse to severed brake cables or ricin-impregnated hand-washes or staged “suicides”.

This is exactly what has happened with the latest revelations from CERN over its landmark CLOUD experiment, whose significance Lawrence Solomon explains here:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun – not human activities – as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

Read the rest at The London Telegraph.

Fox News Story

We’ve all heard of the ravaged rain forests and the plight of the polar bear. But as far as reasons for saving the planet go, the one offered by scientists Thursday is truly out of this world.

A team of American researchers have produced a range of scenarios in which aliens could attack the earth, and curiously, one revolves around climate change.

They speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us.

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Audrey Hudson

Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting-it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.

But the validity of the science behind the image-presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth-is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge.

Special agents from the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died, and the department is eyeing another study currently underway on bear populations.

Biologist Charles Monnett, the lead scientist on the paper, was placed on administrative leave July 18. Fellow biologist Jeffrey Gleason, who also contributed to the study, is being questioned, but has not been suspended.

Read the rest at Human Events.

Investors Business Daily Editorial

Climate Change: The scientist who claimed that global warming threatens polar bears is under investigation. There’s a hole in Earth’s greenhouse. A cooler era lies ahead. That hiss is the hot air coming out of alarmists’ balloon.

The global warming fraud is coming apart faster than the alarmists can repackage and rebrand their fairy tale. Their elaborately constructed yarn can’t hold together much longer. There are just too many loose ends:

• Charles Monnett, the scientist who predicted that polar bears would drown from a lack of sea ice, “is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity” of the article in which he makes that claim, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Monnett, a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been placed on leave pending the probe’s outcome.

Read the rest at Investors Business Daily.

By James M. Taylor

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

Read the rest at Forbes.

‘Propaganda,’ a lawmaker says

By Ben Wolfgang

House Republicans charged Wednesday that the Obama administration is aiming to establish a “propaganda office” for Democratic initiatives on global warming through a proposal to consolidate operations in a new “climate service” office within the Commerce Department

Tensions boiled over at a congressional hearing as officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defended the consolidation plan contained in President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget and denied having any ulterior motive.

NOAA hopes to move more than 50 percent of its resources into the new climate service department, which it says will serve as the central clearinghouse for farmers, local governments, the military and academics seeking information on climate trends.

But a number of GOP lawmakers, who have staunchly opposed the administration’s climate and energy policies in the past, challenged NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco at a hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Read the rest at the Washington Times.

By Rosalind S. Helderman

The University of Virginia and a conservative advocacy group have agreed the university will turn over documents in response to a public information request by the group seeking documents related to the work of a former university climate scientist.

U-Va. will comply with the request by Aug. 22.

The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, along with Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), want e-mails and other documents related to the work of global warming researcher Michael Mann.

The university has said the group requested about 9,000 pages of records, and the organization says about 20 percent have been turned over so far.

But the group believes the university has been dragging its feet in producing the records. The university has said it is working as quickly as possible to sift through thousands of pages of records to figure out which should be released.

In an agreement filed in Prince William Circuit Court on Tuesday, the university agreed it will turn over all records, in electronic form, within 90 days–or Aug. 22.

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

By Dr. Tim Ball

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

1. a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;
2. the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
3. funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

Read the Rest at Dr. Ball’s “A Different Perspective.”

By Joseph D’Aleo

In the LA Times, there was a story on Richard Muller’s invitation to DC to testify to congress about the Berkeley Project, which attempts to reconstruct global dataThe Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is led by physicist Richard Muller, a longtime critic of the scientific consensus on climate change, who plans to testify on the effort Thursday before the House Science Committee in the latest of several congressional inquiries on climate science since the GOP majority was seated. Temperature data from tens of thousands of weather stations across the globe, many of which have incomplete records, are “very contentious,” Muller said in an interview. “The skeptics are raising legitimate concerns.”

Muller and many of those who question the temperature data are drawn to the “urban heat island” phenomenon, maintaining that gauges may be registering latent heat from asphalt, concrete and other urban features. Over time, some weather stations that once recorded temperatures in rural areas have been surrounded by cities and suburbs. The Berkeley project is analyzing information from 39,000 stations -five times as many as the other groups, Muller said – and will address the fact that temperature data have been recorded at varying times of day.

The project also will put its calculations on the Internet in a “transparent” way, Muller said. Other scientists, he said, “put homogenized data online. They don’t put up the [software] tools that get you from the raw data to the homogenized data. How do they pick the [weather station] sites? That involves human judgment.”

Read the rest at IceCap.

From C3 Headlines

As the monthly empirical evidence keeps pouring in, the AGW hypothesis and climate model simulations that portray atmospheric CO2 levels being the principal driving force behind global temperature change looks weaker and weaker. A growing chorus of scientists worldwide are now saying that the idea that global warming is caused by ‘CO2 vapours’ is a quaint, 1800′s European hypothesis, but severely lacking in any robust, modern empirical evidence.

While the CO2-vapours based AGW hypothesis crumbles in the face of actual climate data, other scientific explanations regarding global temperature change are looking stronger and stronger. One such hypothesis is that the Southern Oscillation (SO) accounts for some 80% of global temperature variance.

Read the rest at C3 Headlines.

Is this what climate change looks like?

By Susan Kraemer

There has been an increase in the numbers of earthquakes over 6.0, over the last few years. For the first half decade till 2006, there were about 13 earthquakes a year over 6.0 according to statistics at the USGS (13, 13, 13, 12, 13).

But in the last few years, the frequency of major earthquakes (over 6.0) increased to 20, 17, 21, 25, and in just the first 3 months of this year we already have had 7 large earthquakes.

After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, followed by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in Chile in January, at 7.1, followed by two averaging 6.7 in February, and also in February a 6.3 in February in New Zealand (in a part of the country not prone to earthquakes), now we have the 9.0 mega quake with a 7.2 aftershock in Japan, in March.

At last year’s American Geophysical Union meeting geologists were already questioning whether there was a climate change link underlying the increasing frequency of unusually large earthquakes, according to  Mathew McDermott at Treehugger. The Haiti earthquake was then just the latest example.

Read the rest at Clean Technica.