Manning Up? Nope Mann Down!

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann recently wrote an OP-Ed for the New York Times headlined "The Assault on Climate Science." It was the standard gibberish about how climate change deniers are trying to kill the planet. Yada. Yada. Yada.

In the meantime, Prof. Mann is carrying on his own assault on the First Amendment, something the New York Times declines to mention in Prof. Mann's bio.

Mann is currently suing writer Mark Steyn for allegedly defaming him. The lawsuit has dragged on for years much to the consternation of Mr. Steyn.

Steyn has responded to Mann's bullying misuse of the legal process by publishing a book this year that does far more damage to Mann's reputation than anything he wrote in the pithy 270-word blog post that so riled the good professor.

Here is a review of the book (A Disgrace to the Profession) by one Judith Curry. The quotes about Mann and his methods from colleagues, including other climate scientists are, to put it simply, devastating.

For example:

Wallace Broecker: “The goddam guy is a slick talker and super-confident. He won’t listen to anyone else,” one of climate science’s most senior figures, Wally Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, told me. “I don’t trust people like that. A lot of the data sets he uses are shitty, you know. They are just not up to what he is trying to do…. If anyone deserves to get hit it is goddam Mann.”

Eduardo Zorita: Why I Think That Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf2 Should be Barred from the IPCC Process. Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore. These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. 

 Atte Korhola: Another example is a study recently published in the prestigious journal Science. Proxies have been included selectively, they have been digested, manipulated, filtered, and combined – for example, data collected from Finland in the past by my own colleagues has even been turned upside down such that the warm periods become cold and vice versa. Normally, this would be considered as a scientific forgery, which has serious consequences.

Hans von Storch: A conclusion could be that the principle, according to which data must be made public, so that also adversaries may check the analysis, must be really enforced. Another conclusion could be that scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or in assessment activities like IPCC.

!1There are many more.

I wrote about Mann's lawsuit against Steyn almost three years ago. The column can be found here.

I think it holds up pretty well.