Today’s serving of cyberipecac: An interview in the Philly Inquirer by staff writer Faye Flam (you can’t make this stuff up) of Climategate martyr St. Micheal Mann. There’s no point in my doing a fisking of the article, since guest blogger “John A.” at WattsUpWithThat did such a magnificent job here.
A lot of what John refers to is esoterica, but the end is priceless:
And then to Climategate. Faye is obviously well out of her depth and sinking fast
Mann recalls a Friday night when a colleague alerted him that the hackers had tried to expose the e-mails on RealClimate, the blog he founded with another climatologist.
Over the ensuing weeks, pundits have shifted their focus from one set of e-mail exchanges to another, dubbing the issue “climategate.” First, the spotlight shone on an exchange between two other researchers referring to a “trick” Mann had used in plotting his data.
But not even Mann’s critics can cite any evidence of deception in the now doubly investigated hockey stick papers. The term trick, said Mann, described a technique he used to display his data.
Again this fascination with deception, but I’m willing to bet this is Mann misrepresenting what actually happened with a journalist too lazy to check facts.
Other pundits criticized Mann and colleagues for agreeing to shun the journal Climate Research after it published work by climate-change skeptics. Mann said the particular article was bad science and was “polluting” the journal.
Pundits, Faye? They were scientists including the editor of the journal.
The article finishes with a tear-jerker:
There is still much debate over how big a role human activity plays in the current warming trend, and how the future will be affected. Climate science – and earth science in general – is not expected to make the kinds of sharp predictions that chemists and physicists can make with repeated experiments. “It would be nice if we could do controlled experiments,” Mann said. “But we have only one Earth.”
Yes, and all of these nasty questions make baby Jesus cry.
I wonder why newspapers are sinking fast into the mud of history and then Faye Flam arrives to remove the wonder.
John A., I take my hat off to you, Herr Snarkmeister.
One thing that John didn’t point out though, and I think it bears mentioning is this:
Mann points out that the hockey stick is not widely seen as a smoking gun implicating human activity in global warming.
Liar. It was plastered all over IPCC AR3. Why? It was absolutely explicitly described as the “smoking gun”. This is a very transparent walkback. Expect to see more walking back of all of the work exposed by Climategate. What before was pivotal is now just fluff. This is typical “team” M.O. So now, after fighting tooth and nail about it for a full decade, he’s saying that it’s not very important. Yeah. Tell it to Flim’s sister.
It gets even more ludicrouser. Faye Flam is PI’s – get this – Science Writer. But that’s not the best part. Look at the menu bar. The item called “Carnal Knowledge Columns”. She’s a pr0n writer.
Notice there’s no science degree, just a “science writer”, with a dilettante interest in sex. And notice one of the sex column categories: “Wonders of Evolution”. I think we’ve found Charles Johnson’s alter ego.
Extra: In the dept. of “Say What???”, from the UK, we have this:
In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
With averages like that, who needs maxima? They’re not even pretending to be doing real science any more. From the people who brought us the Ministry of Silly Walks, we have the Cherry Tree of Hot Tomorrows.
Extra Extra: From eighteen months ago:
Prince Charles: Eighteen months to stop climate change disaster
Well, whatever we did, it seems to be a little too effective…
Extra Extra Extra: A new consensus?
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Shit. I was afraid that was going to happen. But never fear, ye faithful:
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
So never mind. Snow is obsolete. Gone with the dodo bird. No need to scrape your “global warming is bad for children and other living things” bumper sticker off of your VW bus. It will come. Just like the Great Pumpkin. Have faith.
And the hits keep on coming: Now we have an English restaurant critic with his knickers in a twist about all the smug snarky denialists:
You hear me? Nobody is saying that, not the bleeding-heartedest, most climate-credulous ladyboy Yakult-drinker in Islington. It will do the opposite. Global warming will in the end interfere with the ocean currents, knock out the Gulf Stream, and remove the protection we have from the icy Nordic weather that is our due, as sharers of the same latitude as Siberia. Britain will get colder. So this joke about the weather just isn’t there.
You all hear that? So just stop it right now, or he’s going to crumple his crumpet! It’s the thermohaline circulation! That oil creature has stolen his illudium Q-36 explosive thermohaline circulation!!!
Tags: climategate, Michael Mann, Philly Inquirer
