Steyn puts Warmists in the Dock
The final episode of "Seinfeld" involved a Good Samaritan court case that featured witness after witness testifying passionately about the moral misdemeanors perpetrated against them by the shows protagonists: Elaine, George, Kramer, and Jerry. One segment simulated a TV newscast in which Geraldos onsite reporter summarized the testimony. The number of prosecution witnesses, she concluded, just went on and on and on into the night. Thats the feeling one gets reading the negative evidence Steyn has amassed in A Disgrace to the Profession, his work about the litigious climatologist and hockey-stick inventor, Michael Mann.Steyns book is, in fact, a series of relatively short testimony segments by scores of witnesses to the shoddy science and shocking intimidation tactics employed by Mann and colleagues. The book also indicts various science publications and organizations for malpractice, especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- a bureaucracy headed till his resignation in 2015, following charges of sexual abuse, by Dr. Rajandra Pachauri, formerly Indian Railways engineer at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi.Steyn divides his work into 12 chapters which contain, in total, 120 testimony segments. Almost all focus on damning observations about Manns methods, conclusions, and harassment of dissenting scientists -- many of whom are still in the anthropogenic global warming camp. Thus, the book isnt a broadside against apocalyptic climate change per se but rather a barrage against Michael Mann, the inventor of global warmings most effective propaganda icon --- the hockey stick diagram of global temperature. (Note: The diagrammatic hockey stick is lying flat with only the blade projecting upward to represent an unprecedented temperature rise in the last century.)To obtain this ominous shape that Al Gore and the IPCC seized upon with orgasmic enthusiasm, Mann obliterated two mainstays of traditional climate science: the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the opinion of many eminent scientists, this feat was accomplished by employing dubious statistical analysis, by using and even manipulating scanty tree-ring evidence, and by tacking on actual thermometer readings for recent times to tree-ring proxy data that was largely employed to erase significant climate variations in the past. These methodological shenanigans resulted in the apocalyptic headline that summarized the Mann-dominated IPCC report of 2001, namely, that 1998 was likely the warmest year in the warmest decade in the warmest century of the past 1,000 years -- a headline gobbled up by lazy and politically-motivated climate journalists.Probably 5% of Steyns extended brief against Mann, et al. consists of extended rsums of Manns critics -- a procedure designed to show that scholars like MITs Richard Lindzen, NASAs Roy Spencer, and renowned physicist Freeman Dyson are, indeed, expert witnesses and not the scientific JV team. Heres a sample of those critiques: The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwells Ministry of Information (Dr. William Happer, Physics, Princeton); The blade of the hockey-stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques (Dr. David Legates, U. of Delaware, Climatologist); The behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession (Dr. Henrick Tennekes, former Director of Research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute); The work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies (Dr. David Deming, Geophysicist, U. of Oklahoma); That was a mistake and it made tree-ring people angry (Dr. Gordon Jacoby, pioneer in dendrochronology); Any scientist ought to know that you just cant mix and match proxy and actual data Yet thats exactly what he did (Dr. Philip Stott, Biogeography, U. of London). The damning critiques go on and on and on in detail. The above comments are only chapter headings, and the individual rsums all include a large number of professional achievements.Another swath of Steyns evidence concerns the University of East Anglia Climate Research emails that were hacked into and published in 2009, resulting in the Climategate scandal. These communications give credence to the claim that there is or was a Big Climate mafia headed by Michael Mann -- a group as eager to protect its fame and grant-producing turf as Michael Corleone was to defend his crime syndicate. Fortunately, Mann and company only employ stigma, blackballing, and control of peer-reviews to achieve their objectives. Two cases in point: In 2014 Dr. Judith Curry, former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology observed that her challenge to the [climate change] consensus has precluded any further professional recognition. She also mentioned that she worries about younger scientists without tenure protection. That same year the 79-year-old distinguished professor Lennart Bengtsson was forced by enormous group pressure to resign for the sake of [his] health and safety from the advisory board of a think tank that promoted rational skepticism about global warming.As a closing bonus, Steyn explains the origin of the 97% of all scientists mantra that Mann and President Obama confidently throw around whenever the settled science of climate change is at issue. Short story shorter: 97% comes from a survey conducted for a thesis by a University of Illinois graduate student who, having received 3,146 responses to a two-question online questionnaire sent to 10,257 earth scientists, eventually identified 77 experts of which 75 (97%) were found to agree with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Theres no word as yet on the identity and views of the other 10,180.Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/steyn_puts_warmists_in_the_dock.html#ixzz3mFxXkRrQ Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
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Steyn is a great American. His stance for Science and Free Speech is truly heroic.
From my research I concluded that although there are a few honest male climate scientists there aren't many . The males are into forming a power block of misinformation . But there are [on a %age basis] quite a few honest female climate scientists .
Good article.