Tuesday
Dec062011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Mann the barricades
Dec 6, 2011 Climate: Mann Michael Mann's talk at TED has just hit the ether. It's a pretty political piece, and I do wonder about TED allowing their brand to be used in this way.
Please try to avoid ranting in the comments.
Reader Comments (64)
Tinkered, Tailored, Soldout, sly
Straw men in abundance.
He starts with a lie and just contunues. I'm glad that I have a conservative government here in Canada that just says no to all this drivel.
I stopped watching TED when I realized one day that the last three programs I'd watched were political bull-bleep--some stronger than others.
Looking at his plots of Hansen's future projections (between 02:10 & 02:40), I have to ask where he got his data because when I compare them with this...
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ordinary-eyeball-how-did-hansens-predictions-do/
...and, more specifically, this...
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/hansenlineartrend.jpg
...there seems to be a rather large discrepancy!
Yes, I know people have argued that Hansen's original projections were off because he assumed the wrong sensitivity, but presenting 'updated' projections in this way without explaining that they've been tweaked in order to align it with the as-measured record is surely unethical?
Fancy him using a stolen Memo despicable behavior!!
My one over-riding impression is that he thinks he represents science and scientists. He fundamentally misunderstands that most of the attacks on him and his Team-mates were not on science but on its miss-use.
Perhaps just as egregious is his characterisation of opposition to the religion of CAGW as being wholly motivated by fossil fuel interests. What tosh!
Lastly he tries (feebly) to blame sceptics for the lack of any progress at climate conferences. That is also tosh. Most countries very sensibly want to avoid another Kyoto because it was not only expensive but utterly pointless! See over at Climate Etc for this post - http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/06/kyoto-protocol-unintended-consequences/ - discussing exactly that reality.
Couldn't see much of a substantial argument there. But his message (if there was any) was that future climate could be controlled by politicians/policy if they only wanted.
I don't believe that for a second, and I don't even think Mann would make that argument if he had to provide quantitative numbers for it, even if his models indeed were telling the whole truth (which they aren't).
So, it was pretty much a defense speech for his (now increasingly dwindling) side of the hypothesis of there being an (manageble) issue with the climate which is caused by humanity.
And his argument still is that the other side of a scientific debate shouldn't be allowed to air their objections ... Not only his argument, but his actions too. Which he claims are 'taken out of context' ..
Well, if he isn't arguing the science, if all he does is promote politics .. why does he expect to be treated like a scientist, and not like any run-of-the-mill activist politician who cannot justify his wishes for expenses ...
He sounds like a man with a [very tendentious] book to publish.
It looks as if he models himself as the new Hansen or Al Gore. Even the same kinds of slides and talking points. I loved the photo of the lonely polar bear "stranded" on an ice block in the ocean. That says as much as anyone needs to know about his mendacious approach to public speaking.
Amazing.
I've been beginning to wonder about TED too after they let Wilkinson do his absurd Spirit Level nonsense. Political Bull Bleep indeed.
I guess it was inevitable. Science = a Bad Infomercial. Mann is become Billy Mays, destroyer of C02 stains.
Andrew
if he were that convinced of gaiia burning , it would have been an online speech only, and he wouldn't trip around the US and America 24/365.
Same with Al Gore and his 6 mansions (1 on sea level)
and same for the Great Kenyan who flies a whole air fleet to hawaii back and forth, for holidays, only.
Jonas N
Ah yes, Mann the politician, Mann of the people.
His showing in yesterday's WSJ suggests that if he had the vertebral integrity to stand as a real politician need actual votes to keep him from the utter oblivion that his intellectual output so richly deserves, in footballing parlance he'd be lucky to get nil.
The antidote to Mannish behavior - It' all about the scientific method from a proper scientist.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_on_what_scientists_do.html
It's - That is
What surprised me was the way it was delivered - very low key, hesitant in places.
What did not surprise me was the almost total lack of analysis, the failure to mention any of the studies or scientists that contradict his work, the ad homs and the appeal to authority.
Quoting Edmund Burke was surreal.
It's almost as if the more his work is attacked the more he believes it's right.
I am compelled to note the same old false AGW talking points:
1) Everyone loves the hockey stick (except his own peers in Climategate II).
2) Polar bears are declining and stranded on ice boats (except when they swim and are increasing).
3) Hansen's models were dead-on accurate (except the originals in 1988).
4) There was no Middle Warming Period (except in hundreds of peer reviewed studies).
5) There was no Little Ice Age (except in hundreds of peer reviewed studies).
6) Cuccinelli's Civil Investigative Demand was quashed on the merits (except when it was quashed on administrative technicalities).
It was like watching a Joe Romm, Al Gore, or Huffington Post performance.
After the brief shell game showing graphs of the modelled natural "would have been" under actual modelled perfectly - with no hint of the hindsight that goes in to that, his presentation then moves onto his first clear love - politics.
You can tell his attention was primarily lavished on the politics slides, three times on his technical graphs he had "Tempatures" as an axis label and somehow missed it in his prep, yet all his little cute politic slides with the "oops" accidents, that were smoothly sequed with his "quips" were clearly lovingly and painstakingly worked out.
At first flush it looks a poor showing - preaching to the choir in a very halting way, but at the end it ably shows the way a poor quality science practitioner can succeed in the polarised climate world. His focusing on the politics was clearly his most comfortable arena and the brief foray through the science at the start just a distraction. The extremes in th US politics suit him, and define him. I suspect that he will always have a nice little niche high in academia as long as he can show he is the victim. All he has to do is to keep real examination of his work out of the limelight - he has to avoid the chance that anyone could whisper the name of "McIntyre".
Anyone taking bets if Steve McIntyre gets a mention in his new book? I'm staking my ground on a round 0 times ;)
wow, that was about as substance-free as it's possible to be for 16 min. No analysis, no insight, simply an infomercial for The Team.
Highly political and propagandistic... It's fortunate that he is so bland and inarticulate while making so many misleading statements -- it lowers the likelihood that many people are going to circulate or be influenced by this thing.
Near the beginning, are his remarks about carbon dioxide emissions illustrated by a picture of water vapour emissions from a cooling tower? If so, he certainly gets off on a strongly indicative basis ...
@Dave Salt, yes the circularity of reasoning is incredible. They adjust the projections and claim its ok to do that because they now have more accurate sensitivity numbers. How do they obtain better estimates of sensitivity -- by backing into the number by to make the 'projection' match the actual result to the best degree possible. In my view, this is just dishonest.
I've been a hard-sell on this "model" scam from the get-go.
Eons ago I managed computer systems when ->A<- computer occupied several floors of a building and we had salesmen forever running models on our systems (we ran our own along with hardware and software monitors to capture data for them--we found that the largest single workload on the system was the software that did the data-reduction for the hardware monitor).
One of the things I learned was that after the "calibration" runs the models always said we needed more of what ever the salesman had a warehouse full of to get rid of to make quota.
I can see how he managed to fool people eager to be fooled. He sounds so sweet. Almost reasonable if you didn't know anything. Too bad the real Mann is documented in the emails, with his own words. If that Mann was on stage, he would be angrily screaming at the audience and threatening them if they didn't clap like trained seals.
When he cited the authority of Hansen (and even later mentioned Gore!) and descended into the Big Oil Conspiracy story it got boring. Once again he confirmed that he is just a political activist masquerading as a 'scientist.' Marvellous the way he pretends to be battling the politicization of science!
And, as usual, the underlying 'victim' act and his Nixonian 'enemies list.' The 'war against climate science' and those nasty 'criminals' who leaked the Climategate emails (that of course didn't mean anything). Then how 'silly' the debate is and, to put the icing on the cake, a picture of 'the children' and a polar bear!!! Thank goodness it ended... lest I rant.
On the bright side, he's from Penn State and so was the whitewash of his horseplay with the data, and his response to Delingpole in the WSJ was a fatal error. Seems the only question now is when and how the Team will dump him. Time for Mann to do some long term field work monitoring the icecap or something.
His article this week in the Washington post was full of the same old dog toss! He took a pasting for it in the comments section which was a joy to read.
It was interesting to note how he pointed out with a smirk that Sarah Palin FOI released emails were explained by her as 'taken out of context'. This man has total and utter contempt for the general public - but it seems that feelings are mutual.
Just looked at the main Youtube site- only 56 views- 4 negative comments already, 1 like, 6 dislikes. An inauspicious start.
Mann's Facebook page is still a pretty lonely place. Only 66 "likes"
How did *they* find this guy to do their tidings?
Rob Schneider
"If miracles happened for Mann, they came in the form of Barry Saltzman. You see, this struggling student’s career was transformed the moment Saltzman became his Ph.D adviser. Only after Saltzman applied his influence were Mann’s lofty credentials “rushed through.” Mann then turned himself into a makeshift tree ring counter, and overnight became the iconic figure in the IPCC Third Report (2001). The rest is history, as they say."
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5700&linkbox=true&position=1
I'm trying to put this demonstration of "Mann in mellow motion mode" into perspective (so that the 16.06 minutes taken out of my life to watch this doesn't completely ruin my day) - bearing in mind our host's imprecation that we "try to avoid ranting".
So, here goes ...
1. Mann doesn't seem to do very well when he's in mellow motion mode ... far too many uhm's and uh's peppering (padding?!) his pleas.
2. This was a TEDxPSU* production, which should not be confused (or allowed to taint) the real TED.
* "TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience."
3. This soft-pedal
exercise in unabashed propagandapresentation was evidently uploaded to the Tube on Dec.5. Mann did make reference to Climategate; mind you, I was too distracted by his uhm's and uh's to notice whether he dared to actually name it, I did catch his 'almost two years to the day'.4. It appears that this TEDx event actually occurred on Nov. 13/11
<wicked idle speculation alert>
5. I wonder if The Saint got wind of Mann at TEDx, and if this was what triggered her/his decision to release CG2?! It is certainly not doing much to assist Mann in reinventing himself, is it?! [viz his more recent, true to form - and far from "mellow" - WSJ rant]
6. For an antidote, I heartily recommend the real TED's presentation by Dr. Hans Rosling:
http://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
He sounds very resonable.........and that's unfortunate because there are a to many people out there that have an inability to think for themselves and will believe everything he says without question.
Too embarassing. I managed to watch it.
if I may quote my own post from WUWT I think there's something especially embarrassing about using the quote from Sarah Palin in the way he does:
Mann tells us about all the evil politicans he hates but there’s remarkably little serious content for 16 min.
It is most “interesting” that he quotes Sarah Palin (regarding her own emails released in Alaska) to endorse the idea that FOI released emails must not be read “out of context” — because any thinking person should then notice that….
(1) The Team would not even cooperate with legally mandated FOI releases, regardless of putting them in ‘context’ or not, we only got to see their "FOI" release because the secretive "FOIA" provided them in the face of radical intransigence from The Team, and,
(2) putting your whines about out-of-context emails on a par with Palin’s should hardly be the way to show the great scientific and intellectual superiority of The Team.
That was unintentionally quite revealing….
skiphil
Sarah Palin is the Goldstein (1984) for Mann's crowd. Any mention of her usually freezes their brains as they hiss so I doubt very much if Mann even thought beyond that immediate convenient effect.
Couldn't help but think of an old song from Adam Ant: Desperate But Not Serious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVWWtqa9-7M
Bruce
Yup, I'd buy a used car from this bloke. What's not to like. He's clearly a victim of the evil empires.
He speaks so reasonably, so measured and so inline with his audience thatt, for a moment, I thought I was back in the echo-chamber of RC or CIF.
Forget CG 2.0, the clear dishonesty and anti-science of his ilk and think on this. The great and the good have spoken, Glory be, and no amount of logic, empirical evidence or common-sense will ever dissuade these neo-crusaders from taking their personal paths to glory.
Science is now dead. Belief is all and our only hope is that cold-economic limits will pull us back from the suicidal jump that will make martyrs of us all!
How come he didn't compare actual temperatures against the famous 'high, low, and medium' models? He just said...
'We've more or less followed that medium model...pretty much spot on...' (but didn't show a comparison).
I'm no expert - but this figure from this page http://www.c3headlines.com/climate-models/ indicates that the actual temperatures have tracked (or fallen below) the 'low' model (which I believe was actually Hansen's assumption of drastic CO2 output reductions - not a lower bound estimate as Mann implied at all).
Could Mann or one of his supporters clarify this please?
PS. I enjoyed the comments about ethics at the end - very droll.
good summary of (at least some of) the critical remarks on Mann's work by fellow scientists:
More Mann Problems - Fellow Scientists Comment on Mann's Work
I don't know what's happening with that hyperlink in my previous post -- I thought I linked to this exact article:
http://junkscience.com/2011/12/06/team-knew-hockey-stick-reconstruction-was-wrong
right now the hyperlink above seems to be going to "latest" on that site rather than to this specific article??
Sorry - I missed Dave Salt's comments above - my comment mirrors Dave's.
It would appear to me that Mann did not accurately compare the Hanson predictions with observed temperatures in this presentation.
Specifically:
1) Mann truncated actual temperatures at 2005 (unless this was recorded in 2005 one has to ask why this truncation was chosen)
2) Mann said that the 'medium model' was 'pretty much spot on' when the 'low model' was actually as close to observation as the 'medium model' - including years after 2005 shows that the 'low' model is in better agreement with observation.
3) Mann misrepresented the 'high', 'low' and 'medium' models. These were actually assuming different reduced, constant, or increased CO2. The actual temperatures appear to be in better agreement with an assumed reduction in CO2 output, despite the fact that CO2 output has not been reduced.
I'm guessing there was no Question & Answer period after his presentation?
"Mr Mann, why won't you publically release all the information needed to replicate your hockey stick graph?"
MrC
Listen at 6:53 on the video. Regarding the "Politization of Science" which he likes to call the "Scientization of Politics" (yes, I believe he's making up words now). Mann says "It's the use of the science, um um um um, more specifically, the attacks against science and scientists in an effort to advance a political agenda" He almost(!) said the scientization of politics is the use of science is an effort to advance a political agenda!
Wonder whether Mann suffers from NPD (not quite the right word - it is those who tangle with people with NPD who suffer); his reaction to being challenged is extreme, a characteristic of those with NPD.
If you thought Mann got flack at the WSJ check out the comments under the Youtube Vid!
Just goes to show.
Smug agitprop is still just agitprop.
Gore-y.
Dec 7, 2011 at 5:59 AM | sue
Scientization of politics
Yes that part was strange, as soon as he said that and put up the slide I thought - Wow! is he at last about to honestly admit that is what he is doing? Trying to usurp political and social discourse by claiming scientific truth as a new religion with him as high priest? But no. He then he went on to stutter and mumble something in a very incoherent way about politics interferring in science.
That part convinced me he must have cobbled together the presentation in a very hurried way, I am glad to hear that this is a kind of TED light, I was despairing at their quality control after first being introduced to TED seeing the brilliant Hans Rosling mentioned by hro001 above.
In the graph of Hansen's projection Mann stops the 'observed' line at 2005. If he brought it up to date the projection would not look as good. The observed temperatures are outside (below) the range of any model.
http://www.climatedata.info/Temperature/Temperature/simulations.html
When he shows Hansen's predictions, the "observed" line stops in 2005.
Watch the truncations under the thimble...
I am not going to mention McIntyre's name...
Amazingly, I managed to force myself to watch the entire group-hug. There were many up-chuck moments - notwithstanding a very poor delivery, considering the auto-cue on the floor in front of him - but when he prayed in aid the idea that Gore had complained about the 'politicisation of science', and then quoted Burke my keyboard was nearly done for.
But the use of the word 'ethics' at the end really capped it!
Such a shame PSU don't run a course in irony.