Journos come running

As soon as the global warming movement puts out the call, much of the press simply comes running, ready to repeat the mantra on request. The latest to involve themselves in the Mann media movement is MSN.

"They can threaten whatever they want," the Penn State professor told me on Sunday, after his talk at the New Horizons in Science meeting at Yale University. "I'm quite confident to fight those sorts of witch-hunt attempts."

Speechless

Some of you may remember Deutche Bank's amusing attempt to address "major sceptic arguments". I posted something on this back at the start of September.

Ross McKitrick has now posted up a back and forth between himself and the authors, Mary-Elena Carr, Kate Brash, and Robert Anderson. These three were joined by a fourth author, Madeleine Rubenstein, for the subsequent responses to McKitrick. McKitrick uses the shorthand "CABR" to refer to the four, and I've adopted the same style here.

• Ross's reply to the Deutsche Bank paper.
• CABR's response - Part 1, Part 2.
• Ross's subsequent response.

There's quite a bit of reading, but it's certainly worth investing the time. The work of the CABR team is, quite frankly, extraordinary. It is so bad I'm going to refrain from further comment.

Mann cannot live by science alone

Michael Mann is rapidly developing a full-time career as a media personality. After the WaPo article, the BAS article and the Britannia Blog interview comes an appearance at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing meeting.

After running through the evidence supporting human-caused climate change, Mann concluded that “there’s not just a hockey stick — there’s a hockey league.” Some scientific uncertainties do remain about climate change, such as the precise effects of clouds in a changing climate. “There are legitimate uncertainties,” Mann said, “but unfortunately the public discourse right now is so far from scientific discourse.”

Where's Mashey?

Michael Mann in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

I’ve been the subject of attacks by climate change deniers for more than a decade now, because of the prominent role that the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has played in the public discourse on climate change. This doesn’t mean that I’m numb to the outrageous attacks against me and other climate scientists. But I’m not surprised by anything anymore. There is nothing, it would seem, that the climate change denial industry isn’t willing to do in their attempts to thwart policy action to combat human-caused climate change. While the attacks have been tough to deal with at times, I’ve had a huge amount of support from my colleagues, other scientists, and ordinary citizens who have come out of the woodwork just to thank me for my contributions.

Michael Mann in Britannica Blog

I’ve been the subject of attacks by climate-change deniers for more than a decade now, because of the prominent role that the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has played in the public discourse on climate change. This doesn’t mean that I’m numb to the outrageous attacks against me and other climate scientists. But I’m not surprised by anything anymore. There is nothing, it would seem, that that the climate-change denial industry isn’t willing to do in their attempts to thwart policy action to combat human-caused climate change. While the attacks have been tough to deal with at times, I’ve had a huge amount of support from my colleagues, other scientists, and ordinary citizens who have come out of the woodwork just to thank me for my contributions.

H/T Shub in the comments.

Mann goes atomic

Another day, another Michael Mann interview. This is very much in the vein of other recent Mann appeareances, with much griping over "deniers" and whatnot.

It is odd to see all these "journals" - WaPo, New Scientist, and now the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - come running when Mann has a message to convey.

(H/T Shub in the comments)

Mann in Britannica

Michael Mann is interviewed for the Britannica blog.

The ordeal has nonetheless emboldened the climate change denial industry, including some members of the U.S. Congress, who are disingenuously exploiting the manufactured e-mail scandal to thwart efforts to pass meaningful climate change legislation.

Yawn. Wake me up when he's finished.

Mann in New Scientist

Michael Mann has been given space in New Scientist to say nothing, well, New.

I'D LIKE to say I was surprised when news broke a year ago that emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, had been hacked into and leaked, and that scientists' personal emails were being quoted out of context to disingenuously imply impropriety on their part. But I wasn't.

As so, so many people have noted, the emails are much, much worse in context.

Congress and Parliament

Over the weekend, the Guardian had a worried-sounding report about the possibility of there being a Republican-dominated Congress in the USA after the midterm elections.

Republican leaders have begun gathering evidence for sweeping investigations of Barack Obama's environmental agenda, from climate science to the BP oil spill, if as expected, they take control of the House of Representatives in the 2 November mid-term elections, the Guardian has learned.

I'm sure this is right, and it looks as if one of their targets will be the Hockey Team:

Republican leaders have also said they are looking for ways to revisit last year's climate science controversy, sparked by hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia.

There can be little doubt that any Congressional inquiry would be conducted in gory detail, by legislators who are keen to get to the bottom of the affair and who have been thoroughly briefed on the details. This may be a consideration for the Science and Technology Committee as they consider how to respond to the recent hearings.

UVa versus Cuccinelli redux

The Madison Eagle is reporting that the University of Virginia has applied to have Ken Cuccinelli's demand for Michael Mann's emails thrown out again.

Cuccinelli sent a third, more limited subpoena — known as a civil investigative demand — to UVa on Sept. 29. Cuccinelli says he is investigating Mann for possibly violating Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act because Mann received a $214,700 university grant while he was employed at UVa between 1999 and 2005.

On Wednesday, UVa’s lawyers filed papers requesting that Cuccinelli’s latest demand be “set aside” as well.

Media coverage of Wegman

	On the Wegman report	On the Wegman plagiarism allegations
WaPo	Nothing	GMU investigating climate change skeptic cited by Cuccinelli
USA Today	Nada	University investigating prominent climate science critic
Nature	Rien	Old claims of bad climate science countered by new claims of plagiarism

The nature of the animal

Has it struck anyone else as amusing that Nature is straight into the groove of reporting the Copygate story (as I'm told we must call the allegations against Wegman)? I mean, they didn't think the original Wegman report was worth mentioning.

Just saying...

Some thoughts on Wegman

I haven't had time to read John Mashey's report, but from what I can gather about today's excitements over the GMU investigation of Edward Wegman, there are two possibilities in play:

• Wegman et al are guilty of plagiarism; short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise
• Wegman et al are not guilty of plagiarism; short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise.

Is this right? Nobody is suggesting that the principal findings of the Wegman report - on the incorrect centring used by Mann - are incorrect, are they? They were, after all confirmed by the NAS panel and apparently also by David Hand during the Oxburgh panel's (brief) deliberations.

So I guess we are looking at quite an interesting investigation about how the norms of academic citation apply in expert reports (no doubt Donna LaF will be checking the IPCC reports over very thoroughly in coming days), but not much else.

Turn my back for 30 secs...

...and all hell breaks loose.

• Wegman being investigated for plagiarism
• Prominent physicist resigns and cites HSI as he goes
• HSI shooting up Amazon charts stateside

Very busy. May comment later.

Mann in WaPo

Michael Mann has an op-ed in the Washington Post.

My fellow scientists and I must be ready to stand up to blatant abuse from politicians who seek to mislead and distract the public. They are hurting American science. And their failure to accept the reality of climate change will hurt our children and grandchildren, too.

H/T Messenger

Cuccinelli tries again

The Washington Post is reporting that Virginia Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli has reapplied for the email correspondence of Hockey Stick maestro Michael Mann. Regular readers will remember that a judge quashed a previous demand, but left the door open for Cuccinelli to try again.

Cuccinelli has limited his demand to the e-mails and documents related to one state grant Mann received. The attorney general dropped requests for paperwork related to four other federal grants. But he expanded a section explaining why he sought the records, laying out in writing that he seeks the documents because Mann wrote two papers on global warming that "have come under significant criticism" and that Mann "knew or should have known contained false information, unsubstantiated claims and/or were otherwise misleading."

"Specifically, but without limitation, some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning that the result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect," the CID alleges.

(H/T Jiminy Cricket in the comments)