Michael Mann repudiates the climate emergency

When the proxy data that he was using came into the modern era they clashed with thermometer records. They showed cooling but the thermometers showed warming.

Mann “fixed” this by abandoning the proxies and splicing actual temperature records in, without revealing the reason.

This is why I call him “Piltdown Mann”. The one “n” Piltdown Man is a scandal where an amateur paleoanthropologist claimed to have found the “missing link” between man and ape but it was a forgery where a modern human cranium had been combined with an orangutang jaw and teeth.

Mann’s technique is similarly defective and deceptive.

If the proxies don’t measure real temperature now, how could they be supposed to be measuring real temperature in the past? The whole proxy exercise had obviously failed and should have been abandoned.

If you want a further, very succinct reference on the Hockey Stick, I can only refer you to the judge in the case of Mann v Simberg and Steyn which ran in court 132 in the District of Columbia Superior Court last week. Mann sued the two defendants for some very caustic comments about his hockey stick. Presiding Justice Irving said:

As to Mr. Steyn, his statements about the bogus, fraudulent nature of the Hockey Stick graph in his mind were substantially and entirely true...

So I approached the opportunity to review Mann’s latest book with caution. A man who will mislead his scientific colleagues is likely to be even less reliable with the general public.

I was not disappointed, and at the same time I was.

On the one hand there were propositions that are surely false, while on the other there were insights that are most probably true. And then the final twist, where Mann showed himself to be relaxed about the near-term prospects for the world, unlike, say, prophets of doom like Greta Thunberg.

This is where he joins the ranks of what is being termed the “new denialists”, which seems to be a term to cover anyone who takes a “Don’t Panic” approach to changes in the climate.

The book is an example of the seductiveness of capitulating to expert opinion. Mann has a theory of everything, and that is that CO2 is the thermostat that controls earth’s temperature. Except he occasionally allows for the sun to have a role at times through Milankovitch cycles.