5 years later and Mark Steyn’s article on Climategate still makes me laugh, perhaps that is why Michael Mann is suing Steyn, specifically.
I’d be specifically mad at him too if I were an egomaniacal huckster and was publicly de-pantsed like this.
The e-mails of “Andy” [Revkin, NY Times editor} (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose Climate Audit website exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph), “Andy” writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle:
I’m going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does! “Re, your point at the end — you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”
And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you’re as big a dupe as Ed Begley or Revkin.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask “Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?” Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The “consensus” warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as “peer-reviewed” if it’s published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar-bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and “Andy” Revkin would still have wandered out glassy-eyed into the streets droning “Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled . . . ”
ht/ just the tip
Only a few writers could publicly take on a lawsuit this headache-inducing so deeply embedded in a scientific subject this arcane with so many intellectual land mines and get so many laughs out of it. Maybe Levin or Burge or Feynman (RIP), but Steyn was born for this. May he rock on and fleece the pants off that lying sack of shit, Mann.
Funny you said “tree ring”…
For decades, people have studied the design and craftmanship of Antonio Stadivari, trying to discover what made his violins so superior to any violins made since. The prevailing theory is that the credit for the quality of his instruments goes to the Little Ice Age. Many years of consistently lower temperatures caused trees to grow at a slower rate, resulting in higher wood density and ultimately superior sound transmission.
Maybe we can look forward to some exceptionally fine C.F. Martins coming out in the near future.
@Tux, Maybe Martin but Obama and his gestapo, err, EPA are trying to put others out of business.
Mann is one of the reasons I throw the alumni association solicitations in the trash. I consider giving a gift as an act of condoning his academic dishonesty.