Conclusions In The Face Of Reality!

By Rich Kozlovich

My friend Maury Siskel, who signed off as Maury and Dog, was a retired scientist in Texas who passed some years ago and used to send me stuff every day. Mostly serious stuff, but occasionally he’d send a joke, a humorous story, or some cartoons - some funny and some political. The interesting thing about humorous stories is they so often reflect how we humans live our lives. Maury and Dog sent this story to me, and I think it’s reflective of why people fall for so much clabber from the world’s activists.

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts. "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me," said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, he heard, "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me ...."He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along.

"Come here quick!" said the boy, "You won't believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls!" The man said, "Beat it kid! Can't you see it's hard for me to walk?" When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery. Standing by the fence they heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me." The old man whispered, "Boy, you've been tellin' me the truth. Let's see if we can see the Lord!" Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord.

At last they heard, "One for you, one for me. That's all. Now let's go get those nuts by the fence and we'll be done...."They say the old man had the lead for a good half-mile before the kid on the bike passed him.

 

So, what’s the moral of this story? What message could I possibly take away from this? How about this!  People will fall for anything if they start out with the wrong conclusion already in their heads!

This tale has a young boy hearing an ambiguous and incomprehensible conversation and quickly arriving at a conclusion. If we conclude from this story he came from a Christian ethic we can understand his conclusion, but it was a conclusion he didn't bother to investigate. He panics and then runs off in an emotional state and involves another party, an old man. But he was just a kid you might say. True, but what really makes this story work is bringing in an old man. Someone who should have known better, and then having him fall for the same fallacious conclusion as the young boy, both becoming imbued with an irrational panic!

But what's the big deal - after all, this was just a story?  It’s not real! No, but the theme is very real! Unfortunately for humanity much of what poses as science in the real world follow the concept of this story - fallacious conclusions! Conclusions charged with emotion and filled with logical fallacies, such as:

• Anecdotal fallacy - using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound reasoning or compelling evidence.
•  Appeal to probability – is a statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).
•  Base rate fallacy – making a probability judgment based on conditional probabilities, without taking into account the effect of prior probabilities.
• Unwarranted assumption fallacy - The fallacy of unwarranted assumption is committed when the conclusion of an argument is based on a premise (implicit or explicit) that is false or unwarranted. An assumption is unwarranted when it is false.” Much of what impacts us from scientists involved in the world of activism ends up being conclusions in search of data to promote some cause or other.

Rachel Carson promoted the idea DDT was destroying the world’s bird population in her book Silent Spring. That was a lie and she had to know it. Rachel Carson is touted as a great scientist. She wasn’t a scientist at all.  She did no research. Carson was a writer with a science degree writing for the Fish and Wildlife Service writing about the research done by others. As a result we know she had to have access to the actual bird counts performed by the Audubon Society. She had to know the bird population of North American increased dramatically during the DDT years, including the Bald Eagle. And the robin was the most populous bird in North America. In short– she deliberately lied – and the world accepted it, as did most in the scientific community. People who had to know better!

Now we've "returned to the future", with the cycle of lies constantly being repeated by activists. They claim neonicotinoid pesticides cause Colony Collapse Disorder - that's a lie. As that lie finally unfolds they shift back to the Carson premise claiming neonicotinoids are killing birds - that's a lie too. They report "declines in certain groups and species of birds" but fail to report those declines preceded the introduction of neonics by decades. They also fail to report “other birds that rely on wetlands, such as waterfowl, have been increasing over the same period.” Clearly they should know better, but academics willingly jump on board with that same pattern of lies they accepted about DDT. It would appear fifty plus years of fact based reality haven't made a dent in their willingness to draw preconceived unfounded conclusions.

Let's try and get this once and for all time, the greenies lie!   Lies of commission and lies of omission! That's why logical fallacies play such a large role in their pronouncements. In his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell said logical fallacies:

"..........are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment."

This is true of virtually every issue promoted by the anti–everything activists, along with their myrmidons in government and science. The universities are now so addicted to government grant money they can no longer to be trusted regarding anything they promote or publish.

Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the original founders of the USEPA, says:

"....science is following the government money, and it’s a problem in all industries. We’ve totally distorted science, not all of it, but certainly at the university level. They know they have to say what the government wants to hear in the grant proposal process in order to get their money.

"U.S. EPA rules the roost, and if they’re not out to prove or say bad things about chemicals of all kinds, they won’t likely get the money. This is all driven by the environmental advocacy groups that control U.S. EPA today. It’s a horrible thing, and what it has done to science mostly at the academic level is bad. But U.S. EPA’s goal is to remove every useful chemical from the environment." (Read the entire interview here. RK)

Every year Retraction Watch lists hundreds of papers that have to be retracted, and many of them due to fraud. In one period in 2012 two hundred and thirty papers were retracted out of about fifteen hundred. And those were the ones caught. It's my belief there are far more that should be retracted and aren't because of the collusion among "scientists" of like persuasion. Government grant money has made science rich. When science becomes rich it becomes politics. When politics dominates science the term scientific integrity becomes an oxymoron. 

 

For decades the left has been screaming about anthropogenic global warming, and yet every prediction they made has failed.   Bill Gates was a big promoter of that nonsense, and now he's backing away, and being attacked by the only people making money off all this climate madness, the environmentalists.   This climate cult is killing Europe, "a poverty engine that is systematically draining Europe’s industrial base in global competition", as Ursula von der Leyen takes COP30 attendees, "on a journey to fairyland -- EU-style, dreamy, green-tinted, and disconnected from reality. The Commission President declared, with evident pride, that EU member states now have a “crystal-clear commitment” to reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent by 2040."

 

As a result of their unending embrace of this insanity European pension funds, that heavily invested in Net Zero projects are facing massive losses.  Projects that were predicted to fail by those on my side of this issue twenty years ago.  

 

De Omnibus Dubitandum – Question Everything. That's my personal motto, and is supposed to be the personal motto of every scientist in the world. Well, truth is no longer the Holy Grail of science, it's grant money. So what's to be done? Society must take oversight of science into its own hands, and that oversight should include serious penalties for fraud. When fraud is exposed, as was done in the now infamous Tulane endocrine disruption study, someone should be charged criminally. In the Tulane study not one person was charged with a crime. And as far as I can tell - that never happens in science - making science a Sacred Cow! That needs to be changed!

The term "citizen scientist" came into existence in 2014 and includes anyone “whose work is characterized by a sense of responsibility to serve the best interests of the wider community" or "'a member of the general public who engages in scientific work, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions'" an amateur scientist.” That’s who we all have to become, but without allowing ourselves to be enfolded into the scientific community and used as "helpers", as is the current defining trend. 

 

If citizen science is to be effective it should be a movement of heterodoxy, having the courage to stand up to the conventional wisdom and tell the world, "you're wrong, and I'm going to tell you why!"

We cannot entrust policy promoted by “scientists”, because we know the scientific community isn't trustworthy. If we don’t stand up to be counted we will all end up like the old man and the young boy, panic stricken and running like chickens with their heads cut off, which is just what the activists want. A society that's panic stricken, ignorant and compliant to a movement that's irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.

Updates On The Collapse Of The Climate Scam

April 26, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.

The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.

Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.” That list is now up to some 33 items and counting. The current version can be found here. Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with many of the items on Tom’s list. However, today I would like to feature a couple of items from Tom’s list that are important but may be less well known.

Item 3 on Tom’s list is that the funding of something called “NASA GISS” is likely to be terminated as part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For some unknown reason, GISS is part of NASA, and is located, of all place, in Manhattan, in an office building on upper Broadway near Columbia University. GISS is mainly known for producing a world temperature time series known as GISTEMP, which is systematically massaged and altered in ways to enhance the narrative of climate alarm. For more details than you will ever want to know about the data tampering, go to my 30+ part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”

Tom calls NASA GISS a “climate alarm shop,” which is accurate. For many years it was headed by crazed alarmist James Hansen, until his retirement in 2013. Since then the head has been Gavin Schmidt, who has proved to be Hansen’s equal in spreading alarm. GISS is best known for its regular press releases proclaiming the most recent month or year to be the “warmest ever.” Indeed, GISS’s most recent press release, from January 10, has the headline “2024 Was the Warmest Year on Record.” Since January 20 GISS has not issued any further press releases, which hopefully represents some message control getting exerted by the Trump administration.

Following Nelson’s links, it is not clear to me that the information about the impending defunding of GISS is completely definitive. One link goes to this Wall Street Journal piece from March 29, with the following quote:

It is at NASA, though, where Musk is making the biggest shift in an agency’s priorities to align them with his own—both financially and personally.  He is working to recast its programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.

If true, that would certainly be bad news for GISS; but the WSJ does not mention GISS specifically,. Then there is this piece by Larry Bell at Newsmax today, which uses the WSJ piece to reach the conclusion that GISS is necessarily on the chopping block. From Newsmax:

[As] to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures [Trump, Musk and new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacson] will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.

So on this item Nelson may be getting a little ahead of himself, but there is certainly a good basis to hope.

Item 9 on Nelson’s list is the final demise of one of the longest-running climate litigations, the one known as Juliana v. United States. This is the case that I have sometimes referred to as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” I have had many posts on it over the years, most recently on April 9, 2024.

The Juliana case was brought way back in 2012 in the federal District of Oregon. The plaintiffs asserted a “constitutional right” to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as a remedy that the court impose a plan to “phase out” all use of fossil fuels. My April 9, 2024 piece included a fairly lengthy summary of the proceedings to that time, which had included three visits to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

After the Ninth Circuit had found a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in a 2020 decision, it had remanded the case back to the District Court with instructions to dismiss; but the District Court instead had given the plaintiffs another chance to amend the complaint to get around the problems. And then the District Court was starting to get the case ready for trial. So after four more years of getting jerked around in the District Court, the government was back in the Ninth Circuit with a mandamus petition when I wrote that post a year ago.

The latest news is that the Ninth Circuit granted the mandamus petition, and now, finally, the Supreme Court has denied a petition for certiorari from the plaintiffs. From Reuters, March 24, 2025:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by 21 young people to revive a novel lawsuit claiming the U.S. government's energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change. The justices denied a request by the youth activists to hear their appeal of a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directing a federal judge in Oregon to dismiss the case after holding they lacked legal standing to sue.

So this one case is definitively over. The bad news is that there are many other similar and/or copycat cases out there kicking around in the courts. It will be a long time before they are all killed off, but at least this one is a start.

Check out Tom’s list for plenty more examples of the continuing, if painfully slow, demise of the climate scam.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXXIII

March 01, 2025 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

 

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which our government alters existing U.S. and worldwide temperature data in order to enhance an apparent warming trend, and thereby support a narrative of supposedly dangerous global warming. This is Part XXXIII of this series, which goes back to July 2013. A composite link to all 32 prior posts in this series can be found here.

As has been widely reported and discussed, the arrival of the new Trump 2.0 presidency is bringing disruption and change to many areas of a previously complacent federal bureaucracy. One of the areas where disruption appears to be hitting is an agency called NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is a part of the Department of Commerce. NOAA is the place where the world and U.S. temperature data are collected and compiled — and altered.

Will the new disruption shed some light upon the systematic alterations of our temperature data? It’s too early to tell, but there is reason to hope.

First up, CBS News reported just yesterday that massive layoffs have hit NOAA. The headline is “Hundreds of NOAA employees laid off in latest cuts to federal workforce.”

Hundreds of staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, were laid off Thursday. . . . A congressional source told CBS News the layoffs affected 880 NOAA employees. . . . Prior to Thursday's cuts, NOAA had about 12,000 staffers across the world.

880 staffers out of 12,000 would be about a 7+% cut. But then there’s this:

Former NOAA officials told CBS News earlier this month that current employees had been told to expect budget cuts of 30% and a 50% reduction in staff.

The CBS piece does not give any indication of whether the cuts are reaching the people who compile — and alter — the temperature data.

But is there reason to think that there may be some concern that the temperature alterations may come under scrutiny? Well, there is this February 25 piece from ABC News, headline “Yes, NOAA adjusts its historical weather data: Here’s why.” Suddenly, it is time to admit that the alterations are occurring:

When digging into conspiracies claiming that the federal agency “manipulates” its historical weather data, ABC News chief meteorologist and chief climate correspondent Ginger Zee was able to confirm that it was true — but that the routine, public adjustments to records happen for good reason. . . . NCEI [a branch of NOAA] adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published through its federal website.

It’s nice to see ABC News catching up to the Manhattan Contrarian in noticing that these adjustments are occurring. But I’m seriously put off by their calling claims that NOAA has been altering data “conspiracies.” Have they checked to see if the adjustments are quantitatively appropriate versus completely made up? Beyond noting that the changes are “peer reviewed,” the answer is no.

Others have checked to see if the adjustments are quantitatively justified, and the results so far have been damning for NOAA. Back in Part XXIX of this series (February 18, 2022), I noted the fundamental problem of NOAA’s adjustments:

NOAA/NCEI make no secret of the fact that they are altering the raw data, and they give what appear to be legitimate reasons for the adjustments (e.g., a given temperature station may have moved to a warmer location); but at the same time they make the details of the alterations completely opaque such that no outsider can directly assess the appropriateness of each adjustment.

My February 2022 piece reported on an article then just out from a group of 17 authors let by Peter O’Neill, Ronan Connolly, Michael Connolly and Willie Soon, published in the journal Atmosphere. My description of this article:

[The authors attempt] to reverse-engineer the adjustments to figure out what NCEI is doing, and particularly whether NCEI is validly identifying station discontinuities, such as moves or instrumentation changes, that might give rise to valid adjustments. The bottom line is that the adjusters make no attempt to tie adjustments to any specific event that would give rise to legitimate homogenization, and that many of the alterations appear ridiculous and completely beyond justification. . . .

The O’Neill, et al., article looks specifically into numerous individual stations, to see if the NOAA/NCEI adjustments correlate to legitimate things like station move, instrumentation changes, or the like. The result:

The more the authors looked, the less they found any relationship at all between valid station discontinuities and temperature adjustments inserted by NCEI’s computer algorithm.

My February 2022 piece goes specifically into several specific sites, where data exist as to specific station moves, but NOAA adjustments do not correspond to those moves. Here is the conclusions from the O’Neill, et al., paper itself:

[T]he results raise serious concerns over the reliability of the homogenized versions of the GHCN dataset, and more broadly over the PHA techniques, which do not appear to have been appreciated until now. As shown in Table 1, the homogenized GHCN datasets have been widely used by the community for studying global temperature trends.

If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.

I’ll await further revelations as the prior NOAA personnel get thrown out.

Another Candidate For The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?

March 30, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

I have written a long series of posts, now 32 in number, titled “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Go to this link if you want to read some or all of those posts. The fraud in question in those posts is the intentional alteration of pre-existing temperature (or, in one case, sea level) records to create a narrative of dangerous climate change that, without the alterations, lacks support in the raw data. In the most recent post in this series, number 32, I remarked, “No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.”

The climate-data-alteration fraud is hugely significant because the altered data provide the fundamental support for the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar effort of the Left to transform the world energy system, and ultimately the entire world economy. As the least expensive and most reliable forms of energy production get restricted, billions of people stand to see their lives impoverished to the extent of tens of thousands of dollars per year each. Is it remotely possible for any other fraud to come anywhere close to this one in significance?

As unlikely as it may seem, now along comes a second plausible candidate for the title. This fraud goes by the common acronym of “LNT,” which stands for the “linear no threshold” hypothesis of causation of diseases, particularly cancer, from environmental factors. The LNT hypothesis is the basis for huge swaths of enormously costly regulation, probably the large majority of environmental regulatory cost outside the sphere of “climate.” In a March 7 article in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, a guy named Edward Calabrese makes the case that the LNT hypothesis has been advanced by means of intentional fraud since its inception nearly 100 years ago. The title of the article is “Cancer risk assessment, its wretched history and what it means for public health.”

The LNT hypothesis theorizes that if a chemical or phenomenon (e.g., radiation) is established as dangerous at some dosage, no matter how high, then it must also be dangerous at small dosages, no matter how tiny. That conclusion follows if the relation of dose to danger is linear, with no threshold below which the danger goes away. A tiny dose may have a tiny danger, but as long as the dose/danger relationship is linear without threshold, then there is no safe dose.

Calabrese’s article provides a thorough history of the origins of the LNT hypothesis, and how it was advanced and promoted by the suppression of definitive contrary evidence. By the 1970s the LNT hypothesis had the backing of the National Academy of Sciences, and had been adopted by the EPA as the basis for regulating hazardous chemicals and radiation. The EPA continues to use the LNT approach in its regulatory efforts today, even as evidence accumulates that it is wrong and has been based on fraud from the outset. 

And thus the LNT hypothesis is the fundamental reason why nuclear power plants are so expensive and difficult to build; why no long-term solution for storage of spent nuclear fuel can be found; why EPA constantly proposes new regulations lowering allowable levels of emissions of chemical substances like mercury or PCBs; why pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate become the subject of multi-billion dollar liability disasters; and so forth.

The LNT hypothesis may at first seem intuitively likely to be true. For example, it is established that large doses of radiation can induce mutations that can lead to cancer. So why then couldn’t a single item of radiation, like one alpha particle or a single gamma ray, induce the mutation that initiates the disease? But Calabrese points out that the LNT hypothesis presumes that mutations are rare, and that the body has no capacity to repair ongoing mutations. What research has revealed is that, far from being rare, mutations are extremely common; and the body has a large capacity to repair them. Thus a small external source of mutations, like background or low-dose radiation, is easily dealt with, and if anything helps to stimulate and exercise the body’s natural repair system. Only when an external force causes very extensive mutations exceeding the body’s capacity to repair — i.e., when some threshold is crossed — does the external force increase the risk of cancer or other disease. From Calabrese, page 16:

[T]he most dominating cause of evolution is our metabolism which induces millions of mutations per day in each cell, with 99.99999% being repaired each day. If our repair systems were not so exceptionally good, life would not exist. Our metabolism produces about 200 million times more genetic damage events per cell per day than that induced by background radiation. There is no contest between the two. What this means is that our body is our biggest enemy; it also means that it is also our best friend. The body’s great repair mechanisms evolved not to prevent and repair damage from background radiation but to fix the damage that our metabolism induces each day. Thus, the body’s repair systems are designed by nature to protect our bodies against ourselves, with background radiation being a very tiny and insignificant factor.

So how did the LNT hypothesis gain such enormous sway, and become the basis for extensive and destructive government decision-making for decades? Calabrese points out that, by contrast to the threshold hypothesis, the LNT hypothesis has the potential to induce great fear in the public, and thus to stimulate large opportunities for funding and career advancement:

[T]he experts got the radiation and chemical mutation idea wrong from the start but they convinced many that they were correct and created debilitating fear in the population at the same time. We also learned that one of the reasons that these great scientists created such fears was to advance their careers and to get a constant flow of government grant monies.

Calabrese’s article is long (18 two-column single-space pages) and goes into detail of the names involved, the particular pieces of evidence suppressed along the way, the manipulation of members of committees to get to desired outcomes, and so forth. It has a lengthy bibliography, including references to multiple prior articles of his own where he has been piecing together and building the story of the LNT fraud for years. If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend this article.

Meanwhile, our government and its “experts” merrily go forth regulating on the basis of the LNT hypothesis, and imposing enormous costs on society for no benefit. From Calabrese’s Conclusion:

[The scientists who promoted the LNT hypothesis] were driven by ideological and self-serving professional biases that would lead to both falsifications of the research record and suppression of key scientific findings, all to establish the LNT model for hereditary and cancer risk assessment, replacing the threshold dose-response model. This troubling history has now been revealed in a long series of peer-reviewed publications by the author and summarized in a broad conversational manner in this Commentary. This troubling history remained hidden from regulatory agencies around the globe since its inception. These groups simply and uncritically accepted a flawed and corrupt history, assuming that it was accurate and reliable. Yet this path of historical ignorance led the US EPA, and other national regulatory agencies, to accept a dishonest foundation upon which to base and frame cancer risk assessment, terribly failing in their public service mission.

As of today, there is no evident retreat by EPA or other U.S. regulatory agencies from the LNT model. Fear sells, and they have no ability or incentive to self-correct.

Is this fraud even greater than the climate data alteration fraud? I still vote for that one as being the more significant. But reasonable people could disagree.

The complete fantasy of climate science

January 10, 2024 By Andrea Widburg

One of the things to remember about climate change madness is that it has all the scientific validity of the flat earth theory or the ancient medical belief in humors. That is to say, it’s a sealed universe driven by self-reinforcing faith and fantasy without any serious reality attached. The last two days have brought two new examples of the delusions and outright lies that drive the climate change narrative.

On the delusion side, we have Axios’s horror that the earth is within 1.5 degrees of the global warming limit set at the Paris Climate Accords, paired with its assurance that (and I’m quoting more accurately than Claudine Gay ever would), “The climate of 2023 was the hottest seen in at least 125,000 years…” (Emphasis mine.)  There are a couple of obvious problems with that article............To Read More....

• Apparently, houseplants now contribute to climate change January 9, 2024 Climate change fearmongering is chockful of bad ideas and terrible solutions to nonexistent problems.... 
• Taking a look at my hometown data I discover the very opposite of the ‘global warming’ narrative is true January 11, 2024 There is a great deal of difference between actual scientific data and the propaganda we see in the media pushing the radical green agenda every day....

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXXI

January 07, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

It’s been almost two years (February 20, 2022) since I added a post to this series. The reason is that global surface temperatures, as measured by NOAA and NASA, had decreased somewhat from 2020 highs, bringing about a hiatus in the otherwise endless drumbeat of propaganda from those agencies claiming “hottest month ever” or “hottest year ever.”

But then a strong El Niño early last year induced a small temperature increase several months later, picked up by the NOAA/NASA thermometer network. Result: 

From NOAA, October 16, 2023 (“Globally, September 2023 was the warmest September in the 174-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January–September) global surface temperature ranked as the warmest such period on record.”); NOAA, November 15 (“The planet added another record-breaking month to 2023, with October ranking as the warmest October in the 174-year global climate record.”); Axios, December 14 (“With November ranking as the warmest such month on record, NOAA is projecting greater than 99.5% odds that this year will be the world's warmest since instrument records began in the 19th century.”). Expect the official announcement that 2023 was the “hottest year ever” to come out some time around the middle of this month.

But do the data really establish that the most recent months and year are the hottest? Readers of the prior 30 posts in this series know that the data on which these claims are based have been subject to extensive adjustments by computer algorithms, in every case to lower the temperatures in the earlier years and raise the temperatures in the later years — thus introducing an artificial warming trend that does not exist in the original records. Those 30 prior posts have looked at both unadjusted and adjusted records from dozens of temperature stations around the world, documenting in particular the downward adjustments of the earlier temperatures, and especially those between about 1900 and 1950. As a few examples, this post from July 2013 documented temperature adjustments from the station in New York’s Central Park; this one from July 2014 discussed data adjustment from Kansas and Texas; this one from July 2015 discussed data adjustments from Maine, Ohio and Tennessee; this one from February 2017 discussed a station in Connecticut; this one from August 2017 discussed multiple examples from Australia; this one from January 2018 had multiple examples from upstate New York; and so on and so forth.

The work on which these posts has been based — tracking down unadjusted and adjusted data from particular stations and compiling them into useful graphic presentations — is laborious and time-consuming. It has been done for dozens of stations by a handful of independent researchers, notably, Tony Heller, Joseph D’Aleo, Paul Homewood and Willie Soon. But there are upwards of a thousand stations in the networks that NOAA and NASA use for their world surface temperature announcements. So far as I am aware, nobody has yet undertaken the enormous effort of showing the adjustments at all of those stations.

That may be about to change. Yesterday, at his website Real Climate Science, Heller had a very brief post with the headline “What Did They Do Wrong?” The entire text of the post reads as follows:

I have developed new software to analyze the global temperature record. The party is over for blade of the hockey stick fraud.

In addition to that text, the post also includes a brief ( 2 1/2 minutes) video by Heller, in which he announces his new project. He says that he has now developed software that enables him to quickly analyze the unadjusted and adjusted data for particular temperature stations anywhere in the world, and will be publicizing the results of his analysis over future months.

As a teaser, Heller puts up graphs of the unadjusted and adjusted temperature records for a station at Liberia, Costa Rica, in Central America. As should surprise no one, the adjusted data show substantial downward adjustments to cool earlier data and thus make the current data appear to be the warmest, when in the unadjusted data earlier years are warmer. From Heller’s video, here are the unadjusted data for the Liberia, Costa Rica station:

And here are the adjusted data:

If you compare the two, you will note first that the most recent temperatures are identical in the two graphs. 

A recent peak in June 2023 is the highest point in the “adjusted” graph, at something just under 86 deg F; and the “unadjusted” data point for the same month is at the exact same level. But if you go back even a few years to the 2015-2019 interval, suddenly the “adjusted” temperatures are all well below the 86.17 deg line, while several of the “unadjusted” temperatures are well above. 

And the farther back you go the crazier it gets. Between 2005 and 2013 there are 13 months above 86.17 deg in the “unadjusted” record, but none even close to that level in the “adjusted” record. 

Then, in the period of February 1997 to December 2005, in the “unadjusted” record there are 12 months above the 88.89 deg level, two of which are above 91.61 deg — and all of these data have magically disappeared entirely in the “adjusted” record. 

Somehow in the “adjusted” record, the temperature of about 86 deg from earlier this year stands as the hottest since the record began, while in the “unadjusted” record there are about two dozen months that have higher temperatures, some by as much as about 6 degrees.

In his video, Heller says that he plans to ask the NOAA temperature adjusters what exactly the Costa Rica weather people did wrong to get all of their readings for this station from 1997 to 2005 deleted. Good luck getting any response to that. Hey, those readings don’t support the official narrative!

Heller says that he plans to use his new software for many forthcoming posts disclosing the fraudulent data adjustments that result in the regular “warmest month ever” proclamations. If so, I will be happy to amplify his work at this blog to the extent I can.

Blast From the Past: Scientific Integrity is an Oxymoron

By Rich Kozlovich

I originally posted this on Thursday, December 15, 2011, titled, "Greenism: The Science of Smoke and Mirrors", saying:

 As I have said, my primary theme for this week is the idea that environmentalism has made scientific integrity an oxymoron!  The goal of the green movement is to get their 'truth' out.   No matter how many lies they have to tell.  The link would not work to the information below, but the video does.  RK

"Enviromental Scientist Caught On Video Faking Data - Dr. Ann Maest is a managing scientist at Straus Consulting, and she's the go to expert on all things groundwater. In the press release announcing her reappointment to the National Academy of Sciences, they mention that she is focused on the environmental effects of mining and petroleum extraction and production, and, more recently, on the effects of climate change on water quality.  Maest is in high demand as an expert for those looking to stop oil and mineral exploration. She's also heavily used by the federal government, even though after new details about her past work are coming to light as a result of a lawsuit.........  As part of their lawsuit, Chevron obtained through discovery, outtakes from a documentary called "Crude" that show Donziger and Maest colluding ignore their own findings and make up some new unsubstantiated claims. Watch this:" 

 

"...Of course when you're endeavoring to pull off a multi-billion dollar legal heist in a banana republic you don't stop at just inventing damages; you stack the deck on the judicial side as well, since that just requires a little "donation."'

"What Chevron has been able to show from the out takes and records obtained is the Maest and her firm drafted substantial portions of the report of the independent expert, Richard Cabrera, who they allege Donziger was instrumental in getting appointed to do the court order study of the alleged environmental damage. Sounds like a criminal enterprise to extort, right? That's what Chevron thinks, and it's why they're suing under RICO."

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud -- Lazard Edition

December 17, 2023/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott. In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

Among the big players in this game, one that stands out is the investment bank Lazard. As an investment bank, Lazard makes its money — in its case quite big money — by causing deals to happen between investors and project developers. Investment banks often promote themselves by issuing reports on conditions for investment in various economic sectors. In Lazard’s case, back around 2008, they decided to become the gurus of green energy investing by issuing annual reports on what they call the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE. They have continued to issue the LCOE reports annually since then, so I’m gathering that this must be quite a lucrative business. Here is a link for the most recent Lazard LCOE Report, which came out earlier this year in April 2023.

The Lazard LCOE Reports are famous for their repeated conclusion that wind turbines and solar panels have become the cheapest sources for generation of electricity. When you read someone in climate advocacy journalism reciting that talking point, most often the source of the point is one of these Lazard reports. In a post back in March 2019, title “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?,” I put together a sample list of half a dozen outlets citing Lazard LCOE studies for the proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity. Those sources included, for example, the Financial Times, CBS News, Australia’s governmental research arm CSIRO, Axios, Think Progress, and others.

For the first decade or so of its LCOE reports, Lazard calculated the cost of energy from wind and solar without including any cost at all for the backup or storage needed to turn those sources into a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electrical grid. But somewhere in there Lazard starting adding to its reports some additional pages on what they call the Levelized Cost of Storage, or LCOS. Remarkably, after adding in the cost of storage, Lazard still seems to be coming to the conclusion that wind and solar generation are usually cheaper than generation from fossil fuels, or at the very least they are competitive. Could this possibly be right?

The Lazard 2023 LCOE Report is presented almost entirely in the form of charts and graphs. There is very little text, and you will struggle to try to figure out what assumptions underlie the conclusions. (From the website Watt-Logic, commenting on the 2023 Lazard LCOE report, and particularly on Lazard’s calculation of the cost of “firming” intermittent renewable generation with storage: “It’s actually quite hard to work out what’s going on here.”; from Andy May at Watts Up With That, December 11, “[T]hey bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”)

With that introduction, here is the key chart from the 2023 Lazard LCOE Report giving figures for cost of wind and solar power with “firming,” supposedly compared to the cost of generating electricity from natural gas “CT” or natural gas “combined cycle.”

By all means take your time to try to digest all of that. If you go to the Lazard Report for assistance, you will not find any useful text beyond what is there in the footnotes at the bottom of the chart. I read the chart as putting the “levelized cost” of “firming” intermittent wind and solar generation at as little as $23/MWh in the Midwest, up to a maximum of $98/MWh in California. Add this cost of “firming” to the “unsubsidized” cost of wind and solar generation, and you get a total for “firmed” power from wind and solar that is mostly within the range (and often toward the lower end) of costs for generation from combined cycle natural gas plants, and at most toward the low end of the range of costs for generation from natural gas “peaker” plants. In other words, while wind and solar are not proven to always be “the cheapest” after including the costs of “firming,” they are generally toward the cheaper end of the range of costs from natural gas generation, and certainly not out of the range of affordability.

But wait a minute. Where did they get these costs of “firming”? These costs appear ridiculously low compared to amounts that I find in my December 2022 energy storage Report. Study those fine print footnotes all you want, and I do not think you are going to find the answer. Can we find anything anywhere else in this Lazard document to help us understand the difference?

After spending some time trying to figure this out, the best I come up with is this chart from page 17 of the Lazard LCOE Report:

This appears to be the set of assumptions they apply for how energy storage will be used to “firm” the intermittent wind and solar generation. Let’s pluck a few key numbers out of this chart:

• In the column headed “Storage Duration (Hours),” we find a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. Four hours of duration just happens to be the norm for the capability of today’s most cost-effective battery storage technology, lithium ion batteries. Unfortunately, the studies that I feature in my energy storage Report calculate that the number of hours duration of storage needed to fully “firm” a system using only wind and solar generation would be at least one month (720 hours), and potentially two to three months (1440 to 2160 hours). Lazard would seem to be off by a factor of somewhere between 180 and 540 of what would be needed.
• Then there is a column headed “90% DOD Cycles/Day.” In each case the entry is “1.” I interpret this to mean that whatever battery we are dealing with here is assumed to have one full charge/discharge cycle per day. The next column tells us they are assuming 350 days per year, so therefore they are assuming that the batteries cycle 350 times per year. So the batteries can spread their costs over 350 cycles per year, or 7000 cycles in 20 years. Unfortunately, as shown in my energy storage Report, due to seasonal patterns of the wind and sun, much of the battery storage capacity needed to “firm” a wind/solar generation system will only go through one full charge and discharge cycle per year. Thus, for this part of the storage capacity, Lazard would appear to be understating the cost of the storage by a factor of 350.

Am I maybe interpreting this chart incorrectly? Perhaps. The Lazard people certainly don’t make it easy to figure out their assumptions. But the two issues that I have identified would be about right in their effects to explain the differences between the costs produced by Lazard, and the costs that I estimated, where the difference is about one to two orders of magnitude (that is, a factor of between 10 and 100).

Now, consider the question of whether cost figures in the Lazard Report are the result of rank incompetence versus intentional deception. Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation? Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?

Scientific Fraud: Anthropogenic Climate Change

By Rich Kozlovich

In March of 2011 "Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise. Former National Post & Toronto Star columnist, past vice president of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association",  posted this article,  The Strange Case of Sari Kovats noting it was "astonishing how a mere student became an IPCC guru.  And here's the story.

In 1994, Kovats was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter that examined how climate change might affect human health. She was 25 years old. Her first academic paper wouldn't be published for another three years. It would be six years before she'd even begin her doctoral studies and 16 years before she'd graduate…..So when are Kovats, the IPCC, and the British government all going to admit that she is far from being a world-class scientific expert? Will she resign her position as coordinating lead author - or will the new edition of the climate bible be irretrievably tainted by her participation?

Let's face it, all this anthropogenic climate change has exposed this one incontrovertible fact:  Grant money has made scientific integrity is an oxymoron!  There is a lot of stuff that can be gleaned from that paragraph you may find amazing. Probably the thing I find most amazing is that so many are amazed at these exposures. I don’t find any of this amazing at all, because it was obvious to me, and many others, that the IPCC was founded in corruption in the beginning, it is foundering in corruption now, and will eventually collapse under the weight of its corruption.

The only difference between when it was formed and now; is that now everyone knows, at least for those who actually care about truth. The important thing to realize is this; when someone so far from the center of information as I am can see what is going on, this question must be asked:  

 

How can leaders in the political, scientific and journalistic realms not see what is going on, or not report truthfully what is going on? 

 

The answer is clear, the corruption of science is ubiquitous.

From the very beginning it was obvious that the claims of the IPCC would fail the test of history. Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. I have said this often in the past and nothing that I have seen has changed my mind:  Everything you see on the news, everything you read in the newspapers and everything you learned in school is a lie. Not necessarily lies of commission, although they are guilty of that also, but mostly lies of omission. If scientists won’t practice the first rule of science, De Omnibus Dubitandum, (Everything is to be questioned) then ordinary people must do so.  Question everything, including them.  Especially them.

No matter what anyone says; you can’t marginalize the truth!  You can suppress it; you can ignore it; you can avoid it; you can attempt to undermine it; you can attempt to subvert it; you can attempt to organize against it; you can even laugh at it - but if we have the courage and the fortitude to stand and confront the lies, irrespective of the personal costs, the truth will stand the test of time.  

 

When you murder someone the case is never closed. The same holds when you murder the truth. No matter how long it takes, truth is defended despite all the calumnies heaped on those who stand firm against the lies and the propaganda intended to persuade those who have been deceived.  

 

Here is the link to the more current pieces on what I've titled The Mann Chronicles, and below are past articles I've stored on Michael Mann from 2014 to 2008. 

 

The Mann Chronicles

 

The Inventor of the Global Warming Hockey Stick Doubles Down - By S. Fred Singer January 21, 2014 - Professor Michael Mann, the inventor of the Hockeystick temperature graph, had a contentious editorial essay in the January 17th issue of the New York Times. [The Hockeystick graph purports to show that temperatures of the last thousand years declined steadily -- until the 20th century, when there was a sudden large rise.]

I am using the word "inventor" on purpose, since the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality. It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000 AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800. In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000 AD to 1980, where the proxy temperature suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.

Since its publication in 1998 and 1999, the hockeystick graph has had a turbulent history. It was adopted by the IPCC (UN-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 3rd Assessment Report (2001) to support the claim of a major anthropogenic global warming (AGW) during the 20th century. Since then, the IPCC has distanced itself from the graph, which has been completely discredited.....To Read More......

The Continuing Chronicles of Mann  Posted in Junkscience.com by Steve Milloy Mann Sycophant: ‘There is a trend to threaten climate science promoters with death, imprisonment, execution, etc’

An Epic Week of Success For PSI  It’s been an extraordinary week for PSI both in the news and behind the scenes. A dramatic twist in a high profile lawsuit, the publication of a new paper set to trigger a scientific paradigm shift, plus a membership surge bringing eminent scientists into the fold - including one Nobel Science Prize nominee.

 

The biggest media story concerns developments in the Climategate scandal involving disgraced Penn. State University researcher, Dr. Michael Mann and our very own chairman, Dr. Timothy Ball. It seems Ball is on the brink of a sensational courtroom victory over Mann, who first stole onto the world stage thanks to his ‘hockey stick’ graph trumpeted across the world in 2001 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mann’s graph was widely cited as the smoking gun proving catastrophic man-made global warming.

Temperatures boiled over when Ball fearlessly declared that Mann belongs “in the state pen, not Penn. State.” That quip incensed the thin-skinned Mann into filing a libel suit against Ball in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Canada.

Hard to believe that was almost 18 months ago! But now the tables have turned and last Friday Mann was exposed for the crime of perjury. It transpired that he lied when making sworn statements under oath that he was a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside former Vice President, Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC.

Climate scientist Michael Mann sues over comparison to child molester  Controversial climate scientist Michael Mann, who helped raise global warming’s profile by representing temperatures as a rapidly escalating “hockey stick,” has filed a defamation lawsuit against skeptics at the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

 

Breaking: Climate Scientist Michael Mann Lawyers Up after Penn State Child Sex Link Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University today (July 21, 2012) announced his intention to pursue legal action against The National Review Online (NRO) and popular right-wing writer, Mark Steyn over their article `Football and Hockey.' 

 

Mann versus Steyn: popcorn time! Today I'm launching a fund and I wonder whether anyone would like to contribute. Please, I implore you all, PLEASE chip in to help finance Professor Michael Mann's suit for defamation against sinister, right-wing Canadian climate-change denier Mark Steyn and the fascist-denialist organ for which Steyn writes, National Review Online!

 

More on Mikey Versus...? Well, Take Your Pick!  For my regular readers I apologize for not posting since Wednesday. Unfortunately I

Climate High-Sticking: The Unmanly Mann Oh this is going to be fun. Michael Mann—he of the iconic climate change “hockey stick” that purports to prove man-made climate change by displaying how global temperature is at its highest level in 2000 years (somehow making the Medieval warm period disappear)—is threatening to sue National Review and Mark Steyn (and perhaps Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars) for libel for questioning whether Penn State’s exoneration of Mann over the “Climategate” scandal was as self-serving as their investigation of Jerry Sandusky. Rand Simberg wrote in a blogpost post that “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”…. As we see now with Mann, people from his scientific circle can dish it out to people like Lomborg, but can’t take it….. As I say, deposing this entire happy band of climateers will be great fun.

Get Lost - My response to Michael Mann  So, as you might have heard, Michael Mann of Climategate infamy is threatening to sue us. Mann is upset — very, very upset — with this Mark Steyn Corner post, which had the temerity to call Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” The Steyn post was mild compared with other things that have been said about the notorious hockey stick, and, in fact, it fell considerably short of an item about Mann published elsewhere that Steyn quoted in his post…… He’s going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world. In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn’t stopped him before.

Zone of Reality: Mann Versus Ball  On Sunday I posted "I Will Huff and Puff and Blow Your House Down" discussing these lawsuits by Mann against Ball and Steyn. I was watching this from the beginning but nothing happened for quite a while. It is surely now coming to a head. John O'Sullivan has posted some worthwhile information succinctly outlining the issues and what appears to me to be an eventual outcome that can only be devastating to the hucksters of global warming, the socalled 97% of scientists who concur with their views, the governments of the world who have jumped on this bandwagon and the IPCC....Oh....and Mann too!

New SLAAPstick Courtroom Capers as Michael Mann Falls Foul Again Media war of words erupts in anticipation of another global warming courtroom battle. We take time to see how latest events connected to Climategate’s controversial scientist Michael Mann stack up alongside Mann’s legal shoot out versus Dr. Tim Ball.

Last week Pennsylvania State University (PSU) popped back up on the notoriety radar thanks to lingering fallout over their jailed child sex felon, football coach Jerry Sandusky. PSU’s other alleged bad boy, climatologist Michael Mann, came out with all legal guns blazing after popular right-wing writer, Mark Steyn and the National Review wrote of the parallels in the “whitewashes” PSU investigations performed separately on Sandusky and Mann. The recent and hard-hitting Freeh Report is damning of PSU’s hierarchy.

Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli Versus the Judiciary of Virginia There are a large number of people who knew from the beginning that this whole Anthropogenic Global Warming scare was bogus. The one thing the warmers and press all kept pointing to was the Hockey Stick Graph as an absolute confirmation of their claims. Unfortunately the only people who had access to the data as to how they arrived at these numbers were those who were part and parcel of the scare mongering. When asked why the data wasn't released for open peer review (which is the standard to show the science is accurate) they refused; stating they had worked on this for years and they weren't going to turn it over to people who just wanted to rip it apart. But that is what peer reviewers are supposed to do. That is what they have done forever. That is what peer review is all about. For them to make such a statement is a tacit acknowledgement that what they produced wasn’t science; and when the federal government forced them to release that material it was shown to be junk science.

What the Cuccinelli Climategate case really means  Don't waste your time reading the liberal press about this one. The Virginia Supreme Court issued a decision in the case in which Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli sought emails from the University of Virginia about Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, made famous by the Climategate fiasco. Cuccinelli issued a subpoena under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA), which authorizes investigations of suspected fraud to obtain taxpayer money. The court ruled that Cuccinelli could not get the emails. But the decision was not about academic freedom or anything like it, although the liberal press would like you to believe that it was. In fact, the decision highlights one of the many ways that government is allowed to break the law. FATA allows the Attorney General to investigate suspected fraud used to obtain state funds. The Attorney General may issue a civil investigation demand, which is essentially a subpoena, to any "person" suspected of using fraud to obtain state funds. Any "person" includes any corporation. The University of Virginia is incorporated.....

Will Warmists Face Justice for their Deceptions? This originally appeared here. I recommend following the links, especially the link dealing with the Mann’s legal issues. RK

 
Desperate Climate Scientists File Second Lawsuit Against Top Skeptic  - Mann, the infamous creator of the now discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph was once the darling of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a tax hungry government funded organization that blames mankind for raising global temperatures by 0.7 degrees during the 20th Century. Now he is desperate to hit back at his critics with the help of Big Green's immense financial resources. Below we examine the shady background of Professor Mann and explain what Ball must do to defeat this latest legal challenge. The ascent of Mann
Climate Realists has an interesting article (see link below) that looks at the extraordinary rise to prominence of the hockeystickmeister, Michael Mann. This is one of the angles of the hockey stick story that is still something of a mystery - how did such an obscure scientist, one who had just completed his PhD, get to be lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC?

Headline Story: Did a Secret Climate Deal Launch the Hockey Stick Fakery? By John O’Sullivan, guest post at Climate Realists …………."So what miracle turned this problematic researcher’s life around?  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."........If my name were Ken Cuccinelli I would want to chase down one or two grant and funding sources; with proof of collusion a case for fraud holds water. That's treble damages and Virginia’s taxpayers will be sitting $1.5 million better off plus expenses.

 Ken Cuccinelli v. 810 academics  - Academic freedom is not a license to commit fraud Carr and 809 other Virginia scientists and academics signed a petition launched by the activist Union of Concerned Scientists, protesting Commonwealth Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation of former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann. The American Association of University Professors likewise opposes Cuccinelli, who is seeking documents from UVA, to determine whether there are grounds to prosecute Mann for violating the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, by presenting false or misleading information in support of applications for state-funded research.  Carr claims Cuccinelli is attempting to “drown out” scientific debate.” Others have accused the AG of conducting a “witch hunt,” engaging in “McCarthyite” tactics, and “restricting academic freedom.”

Split Court Decision for Michael Mann in Global Warming Legal Battle Virginia Supreme Court renders a verdict that permits continued suppression of evidence in the Michael Mann ‘hockey stick’ graph controversy – but only just. One dissenting judge scuppers the climatologist’s hopes of yet another global warming whitewash and skeptics remain upbeat…..

 Harvard vs. University of Virginia…not even close!  I first discovered this at Greenie Watch and have since learned that his comments also appeared in the Letters to the Editor section of the Wall Street Journal on Friday, September 3, 2010. I would like to thank Dr. Battig for allowing me to reproduce his comments. He originally posted this on his site, Climate Reality on August 31st, 2010. Dr. Bettig has strong views regarding the need for scientific integrity and has posted other comments regarding this particular issue in an article titled, Why is UVa Hiding M.Mann Behind a Legal Smoke Screen? (published in the Charlottesville “THE HOOK” on June 24, 2010.) RK

Scandal and Insanity at Penn State - In a repeat of Copenhagen, on the eve of the Durban climate change gabfest, someone released another horde of emails from alarmist climate researchers, including Dr. Michael Mann, whose infamous “hockey stick” was headlined in the 2001 IPCC report to justify the Kyoto agreement and demands that nations slash fossil fuel use and economic growth.  Meanwhile, back on Dr. Mann’s campus, Pennsylvania State University was confronting the sordid Jerry Sandusky affair. Sports Illustrated summarized the Augean Stables task in an article titled “Missteps at every turn: Efforts to clean up Penn State reveal how deep the institutional problems lie.”

A new hockeystick?  Sunday, September 7, 2008 lifted with permission from Greenie Watch - After years of headscratching, Michael Mann thinks he has finally devised a new set of statistical procedures that will revive his discredited "hockeystick" graph. An email about it from John A [johna.sci@googlemail.com] below: The BBC in their traditional position of custodian of climate science orthodoxy, have announced that Michael Mann has produced yet another Hockey Stick:

A new study by climate scientists behind the controversial 1998 "hockey stick" graph suggests their earlier analysis was broadly correct. Michael Mann's team analysed data for the last 2,000 years, and concluded that Northern Hemisphere temperatures now are "anomalously warm".

Yep, all the omens are good.

In their latest study, Dr Mann's group collated more than 1,200 proxy records - the majority from the Northern Hemisphere - and used different statistical methods to analyse their cumulative message. We used two different methods that are quite complementary in the assumptions they make about data, so that provides a test of the sensitivity of data to the methods used," he told BBC News. "We also made use of a far wider network of proxy data than previously available. "Ten years ago, the availability of data became quite sparse by the time you got back to 1,000 AD, and what we had then was weighted towards tree-ring data; but now you can go back 1,300 years without using tree-ring data at all and still get a verifiable conclusion."

Of course Dr Mann made this claim of robustness to the removal of dendroclimatic records last time, which turned out to be a flat out lie: The Hockey Stick shape disappeared when the bristlecone pines of Western Colorado were removed as Mann himself knows because he tested for their removal and then failed to report that salient and inconvenient truth (ie the CENSORED directories).