I Guess The Trib WON'T be Correcting Itself

Oh geez. This is gonna take some time, my friends, as there are not one but two wingnut anti-climate science editorials in today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Let me look at the first editoral and I'll tackle the second editorial later.

Let's start (yet again) with Michael Mann. About a week ago, Mann was exonerated by a panel of Penn State scientists of the fourth and the final charge against him: that he violated the university's research misconduct policy.

How do I know this? Because it says so in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:

A Penn State University panel of scientists on Thursday exonerated one of the school's researchers of accusations that his work on climate change violated the university's research misconduct policy.

Wait there's more. The next two paragraphs from Mike Cronin's piece read:

After a four-month investigation, five university professors unanimously cleared professor Michael Mann, a climate scientist and one of several hundred researchers sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Penn State investigators concluded in a report released yesterday that "Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."

So what do we make of this editorial from today's Trib? In it - tucked at the tail end of a late paragraph - we find:

Only now -- after those Climategate e-mails documented improper data manipulation, and after other setbacks for the Church of Climatology's credibility -- does Mann border on 'fessing up. Perhaps his highly questionable "exoneration" by Penn State is loosening his lips.

Unpublished on the Trib's editorial page are any mention of the British Panel's exoneration of all the scientists involved in the so called "Climategate":

A British panel on Wednesday exonerated the scientists caught up in the controversy known as Climategate of charges that they had manipulated their research to support preconceived ideas about global warming.

Doesn't Scaife's braintrust read the news? Don't they read the news that's published in their own paper?

I guess not.

But back to the editorial. Here's how it starts:

The faith of Penn State University's Michael Mann in Church of Climatology dogma seems to be wavering. Hallelujah!

The London Daily Telegraph reports Mr. Mann recently told the BBC he'd always made clear there were "uncertainties" in his work. "Always?" Seems not. Still, that statement surely sounds like he's having second thoughts.

Speaking about his infamous "hockey stick" global-temperature graph, Mann also told the BBC: "I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate."

The point is that even Mann is having doubts about the "Church of Climatology."

Except he's not. Take a look at where the quotation is from:


At 1:10 Mann is asked:

Do you think you've ever exaggerated the certainty of man-made climate change?

To which Mann answers:

No. I think that the evidence for human-caused climate change is overwhelming.

So yea, he's "wavering." Obviously.

Like any true dogma , no amount of evidence can ever shake the faith of a true believer.

Considering how deeply entrenched the Trib's editorial board is to its own anti-science dogma, I don't think we'll be seeing a correction/clarification any time soon.