Scaife's Braintrust Just Can't Help It

So stuck with their anti-science narrative, they have to skew everything around it in order to maintain their myth.

The latest example:

Professor, environmentalist and best-selling author James Lovelock once was regarded as the father of climate studies. But now he's an extremist in the eyes of leading climate cluckers for having the audacity to expose their faith as "alarmist."

Oh, the author of "The Revenge of Gaia" and preacher of global-warming Armageddon still believes that climate change is occurring, but not as fast as previously postulated.

"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium," Mr. Lovelock, 92, tells MSNBC. Temperatures have remained constant "whereas (they) should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."

So much for man-made influences.

To the Church of Global Warming, that's heresy

As part of the "Church of Global Warming" metaphor, the editorial is titled:

Warming excommunication: Who's the 'extremist'?

So Lovelock committed "heresy" and has thus been been "excommunicated."  Who's doing the excommunicating?

Luckily the braintrust has some names ready:

Among them, Penn State's Michael Mann, inventor of the discredited "hockey stick" global-temperature graph, who in an email to LiveScience insisted that Lovelock's views were never in line with "mainstream" science.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., was less kind: "The fact is (Lovelock) knows little or nothing about climate change."

So, now Lovelock is an extremist? For all its "settled science," the climate-change club sure is an intolerant group.

In order to remain faithful to anti-science, the braintrust has to maintain that Mann's "hockey stick" was wrong.

But it's right - the National Research Council says so. Like any zealot, the braintrust just can't except reality when it conflicts with their zealously held beliefs.  And that's sad.  Frightening and sad.

Let's move on to that Livescience quotation from Mann.  It's here.  This is what Mann actually said (remember the editorial is about how Lovelock's been "excommunicated."):

Lovelock's views were not in line with mainstream climate science to begin with, Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist, pointed out.

"As I see it, Jim's views were at the alarmist end of the spectrum of scientific opinion, so frankly I see him largely as just coming back into the fold of mainstream thinking," Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience. "That having been said, he has made some statements which appear to reflect a misunderstanding of what the science has to say." [emphasis added.] 

Far from excommunicating Lovelock, Mann's saying that while Lovelock was wrong about lotsa stuff, he's now closer to being right.

Only in the down is up world of Scaife's braintrust could that be excommunication for heresy.

How Can There Be A "Climategate II" When There Was No Climagegate I?

It took some time, but Scaife's braintrust over at the Tribune-Review finally caught up to the rest of the anti-science crowd and commented on the latest batch of hacked emails from East Anglia.

For some reality-based background, we turn to the Guardian:

A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Keep that last sentence in mind.

But let's get back to what Scaife's braintrust really wants to discuss:

Among the correspondence, as reported by author James Delingpole in The Wall Street Journal, is an e-mail from Penn State global-warming guru Michael Mann: "I've been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose (Steve) McIntyre and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."

That would be the Canadian ex-mining engineer who exposed Mr. Mann's flawed "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. Rather than "prove" Mr. McIntyre wrong, Mann preferred to go dirt-digging.

Here's the WSJ article the braintrust references.  And this is what he wrote about Professor Mann:

Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy." Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures.

One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.

The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones's infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to "hide the decline," deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists' preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?

The part left out by Delinpole (and subsequently by the braintrust) is that Mcintyre had, by 2007 was already being challenged. Like this from 2005:

Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.

Ammann and Wahl’s findings contradict an assertion by McIntyre and McKitrick that 15th century global temperatures rival those of the late 20th century and therefore make the hockey stick-shaped graph inaccurate. They also dispute McIntyre and McKitrick’s alleged identification of a fundamental flaw that would significantly bias the MBH climate reconstruction toward a hockey stick shape. Ammann and Wahl conclude that the highly publicized criticisms of the MBH graph are unfounded. They first presented their detailed analyses at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last December and at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver this year.

The main thrust of the brainstrust's argument is that the "hockey stick" is wrong and therefore climate science is wrong.

But it isn't and the science is still undeniable.

Funny how the braintrust never seems to get around to that NOAA report.

You May Have Missed This

Whilst I was away on vacation (A stop to see mom in Connecticut and then a trip up to Bar Harbor, Maine where there was some wicked good laab-stah every night) I missed reading about yet another exoneration about some never happened scientific misdeads:

Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania climate-change researcher caught in the flap surrounding e-mails hacked from a U.K. university server, was cleared of wrongdoing by an agency that promotes science.

Finding no "evidence of research misconduct," the Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation closed its inquiry into Mann, according to an Aug. 15 report from its inspector general. In February, Penn State University, where Mann is a professor of meteorology, exonerated him of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting e-mails and misusing privileged information.

And:

The report confirms findings from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in the U.K., United States and Switzerland.

The original reporting can be found here at Bloomberg.com and you can read the NSF report here. The NSF report says this about those hacked East Anglia emails:

We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct within the definition in the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. The University had been provided an extensive volume of emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted. We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence

On the charge of data falsification the NSF concluded:

There is no specific evidence that the Subject falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

But back to the Bloomberg reporting. The interesting part about it is where it was posted: The Tribune-Review.

Perhaps this will be more evidence of how the editorial board doesn't bother reading the news published in the Trib, but this is what Scaife's braintrust said of Mann only last summer:

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."

Funny, isn't it, how Mann only now objects to Al Gore making his "hockey stick" a household word via "An Inconvenient Truth" -- and to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change making such a big deal of that graph in its reports.

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.

Better late than never? Of course. But if he'd never warped genuine science to fit his predetermined "conclusions," he'd never have had to even think about, and wouldn't be verging on, full-blown backpedaling.

Given the Trib's news division has actually reported on Mann's exoneration, do you think the editorial braintrust will even bother to do some backpedaling itself?

Yea, me neither.

Good to be home, though.

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.

The Conspiracy Continues...

Remember Michael Mann?

He's the Penn State scientist who got caught up in that "Climategate" hoax (the hoax being that those stolen emails somehow proved that Global Warming is itself a hoax - they didn't, thus the hoax).

There were a number of allegations of scientific impropriety made and some were dismissed early. I wrote about it here.

Well Mann's been cleared of the last allegation by Penn State.

And to his credit, Mike Cronin over at the Trib closes the loop on the story:

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.

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."

Here's the report, if you wanted to read it.

David Templeton's got basically the same story at the P-G. But considering the repeated rhetorical beatings Mann has suffered at the hands of the Trib's editorial board, I wanted to highlight Cronin's piece over Templeton's.

So, you may well be asking your collective selves now, what sort of beatings has Mann taken from the Richard Mellon Scaife's braintrust?

Take a look at this from January:

Granting more than half a million federal stimulus dollars to a professor whose Climategate role prompted a Penn State University investigation is politically motivated misuse of public money at its worst.

Michael Mann received the three-year, $541,184 grant in June, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research, a nonpartisan educational foundation in Washington. Creator of the discredited "hockey stick" temperature graph that purportedly buttressed the case for man-made global warming, he's a key figure in the leaked Climategate e-mails that show data were manipulated and destroyed and contrary research was suppressed to bolster scientifically suspect climate-change orthodoxy.

Penn State is right to scrutinize Mr. Mann's "scholarship." But the university need not await its own decision on his future employment to do the right thing for taxpayers. As the center urges, Penn State should return the money to the U.S. Treasury immediately.

Whoever approved Mann's grant should be removed from the public payroll. And all other stimulus grants should be reviewed to tell taxpayers just how much of their money was misspent to promote Democrat eco-wacko dogma under the dubious stimulus guise of "job creation."

Will the braintrust be correcting itself anytime soon? Will the braintrust apologize to "whoever approved Mann's grant" and say it was wrong to call for that person's "remov[al] from the public payroll"?

And how will it address Mann and it's own "Climategate" hoax from now on, considering that one of its own reporters has reported in the Tribune-Review that Mann's been "exonerated"?