[Sivad]

"The goddam guy is a slick talker and super-confident. He won't listen to anyone else," one of climate science's most senior figures, Wally Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, told me. "I don't trust people like that. A lot of the data sets he uses are shitty, you know. They are just not up to what he is trying to do.... If anyone deserves to get hit it is goddam Mann."

[blackjack21]

Then please demonstrate that your claim is true and there is no other possible reason for this failure to comply.

It was Michael Mann who filed the suit, and therefore his burden to prove that the hockey stick graph was not fraudulent and that he was thereby defamed by Ball. Mann refused to present the evidence to prove his case.

Steve McIntyre has quite a different intepretation.

Anyway, it's interesting that Timothy Ball and Stephen McIntyre are both Canadians and Mann is an American who sued them in Canadian court. I guess that's why we haven't heard from @Godstud yet.

Whatever, I posted all the info anyone would ever need to understand what a crazy fucking fraud Michael E Mann is and you have graciously demonstrated what ludicrous depths of bullshit someone has to sink to in order to deny it.

It's pretty incredible isn't it? They sue claiming defamation of character, refuse to present evidence at trial, and then expect to be taken seriously thereafter. I've really enjoyed the takedown of so many establishment characters in the last 10 years or so. I'm glad it continues.

However, the substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales. We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues.

I'm not a scientist--although I have a bachelor of science, which principally means that they made me study a lot of math and statistics. Having a lot of experience with trading systems, I know quite a lot about the perils of curve fitting, correlation vs. regression, confidence intervals, p-values, etc. I looked at the variance alone in the TAR forecasts and knew something was wrong. Stephen McIntyre is a lot smarter than I am and uses his PhD in the financial markets as well. He seems to have come across this too, but dug much deeper. Christopher Monckton is another who has poked a few holes in these assessments.

Mann's failure in court was foretold.
Court Battle: Michael Mann Losing, Gives Tim Ball ‘Concessions’

Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick,’ loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant’s costs
Being ordered to pay the defendant's costs suggests the court thinks the case was made in bad faith. It will be interesting to see how Mann's case against Mark Steyn is resolved.

A Cockwomble Reaches for the Hockey Stick
Delingpole: Michael ‘Hide the Decline’ Mann Loses Defamation Lawsuit
MICHAEL MANN REFUSES TO PRODUCE DATA, LOSES CASE

Forbes warned in 2012 that Mann was "courting disaster" with this approach.
ClimateGate Star Michael Mann Courts Legal Disaster

But there were some problems with that graph and the research behind it. Some very big problems. One was that the Medieval Warm Period which occurred between about AD 800 and 1100 along with the Little Ice Age (not a true Ice Age) which occurred between about AD 1350-1850 somehow turned up missing. And as for those Yamal tree samples, they came from only 12 specimens of 252 in the data set… while a larger data set of 34 trees from the same vicinity that weren’t used showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages.

Scientific critics raise another looming question. Mann’s 1,000-year-long graph was cobbled together using various proxy data derived from ice cores, tree rings and written records of growing season dates up until 1961, where it then applied surface ground station temperature data. Why change in 1961? Well, maybe it’s because that’s when other tree ring proxy data calculations by Keith Briffa at the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU) began going the other way in a steady temperature decline. After presenting these unwelcome results to Mann and others, he was put under pressure to recalculate them. He did, and the decline became even greater.

As recorded in ClimateGate e-mails, this presented what Mann referred to as a “conundrum” in that the late 20th century decline indicated by Briffa would be perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, was a “problem”, and posed a “potential distraction/detraction”. Mann went on to say that the warming skeptics would have a “field day” if Briffa’s declining temperature reconstruction was shown, and that he would “hate to be the one” to give them “fodder”.

In an e-mail sent to Mann and others, CRU’s director Philip Jones reported: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [journal] trick…to hide the decline [in global temperatures].” “Mike’s” ( Mann’s) “trick” was to add in real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years from 1979 onwards and from 1961 for Briffa’s, show all of the proxy and surface measurement chartings in different colors on a single graph, and then simply cut off Briffa’s in a spaghetti clutter of lines at the 1961 date.

This is why it's never a good idea to try to bullshit computer heads. I knew just from looking at the variance and what that would mean to the confidence interval that something was wrong--and I am a dilettante at best on the subject. Others like Stephen McIntyre, Timothy Ball, Anthony Watts, Christopher Monckton and others went much further.

[Godstud]

I guess that's why we haven't heard from @Godstud yet.

I don't give a fuck about pseudoscientific claptrap, from a self-professed 'intellectual', so don't drag me into your bullshit arguments.

Twat.

[Sivad]

I looked at the variance alone in the TAR forecasts and knew something was wrong.

The variance between the 3 reconstructions or the error bars? The error bars are what give the game away and those are extremely conservative. Those jokers want us to believe they can reconstruct average temperatures a thousands years back to within 1 degree c from a handful of proxies? Get fucking real. It can't even be done with modern instrument data, the whole thing is horseshit.


Mann et al 1999

horseshit.

[blackjack21]

I don't give a fuck about pseudoscientific claptrap, from a self-professed 'intellectual', so don't drag me into your bullshit arguments.

Twat.

But, but, but... they're Canadian and they have PhDs, and they won in a Canadian court against an American!

[Godstud]

@blackjack21 troll off. I am not interested in this topic, in the slightest. Respectfully...

[KS mod edit: Rule 2]

[Pants-of-dog]

I don't. In this thread I've presented the opinions and analysis of chairs of three of the largest and most prestigious major research university climate science departments in the world, the findings of the National Academy of Science on Mann's proxy reconstructions, the assessment of a senior physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the criticisms and objections of Mann's work and methods by his own colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit.

I find it interesting that you say you did not do something, then go on to explain how you did that thing.

You responded to all of that by just making up crazy bullshit and going into obtuse denial mode.

Here's the National Academy of Science on the reliability of Mann's reconstructions:

Again, what is the argument associated with the stuff you uncritically copied and pasted?

Can you explain how they prove the claim that Mann lied?

[Truth To Power]

The whole thing makes no sense really.

"Whenever I see something that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, I know there must be a damn good reason for it." -- Peter de Vries

How was it even published in Nature if his methodologies weren’t verifiable?

Google "pal review."

[Truth To Power]

Can you explain how they prove the claim that Mann lied?

Is it "lying" to deliberately cherry-pick data to remove evidence that proves you wrong? Dishonest and deceitful, yes, certainly; but maybe not "lying."

[Sivad]

Is it "lying" to deliberately cherry-pick data to remove evidence that proves you wrong? Dishonest and deceitful, yes, certainly; but maybe not "lying."

It's a lie of omission. If you read the IPCC third assessment report there's no mention of any of the myriad problems with proxies, there's no discussion of the controversial statistical methods employed in those reconstructions, and any inconvenient data was just left out.

[Pants-of-dog]

It's a lie of omission. If you read the IPCC third assessment report there's no mention of any of the myriad problems with proxies, there's no discussion of the controversial statistical methods employed in those reconstructions, and any inconvenient data was just left out.

In the Third Assessment Report, in Section 2.3.2.1, there is an explicit discussion of “the myriad problems with proxies”, et cetera concerning the divergence problem to which Judith Curry referred.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads ... TAR-02.pdf

From page 131, or page 33 of 84 of the PDF:

Several important caveats must be borne in mind when using tree-ring data for palaeoclimate reconstructions. Not least is the intrinsic sampling bias. Tree-ring information is available only in terrestrial regions, so is not available over substantial regions of the globe, and the climate signals contained in tree-ring density or width data reflect a complex biological response to climate forcing. Non-climatic growth trends must be removed from the tree-ring chronology, making it difficult to resolve time-scales longer than the lengths of the constituent chronologies (Briffa, 2000). Furthermore, the biological response to climate forcing may change over time. There is evidence, for example, that high latitude tree-ring density variations have changed in their response to temperature in recent decades, associated with possible non- climatic factors (Briffa et al., 1998a). By contrast, Vaganov et al. (1999) have presented evidence that such changes may actually be climatic and result from the effects of increasing winter precipita- tion on the starting date of the growing season (see Section 2.7.2.2). Carbon dioxide fertilization may also have an influence, particularly on high-elevation drought-sensitive tree species, although attempts have been made to correct for this effect where appropriate (Mann et al., 1999). Thus climate reconstructions based entirely on tree-ring data are susceptible to several sources of contamination or non-stationarity of response. For these reasons, investigators have increasingly found tree-ring data most useful when supplemented by other types of proxy information in “multi-proxy” estimates of past temperature change (Overpeck et al., 1997; Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998; 1999; 2000a; 2000b; Crowley and Lowery, 2000).

So, if you read the TAR, there is mention of the problems that you accuse them of deliberately omitting.

[Sivad]

So, if you read the TAR, there is mention of the problems that you accuse them of deliberately omitting.

One paragraph buried deep inside the report, that's hardly what you'd call an honest appraisal of the science. There's no mention at all in the summary for policy makers. We know these fuckers deliberately omitted data, Mann is on record pushing to have the data excluded.

[Pants-of-dog]

:knife: One sentence buried deep inside the report, that's hardly what you'd call an honest appraisal of the science. There's no mention at all in the summary for policy makers. We know these fuckers deliberately omitted data, Mann is on record pushing to have the data excluded.

It is not buried.

It is in the section where they discuss how they reconstruct paleoclimates. They literally could not make it easier to find unless they called it “Hey Sivad, Here Is Where We Talk About Curry’s Criticism Of the Divergence Problem And How She Pretends We Did Not Mention It”.

[Sivad]

It is not buried.

It is in the section where they discuss how they reconstruct paleoclimates. They literally could not make it easier to find unless they called it “Hey Sivad, Here Is Where We Talk About Curry’s Criticism Of the Divergence Problem And How She Pretends We Did Not Mention It”.

It is buried, it's one paragraph and the divergence problem isn't clearly stated. There's a vague reference but it doesn't say anywhere in there that the tree ring proxies from the 1960s on are running in the opposite direction of the instrument data. Not only is it buried but the findings for the multiproxy averages are given a confidence rating of "likely" which is extremely dishonest given that combining proxies in that way was a brand new methodology and really shouldn't have even been included in the assessment at all because they hadn't been around long enough for proppper scientific vetting. There's no discussion of any of that.

Here's what the National Academy of Science had to say about the reliability of Mann's findings:

substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium."

[Pants-of-dog]

@Sivad

You are now changing your argument.

You originally claimed it was a deliberate lie of omission.

Now you are arguing that they did not clarify the issue as well as you would have liked.

Such shifting of the goalposts is an implicit concession.

[Sivad]

@Sivad

You are now changing your argument.

You originally claimed it was a deliberate lie of omission.

Now you are arguing that they did not clarify the issue as well as you would have liked.

Such shifting of the goalposts is an implicit concession.

I haven't shifted anything. The fact is there's zero mention of any of those issues in the summary for policy makers which is by far the most influential part of the report and there are only a couple of vague lines buried deep in the main report that don't even begin to convey the severity of the problems with those proxies. The confidence estimate is absurdly high given the limited work done on multi-proxy analyses and NAS says as much in its report. And we have Mann on record pushing to exclude data and we got Briffa objecting to the exclusion and saying that Mann's "likely" estimate was bullshit.

You're just desperately clinging to a semantic quibble because there's a mountain of criticism of Mann's bullshit tactics and dishonest methods and stupid little semantic quibbles is all you got.

[Pants-of-dog]

I haven't shifted anything. The fact is there's zero mention of any of those issues in the summary for policy makers which is by far the most influential part of the report and there are only a couple of vague lines buried deep in the main report that don't even begin to convey the severity of the problems with those proxies. The confidence estimate is absurdly high given the limited work done on multi-proxy analyses and NAS says as much in its report. And we have Mann on record pushing to exclude data and we got Briffa objecting to the exclusion and saying that Mann's "likely" estimate was bullshit.

You're just desperately clinging to a semantic quibble because there's a mountain of criticism of Mann's bullshit tactics and dishonest methods and stupid little semantic quibbles is all you got.

So now you are shifting the goalposts and arguing that they kept it out of the summary report.

Still, it is an implicit concession that they did discuss it, and your only criticism is that they did not discuss it as you would like.

How would a long winded discussion about the misleading tree ring data have helped formulate better policy?

[Sivad]

Still, it is an implicit concession that they did discuss it, and your only criticism is that they did not discuss it as you would like.

it wasn't discussed, it was vaguely referenced deep into the report after being prominently displayed at the very beginning of the report. Had they discussed it we wouldn't be having this conversation.

How would a long winded discussion about the misleading tree ring data have helped formulate better policy?

Are you seriously asking how a fair and honest treatment of the science would have helped policy makers make sound policy? Mann went out of his way to ensure that policy makers weren't burdened with an accurate assessment of the science, Mann also felt that a "long winded discussion" of the facts would be bad for his agenda. So he just omitted all the facts he could and buried vague references to those which he couldn't omit without making the fraud too obvious.

[Pants-of-dog]

:knife: it wasn't discussed, it was vaguely referenced deep into the report after being prominently displayed at the very beginning of the report. Had they discussed it we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Again, they put it exactly where you would expect to find it: in the discussion concerning how we reconstruct paleo-climates.

If you are defining “putting things where they can most be easily be found” as “vaguely referencing”, then your only criticism is that they did not discuss it as clearly as your feelings dictate.

Are you seriously asking how a fair and honest treatment of the science would have helped policy makers make sound policy?
.

No. Do you need me to repeat the question more clearly?

[Sivad]

If you put out an assessment report on the science that doesn't fairly and honestly assess the science then you have committed fraud. If you omit inconvenient data, obfuscate the facts, downplay controversy, and grossly exaggerate the accuracy and reliability of your methods then you're a dirty deceitful fraud, aka a Mike Mann.

"I don't trust people like that. A lot of the data sets he uses are shitty, you know. They are just not up to what he is trying to do.... If anyone deserves to get hit it is goddam Mann." - Wally Broecker(Grandfather of Climate Science)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Smith_Broecker