Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Fraudster Michael Mann: There's no uncertainty "that arctic sea ice will be gone in a few decades"

Fraudster Michael Mann: A Changing Climate Doesn’t Have a Political Agenda | Universe Today
The body of evidence for climate change is strong and convincing, and multiple lines of evidence [like what?] show the changes are caused largely by human activities. The consensus among scientists about the reality of the phenomenon is also convincing.
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“We have to make it clear that the ice sheets are not Republicans or Democrats – they don’t have a political agenda as they disappear,” said Michael Mann, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been at the recent forefront of climate research. “Certain facts cannot be denied. We have to find a way to steer the conversation to a good faith debate about what we can do about the problem, not this bad faith debate about the reality of it.”
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Mann said there has been a large, well funded campaign to manufacture misinformation about climate change, similar to how tobacco companies muddied the waters in the 1960’s on how smoking causes lung cancer and emphysema. It’s no secret that many climate change deniers have ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Mann referred specifically to an infamous memo sent out by GOP political consultant Frank Luntz in 2002 to President George Bush, “which basically said that if the public comes to understand the reality of this problem they will demand policy action to deal with it,” Mann said, “and so you need to manufacture doubt and controversy and uncertainty and cultivate a set of scientists who can act for advocates essentially for fossil fuel industry. And that is what is happened.”
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“There are legitimate uncertainties, but unfortunately the public discourse is so far removed from where the scientific discourse and controversies actually are, “Mann said. “There is not an uncertainty of the reality of climate change, that sea levels are going to rise, that arctic sea ice will be gone in a few decades or a whole lot of other areas, but we do have an uncertainty in our ability to project regional climate change.”
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Every reconstruction reveals that the warming is indeed anomalous in a very long term context. Global temperatures are running the highest they have ever run. The twelve month running averages are warmer than they have ever been in documented history. There is no cooling of the globe and no decline to hide,” Mann said referring to the “Climategate” emails that were stolen from East Anglia climate research center and leaked just a few weeks before the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

Hackers stole thousands of emails –private correspondences between scientists,” said Mann, “and their words were cherry picked, taken out of context and distorted to make it sound like scientists were engaged in some sort of hoax.”
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Mann said the real crime was the illegal theft of private correspondence, in addition to the moral crime of intentionally distorting what scientists believe and think.
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“No doubt we are in for a period of months or even years where climate science is likely to be subject to the sort of politically motivated inquisition that we haven’t seen, frankly, since the 1950’s,” he said.

1 comment:

Craig Goodrich said...

My comment there--

Michael Mann gets some things right:

"... there has been a large, well funded campaign to manufacture misinformation about climate change ..."

Yes, indeed, and Mann just picked up a $1.3 million research grant last year to manufacture more misinformation. At least he can't complain about not getting his cut of the $5 billion a year...


“... Certain facts cannot be denied because you don’t like the implications,” Mann said.

Well, that's certainly a nice change of attitude from a man who has spent the last decade denying that all of the mounting available actual scientific evidence says that the CO2-driven AGW theory is complete nonsense.

"... arctic sea ice will be gone in a few decades ..."

That's the bad news. The good news is that Michael Mann will be gone in a few decades.