by Roger Roots, 12/10/2015
An amazing spectacle of doublespeak, smoke, and mirrors took a stage at Montana State University in Bozeman on December 9, 2015. At taxpayer expense.
Dr. Michael Mann, the overbearing pro-government climate scientist at the heart of the 2009 Climategate scandal, was invited by MSU faculty to lecture a large public audience. Mann’s speech was the capstone to a two-day extravaganza at MSU, with expensive, glossy global-warming literature and signage throughout.
Mann presented his case for manmade climate change in a wholly one-sided manner. At least twice, Dr. Mann claimed that global temperatures have increased precisely as predicted by the government-funded climate modelers of the 1990s. Mann showed a chart on a large screen with a line purporting to be a temp prediction model created decades ago by his friend James Hanson. He then overlaid this line with a wriggly line purporting to be the actual temps of the past 20 years. The lines appeared to correlate closely.
Mann must know, of course, that more than 100 climate models predicted temp trajectories that were later shown to overestimate actual temps by 2 to 3 times. Even the most accurate temperature predictions of the 1990s-era modelers have been shown to have overestimated global warming by more than a standard deviation. The crowd at MSU were left in the dark about these basic facts.
Dr. Mann also spun a tale of persecution for mainstream climate scientists, pointing to various subpoenas and demands for his emails by politicians over the years. He failed to mention the larger phenomena of skeptics being fired, persecuted, and denied grants and promotions.
He glossed over the scandal regarding his deceptive “hockey stick” temperature graph of 2005 that was once on the cover of the UN’s IPCC report. Researchers later found that Mann had discarded all data that disputed the catastrophic-global-warming theory of the IPCC.
Questions from the crowd seemed so “softball” in nature that I was tempted to guess that the questioners were pre-selected. I had my own hand in the air but was never offered the microphone. The first questioner asked Mann about his hope for the future. The second questioner asked Mann if he thought social scientists should play a role in promoting the hysteria of global warming. (Mann said yes.)
