Mann attempts to defend the manufactured consensus.

[Update a few minutes later]

Note, as usual, that he confines his defense to the emails, and never even attempts to address the much more damaging revelations from the models and data sets:

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

Both true, and irrelevant. A straw man, in fact. The emails raise suspicion to tropospheric levels, but no, they don’t in themselves undermine the case. What does that is the clear cherry picking of station data and arbitrary “homogenization” that miraculously always results in a temperature increase.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Patrick Michaels isn’t impressed by the apologia:

Penn State and East Anglia have initiated “investigations” into Mann’s and Jones’s activities. Will Penn State request all of Mann’s e-mails from University of Virginia, where he was for the most of Climategate? Will the school comply? Will East Anglia clean out its massively politicized house?

Don’t hold your breath. Penn State gets over $750 million in federal-taxpayer dollars, and Jones alone received $22 million since the turn of the century. Because universities charge 50 to 125 percent “overhead” on research dollars, climate change is supporting a lot of humanities departments around the world.

So, the tragedy of Climategate is that we simply don’t know how many papers were rejected or simply not submitted because skeptics found it very difficult to publish in this climate. Does anyone seriously think Penn State and East Anglia are going to starve their English departments because of the activities of a few climate scientists?

Curiously, none of this — the attempts to rig the peer-reviewed literature, or the massive amounts of money that likely to influence any university investigations — were discussed in Mann’s Washington Post apologia.

Federal funding of higher education is one of the things that allows the academic bubble to stay inflated, and it’s a vast enabler of left-wing propaganda on campus, in addition to supporting fraud and corruption like this.

[Bumped]

Roy Spencer was allowed to give an interesting presentation at the AGU meeting in San Franscisco. I liked this comment:

I can’t help feeling that you might as well have stood before a flock of Archbishops, who were discussing the 7 days of creation, stating that there is evidence that the earth is actually several billion years old – and giving evidence to support your idea. The religious elite smile and nod, and say encouraging words.. “interesting way of seeing things, young man…” before moving on to discuss whether The Almighty drank coffee or iced tea during work breaks.

But this is an interesting point as well:

There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.

Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media.

Let us stipulate that a valid model of climate prediction is going to be complex, or at least, the more complexity, the more likely it is that it is taking the necessary factors into account. That does not, in itself, render complexity a virtue, and it’s quite possible that a simple model will do a better job than a more complex, but flawed one. This sort of reminds me of Shuttle huggers who will say, with pride, that it is the most complex machine ever built, as though that were a feature and not a bug.