Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Grauniad On The Mann Lawsuit

14 Comments

Journalism:

Mann, who currently directs Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, is one of the authors of the so-called “hockey stick graph”, which Al Gore used in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate the precipitous rise in global temperatures since the dawn of industrialization when humans started spewing the heat-trapping greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere. For the “sin” of helping to create this “exhibit A” in the scientific case for climate change, the conservative semimonthly, the National Review, called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate scientists”. Blogger Rand Simberg wrote on the Review’s online site:

Except that instead of molesting children, [Mann] has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.

The Penn State researcher didn’t take this insult lying down. He sued the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which also published the offending blog; the case is currently pending.

For the record:

a) I wrote that at CEI’s Open Market blog, not at National Review (and no, I received no money from the Kochs, from Big Fossil Fuel, or even from CEI to do so, thanks for asking). The Jerry Sandusky phrase was later removed by CEI’s editors in response to Mann’s complaint (prior to his filing the lawsuit).
b) Before it was deleted, Mark Steyn quoted it at National Review‘s blog, The Corner.
c) The reference to Sandusky was not so much to compare Mann to Sandusky as to compare the Mann “investigation” by Penn State to the Sandusky “investigation” at Penn State (under the same Penn State administration), and it had nothing to do with the “sin” of creating the hockey stick, per se.

And the comments section over there is a supersaturated solution of ignorant moonbattery.

[Update on January 14th]

Based on what I’ve since learned, the phrase was in fact removed by CEI’s editors before they learned that Mann’s attorney had complained to National Review.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Eco-Warriors Frozen In Global Warming

Mark Steyn’s take on the intrepid explorers:

…you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…

There’s more.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Ignorant Left

16 Comments

…an ongoing series:

Most people who haven’t taken the time to learn about the issue (which is to say, most people) believe that conservatism is either a largely Christian fundamentalist movement or principally informed by Ayn Rand or, if you listen to the geniuses at places like Salon or MSNBC, both.

I’m always amused by morons who think that, because I’m skeptical about climate models that are not only failing to predict the future but can’t even predict the past, that I must be a creationist.