Dr. Michael E. Mann is regularly promoted as the “world-leading climate change scientist.” He is a professor at Penn State University and the author of the famous “hockey stick” graph. The “hockey stick” graph was published in 1998 and presented a wildly new assessment of earth’s temperature over the past millennium.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its First Assessment Report in 1990. This included publicly available surface temperatures that rose to a high point of nearly 10.0 C during the Medieval Warming Period and dropped to 8.6 C in the Little Ice Age of the late 17th century. It indicates that the present temperature is only slightly higher than the 1,000-year average.
By contrast, Mann’s “hockey stick” depicts global temperatures holding flat for 900 years. Then, beginning in the late 1800s, rising rapidly 0.7 C above average. If this rewriting of history is accurate, it would indicate that the industrial revolution’s increased use of fossil fuels correlates perfectly with an increase in earth’s temperature.
The IPCC seized on Mann’s “hockey stick” as the smoking gun that proved man-made global warming and included it in its Third Assessment Report (2001). Since then, the “hockey stick” has become a sacred icon for the high priests of climate science.
How could Mann rewrite decades of settled science almost overnight? He claims that “r2 statistics” lie behind his rewrite of history. These use “proxy tree-ring data” to re-calibrate the data. But after 21 years, Mann still has not released his data. Absent these facts, the scientific world must take Mann’s word for it.
Not every scientist is willing to do this. Many have asked Mann to release the proxy tree-ring data along with his r2 statistics. Without this data, the entire “hockey stick” scenario remains a private revelation given to Mann and Mann alone, with no way to verify it.
Mann claims that these specifics are “intellectual property,” that he has every right to withhold. That’s fair enough. But intellectual property rights are about a person’s right to profit from his creativity. By this measure, Mann’s intellectual property has given him fame and fortune.
But science is not a creative enterprise. Scientists are not supposed to make up facts, they are supposed to discover them. The scientific method is not high priests who emerge from smoky laboratories to utter religious dogma. The scientific method is about data—hard facts, rigorous controls and careful calculations that can be duplicated by skeptic and believer alike.
One scientist who questioned Mann’s dogmatism is Dr. Tim Ball. After enduring a dozen years of Mann’s refusal to release the data, Ball told an interviewer that Mann “should be in the state pen, not Penn State.” This clever turn of phrase became the center of a nine-year, multimillion-dollar libel lawsuit.
Ball, a Canadian professor, responded that libel cannot be proved if Mann is, in fact, wrong. But in order to prove his accuser wrong, Ball needs to cross-examine the proxy tree-ring data and r2 statistic calculations before the jury.
Mann found himself maneuvered into a corner. In January 2017, a judge agreed that Mann would have to hand over the data and gave him two years to do so. Months passed as it became increasingly obvious that Mann had no intention of complying. The deadline came and went with no data ever produced.
In May, Ball’s legal team asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit based on Mann’s refusal to release the data. On August 23, the judge granted the motion to dismiss. Not only that, but he also took the unusual step of requiring Mann to reimburse all of Dr. Ball’s legal costs.
Mann remains defiant. He still claims that his rewriting of the climate data for the past 1,000 years is justified and accurate while refusing to let anyone subject his claim to independent testing. Until he does, nobody on earth has any way of knowing whether he has created his facts out of whole cloth, or whether he has discovered them through the discipline of science.
The Ball is in Mann’s court, so to speak. With help from a complicit media, he can continue to milk his fame for as long as the scientific community will permit it. But, doing so will continue to erode public trust in the science behind climate change—and the scientific community more generally.
Better, release the data. Let science be science. If man-made global warming is true, releasing the data will certainly establish it as fact. If not, errors will exposed and true science will advance. Either way, the truth will come out. Man-made global warming increasingly appears to be Mann-made. In such a climate, a real scientist doesn’t sue skeptics, he publishes the data.
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