Michael Mann
made the news last week. It’s amazing how the Climategate
hockey-stick chart-maker continues to do so for “work” he did a
long time ago.
The new-old newsworthy thing he did was
forward an email almost three years
ago. That’s news today because the message was from University of
East Anglia climate data-keeper Phil Jones, who asked Mann to
delete some emails from fellow UN IPCC conspirators related to
their Fourth Assessment Report. Jones wanted Mann to tell his
friend Eugene Wahl at Alfred University to delete emails too. Mann
passed the message to Wahl.
The problem with this is Mann
told investigators at his place of
employment, Pennsylvania State University,
that he did not tell others to delete emails. Now his explanation
is that he forwarded Jones’s email — ”ASAP“ —
for Wahl’s benefit, but not for him to delete his emails. Wahl
scrubbed anyway.
Mann is one of the more interesting global warming
alarmists, perhaps second only to Bill “Those
damned shriveled ears of corn“ McKibben. He hates
the fossil fuel industry and thinks all his tormenters are funded
by them. And people like to do funny
things with his
image, mostly because he’s
so hypersensitive.
Mann still works, or at least he gets paid — apparently
very well — for projects with his name on them. When Climategate
first broke a year and a half ago, I found his
vital statistics on Penn State’s website.
They were quite exhaustive, mentioning his work on oxygen ordering
in 1988 all the way to his recent posts on the alarmist RealClimate
blog. Upon my discovery I thought others might be interested in the
nearly $6 million in grants Mann received over the years for his
projects, which I
shared via American Spectator.
Since then Mann has added two more projects to his repertoire,
bringing another $280,000 or so in government grants (from the
National Science Foundation and from NOAA) to Penn
State.
The first project is called Development
of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the
Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term
Variability in the Monsoons. The abstract on
NOAA’s website
explains, in part:
While much past proxy work has focused on the
reconstruction of large-scale surface temperature patterns, there
is perhaps no more societally relevant climate variable than
precipitation. Yet, no comprehensive large-scale reconstructions of
precipitation for the Northern Hemisphere (i.e., all of North
America and Asia) have been performed spanning the past millennium.
This proposed reconstruction project will use all available
proxy-climatic records spanning the last 500-2000 years in the
Northern Hemisphere to develop: 1) gridded seasonal and annual
precipitation datasets for North America, Europe and Asia with
various spatial resolutions and dataset lengths, and 2) a
2.5ÅãÅ~2.5Åã latitude and longitude annual (and/or summer)
precipitation dataset of the last 500 years for the Northern
Hemisphere….
One key outcome of the proposed research is a better
knowledge of the natural range of precipitation variation, and its
relationship with larger-scale climate dynamics, for policymakers
and stakeholders who need to gauge societal vulnerability to
variations in water on timescales of decades to centuries, be it
natural and anthropogenic in origin….
Don’t know about you, but reconstructions in the hands of
Mann make me nervous, especially when he’s trying to get hip with
the “societally relevant” and influence its policymakers and
stakeholders. So I asked a few of my climate science pals in the
global warming realist camp what they thought. Their
responses:
• “Pretty straightforward study. If the same
proxies are used that he did for temperature, it will also yield
hockey sticks. By the way, this will all be very interesting
because there has been no trend in monsoon rainfall that bears any
relation to global or regional temperature.” (a
climatologist)
• “In the hands of a scientist, this proposal
might be good. How, I wonder, are they going to figure out
what the precipitation was in 1250 in (say) the Four Corners
area? Only Michael Mann knows. Likely, he’ll use
tree-ring widths that supposedly told him about temperatures.” (a
doctor of physics)
• “Of course the Mann study you attached is
another disgraceful waste of taxpayer’s money by the Cult….”
(another doctor of physics)
Speaking of cults, that brings me to the second project
that Mann has recently added to his CV: Scientific
Input on Climate Change Outreach by a Network of Zoos and
Aquariums. This undertaking was blessed with a $1
million grant from the National Science Foundation to the Global
Warming Education Sect, who propagate their religion to little
kiddies by scaring them about polar bears and other imagined
threatened species. From the
abstract on NSF’s website:
The core goals of the planning phase are to a) develop and
extend the strong multidisciplinary partnership, b) conduct
research needed to understand the preconceptions, attitudes,
beliefs, and learning modes of zoo visitors regarding climate
change; and c) identify and prototype innovative learning
environments and tools…. The long-term vision centers on the
development of a network of U.S. zoos, in partnership with climate
change domain scientists, learning scientists, conservation
psychologists, and other stakeholders, serving as a sustainable
infrastructure to investigate strategies designed to foster changes
in public attitudes, understandings, and behavior surrounding
climate change.
It looks
like Penn State and Mann only got a small
fraction of this grant, but clearly the opportunity to create
future alarmists was not to be passed up. The plan is to spend
three years blanketing zoos across America to try and understand
the psyches of visitors, preach climate propaganda, and convert
them to the cause.
Objective science on the march,
obviously.
