Climate Change before Michael Mann Re-wrote History

Mike Mann Survived DollarCity UDRP, Sells Domain for ...

Michael Mann is all over the scientific news at the moment, for having his libel case against Dr Tim Ball dismissed by the presiding judge.

For those who were unaware, Mann brought this libel case after Tim Ball made an off-the-cuff remark about Mann being from Penn State when he should be in State Pen.

He stubbornly refused to present to the court what I believe are known as ‘R2 Regression Numbers’, which is as I understand it, are the methods and mathematics he used to create the Hockey Stick graph.

If you have evidence that will prove you are right, you don’t withhold that evidence. The only reason you withhold evidence is if it would prove you wrong. If this had been a criminal case, Mann could be facing prosecution for refusing to disclose information.

Therefore the judge decided to dismiss the case on the back of Mann’s bad faith contempt – his failure to release his hidden numbers – breaking to the binding agreement he signed with Ball.

This case-dismissal is a victory for common sense and free speech, and will have been a huge relief to the whole Ball family. I am acquainted with Tim’s son David on social media, and as he commented to me, “…this has huge implications…” for climate science. I believe the judge also awarded court costs to Dr Ball, though I suspect getting Mann to part with any money will be somewhat difficult.

Mann said he was taking a stand for science in the court case, and it’s interesting to note that Mark Steyn said not a single scientist or scientific institution filed an Amicus Brief in support of him.

I believe there is also now a suggestion of the possibility of prosecuting Mann under the RICO anti-racketeering laws, the very same laws that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wanted to use to silence climate skeptics a couple years ago, as he had convinced himself climate skeptics were effectively criminals and should be jailed for their ‘crimes’.

The Hockey Stick graph

In their original First Assessment Report in 1990, the IPCC included the illustration below by Hubert Lamb, the founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It clearly shows the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Their existence had been proven from ice core data from both Greenland and Antarctica, and no-one in academia disputed they had happened as they had been in the scientific literature for decades.

The Medieval Warm Period was a time of significantly warmer temperatures than today by several degrees, and which lasted from around 950AD to around 1250AD during what is known in Europe as the High Middle Ages.

It was hugely beneficial, and saw the flowering of medieval society, agriculture, science and art. During this time, it was warm enough for the Viking Erik The Red to establish a colony in 985AD at Hvalsey on Greenland and raise crops. Vineyards were sown in England as far north as Northumberland.

This period was followed by the Little Ice Age, which began around 1300AD and lasted to the middle of the 19th Century. Northern hemisphere temperatures dropped significantly, and the Vikings were forced to abandon Greenland. Harsh winters plagued northern Europe and parts of North America.

There were multiple crop failures during the short cold summers, and many European rivers froze each winter. There were mass deaths from starvation & cold temperatures and disease became rampant.

The Little Ice Age was recorded in paintings depicting what were described as ‘frost fayres’ on the river Thames in London. Historical records show farms and villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed by encroaching glaciers during the mid-17th century.

Canals and rivers in Britain and the Netherlands were frequently frozen deeply enough to support ice skating and winter festivals. The first River Thames ‘frost fayre’ was held in 1608 and the last in 1814. Freezing of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the Great Belt to Denmark to attack Copenhagen.

In the winter of 1780, New York Harbour froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan Island to Staten Island. The winter of 1794–1795 was particularly harsh: the French invasion army under Pichegru was able to march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, and the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour.

This image is one of many on the internet depicting such a frost fayre on the Thames, and is believed to have been painted around 1683.

In 1998, former University of Massachusetts researcher Michael Mann, unveiled his infamous and contemptible ‘Hockey Stick’ graph shown below, which completely removed both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

In 2007, the IPCC published it’s Fourth Assessment Report, in which the previous Medieval Warm Period illustration had been removed, and replaced by Mann’s Hockey Stick graph, as seen below.

The Hockey Stick was favourable to the IPCC as it accentuated the 20th Century warming, and thus helped promote their human-caused warming agenda. Also, look at the scale on the left. By putting large gaps between each half-degree increase, you artificially inflate any given warming. To show a half-degree increase accurately, the graph should look closer to this:-

In 2001, the Canadian author Mark Steyn had become interested in the climate issue, and on viewing the Hockey Stick, described Mann as “…a disgrace to the profession” and even wrote a book with that as it’s title.

It will be interesting to see if the dismissal of Mann’s libel case against Tim Ball will set a precedent in his similar case against Mark Steyn after he called the Hockey Stick fraudulent in National Review, and Mann sued for defamation.

Steyn rather comically commented on it during his speech at the Heartland Institute’s 10th International Conference on Climate Change in 2015: “The Hockey Stick is what’s known as a proxy reconstruction, and there are only two problems with it; the proxies and the reconstruction.

The Youtube video of that can be see by copying this link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bARjABDqok

On June 12th 2006, Dr David Deming of the University of Oklahoma, presented testimony to the US Senate on Environment & Public Works, and the relevant part of his statement is shown below

Note the highlighted sentence with:

We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.

This incident occurred as shown in 1995, and by 1998 Michael Mann had indeed made the MWP and LIA vanish with his Hockey Stick graph.

Incidentally, the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University would later become embroiled in the ‘Climategate’ affair I detailed in my original essay, when they too were proven, through a series of emails hacked from their servers, to have been involved in deliberately tampering with data to reduce past recorded temperature records and increase recent ones to make the observed warming steeper than it actually is. This altered data was then used to deceive the public and policymakers.

The Hockey Stick, or Hokey Schtick as it has become known, has been comprehensively shown to be a fraudulent representation of historic temperature, yet this proven fallacy is now one of the most over-used propaganda tools in the world, and is even being used as a teaching aid in schools.

If you missed it, you can also read John O’Sullivan’s excellent article published here a few days ago – https://principia-scientific.com/rico-racketeering-probe-beckons-after-michael-manns-court-defeat/

The policies being formulated to deal with this so-called ‘climate crisis’, which it isn’t, will have a negligible effect on the climate, and are a clear case of the ‘cure’ being very much worse than the ‘problem’.

They will cripple industry, they will vastly increase energy bills, which will hit the poorest members of society the hardest, creating more poverty and even death if people are unable to heat their homes. People will be forced to choose between heating or eating. This is morally wrong, yet policy-makers are continuing to try and push such measures into law.

Having reviewed the available data over the last four years, and having corresponded with several climate scientists and climate researchers, I have come to the following conclusions. There is no catastrophic climate change, human-caused or otherwise, and millions will not die because of human activity.

The level of atmospheric CO2 is indeed rising, but as a change in atmospheric CO2 is the result of a temperature change, not the cause of it, it does not, and cannot, impact in any significant way on global temperatures. The largest contributors to the global climate are water vapour and the Sun. The Earth has been warming slightly over the last century or so, but the average global temperature has been virtually unchanged since 1998, apart from the 1998 and 2015/16 El Nino spikes.

There is no catastrophic sea-level rise. The intensity and frequency of large storms, floods and droughts have decreased as the world has warmed. Even the IPCC agrees on this. The oceans are not acidic, they are alkaline, so ‘ocean acidification’ is another myth that does not exist.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is how living things grow. It is an essential part of the ecosystem, and indeed, vital to our very survival. We are made of carbon. Every time you exhale you breathe out CO2, so going by the logic of the alarmists, we are polluting the atmosphere by breathing.

Since the formation of the IPCC in 1988, the world has collectively spent approaching 250 billion dollars looking for evidence of human-caused climate change, and failed to find it. The likes of the IPCC would have you believe the evidence is in plain sight all around us, whereas in reality, it just isn’t there. We are living in one of the coldest periods of history, and global warming or climate change, whichever you wish to call it, is not a problem, it is beneficial. Warming is good. Cold kills far more people than warmth.

Increasing CO2 is not harmful, it too is beneficial. Trying to prevent climate change is a ridiculously expensive and totally futile exercise. Not one of the many doom-laden predictions have even come close to being right. As the alarmists are fond of saying – ‘the science is settled’. Yes it is, firmly on the side of this being the biggest deception ever perpetrated on Mankind.


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Comments (7)

  • Avatar

    John Doran

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    A beautifully clearly written & succinct summary of the warming/climate fraud.
    Thank you, Andy Rowland.
    JD.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      Andy Rowlands

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      Thanks John for your kind words, that is much appreciated.

      Reply

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    richard

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    “Mann said he was taking a stand for science in the court case, and it’s interesting to note that Mark Steyn said not a single scientist or scientific institution filed an Amicus Brief in support of him’

    Because they all know it is a fraud and don’t want to be caught in the same cesspit as him should he be forced to reveal. Though they are quite happy to perpetuate the fraud from a distance.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      Andy Rowlands

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      I’m sure you’re exactly right there Richard, some are more than willing to do so, though I suspect there are some who go along with it as their funding and salaries depend on it. I discussed this with the editor of PSI, and we are both of the opinion people like John Christy & Roy Spencer at UAH are being careful about what they say until they retire, at which time they will probably become much more openly skeptical.

      Reply

  • Avatar

    rod

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    “The policies being formulated to deal with this so-called ‘climate crisis’… will vastly increase energy bills, which will hit the poorest members of society the hardest, creating more poverty and even death if people are unable to heat their homes.”

    And… as a special introductory offer, this century only… the implementation of the Left’s much desired policies will necessarily result in armed revolution, the dystopian ultimate goal of the Marxists in charge of IPCC.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Joseph Olson

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    “Hockey Stickery Doc” and “Penn Panel Limbos under the Hockey Stick” at CanadaFreePress(.)com > satire is protected from rogue lawsuits. “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Andrew Montford exposed the bristlecone hoax hiding the Medieval warming. McKitrick & McIntyre exposed the hockey ramp hoax.

    Reply

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