Michael Mann’s fevered dream
Ever read the New York Times? Wadda ya think, does it veer persistantly to the left? Is the Pope Catholic?
Well, Michael Mann has been huffing and puffing at the Huffington Post that the New York Times has strayed from his approved dogmatism concerning global warming. They dared to run an opinion piece by Richard Muller.
Richard Muller lives happily on the alarmist side of the road, but on occasion he lets his toes cross the dividing line, so that he can claim some credit for being open-minded.
In a recent op-ed he must have touched one of Mann’s extremely frayed nerves when he said…
“I worried that the famous “hockey stick” graph plotted by three American climatologists in the late 1990s portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity.”
Ouch. This was simply Muller’s demure way of stating the obvious. Of course, the main “American climatologist” who made this graph of “inappropriate simplicity” is none other than Michael Mann. Muller’s soft punch of a statement seems to have left a big bruise on Mann’s sensitive ego.
Mann thinks The New York Times never should have let Muller engage in this attack on his crowning achievement. But then the Times went even further and let the apostate spread even more heresy in a second op-ed about tornadoes. Muller wrote…
Despite the recent spate of deadly twisters, including those that tore through the Midwest over the weekend, the scientific evidence shows that strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming…
I am not talking about global warming per se, which I am convinced is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. But not everything attributed to global warming has a scientific basis…
So let’s consider only the most violent tornadoes, the ones in categories EF3 to EF5…
NOAA… shows that the number of these storms has been significantly decreasing over the past 58 years, from over 50 per year in the first half to under 40 per year in the second. The statistical significance of this decrease is extremely high: well above 99 percent confidence.
How dare Muller display such an attitude!
Mann is especially incensed that Muller quoted from an earlier HuffPost article which said…
Michael Mann, a climatologist who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, agreed that it’s too early to tell. ”If one factor is likely to be favorable and the other is a wild card, it’s still more likely that the product of the two factors will be favorable,” said Mann. “Thus, if you’re a betting person — or the insurance or reinsurance industry, for that matter — you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.”
But Muller wrote
Michael E. Mann, a prominent climatologist, was only slightly more cautious. He said, “If you’re a betting person — or the insurance or reinsurance industry, for that matter — you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.”
Mann called this innocent contraction “sleight of hand.” Touchy, touchy.
Mann uses his mighty reasoning powers to discern a conspiracy. You can’t be too careful when even your friends are out to get you. He warns us that this is ultimately the work of the Koch brothers, just like every other vile conspiracy against the goodness and light of global warming alarmism and the left in general. (It used to be Dick Cheney and Halliburton, but I guess they must have passed the world control levers over to the Koch brothers.) You see, Richard Muller now controls the New York Times, and the Koch brothers control Richard Muller.
Mann wraps his tin foil a little tighter and lectures…
The New York Times does a disservice to its readers when it buys into the contrived narrative of the “honest broker”–Muller as the self-styled white knight who must ride in to rescue scientific truth from a corrupt and misguided community of scientists. Especially when that white knight is in fact sitting atop a Trojan Horse–a vehicle for the delivery of disinformation, denial, and systematic downplaying of what might very well be the greatest threat we have yet faced as a civilization, the threat of human-caused climate change.
Shame on you New York Times. You owe us better than this.
You can get the full temperature of Mann’s paranoid delusional fever at his Huffington Post’s article, Something Is Rotten at the New York Times.
