Michael Mann: Swiftboating Comes To Science

Lasrick writes: Michael Mann writes about the ad hominem attacks on scientists, especially climate scientists, that have become much more frequent over the last few decades. Mann should know: his work as a postdoc on the famed "hockey stick" graph led him to be vilified by Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal. Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries pressured Penn State University to fire him (they didn't). Right-wing elected officials attempted to have Mann's personal records and emails (and those of other climate scientists) subpoenaed and tried to have the "hockey stick" discredited in the media, despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed the work, and that subsequent reports of the IPCC and the most recent peerreviewed research corroborates it.

Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. "We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."

Comments

Re:So, he is admitting that the attacks are true

[Registered Coward v2]

Well, considering that the word "swiftboating" is derived from accusations against John Kerry that were true. when someone says they are being "swiftboated" they are admitting that the attacks against them are based in truth.

Except they weren't true, as almost all of his cremates have said.

Re:Stop trying to win this politically

[phantomfive]

If you want to talk about science, then show me a tested climate model that has been subjected to an empirical test of its validity.

There are plenty of climate models that have been subjected to an empirical test of validity.

Re:Stop trying to win this politically

[bunratty]

When Arrhenius predicted global warming over 100 years ago, he was not looking at past data. He began with a reasoned hypothesis (burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, therefore burning fossil fuels will cause warming), made his prediction, and we've observed the warming which proves the prediction correct. It's a slam dunk as far as I'm concerned.

Predictions have been pretty good, actually

[Geoffrey.landis]

Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately.

And, surprise! It does. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

While I agree with most of your post, what you describe here is not science. That approach turns science on its head. The scientific method begins with a reasoned hypothesis, followed by a prediction based on the hypothesis, and an experiment to prove or disprove this prediction.

Correct. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius 1896 http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... The numerical calculation of greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide was first accurately done using measured value for infrared absorption and numerical integration of the profile was done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any reasonable book about atmospheric science (such as the one on my desk at the moment, An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, by Liou (1980), p. 188). Calculating the greenhouse effect alone (that is, assuming no change in cloudiness, and constant relative humidity), Manabe and Wetherald showed "a ten percent increase in CO2 concentration (from 300 to 330 ppm) would lead to a warming of 0.3 K." It's a logarithmic response function (Arrhenius calculated that much back in 1895, although he didn't have the data to do the complete numerical integration), so it's easy to extrapolate this to the current carbon dioxide of about 400 ppm. It comes to about 0.8 K increase by their model.
Comparing it to the data, from 1967 on... looks like the experimental result matches the prediction.

Climate "science" on the other hand does exactly what you describe here. It looks at past data and attempts to fit it to a hypothesis.

Nope. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius. The detailed calculation dates to Manabe and Wetherald.

In any case, while the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark, there's plenty of other data. You seem to be unaware that there is is a lot of measurements of the atmosphere.

That's not science at all. That's little more than a statistical model. These guys believe they have their answer and are trying to fit all observations to it.

That's a description of deniers. That's not the way climate science is done.

The reason we believe that the model is more or less accurate is that there are terabytes of data confirming it. The reason we don't believe that alternative models are accurate is that there aren't any. All of the alternative models proposed so far fail when compared against the evidence.

When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.

You don't seem to know much about the subject, but this is not one or two scientists doing questionable work and then everybody else saying "oh, they must be right". There are thousands of scientists working on it; supercomputer models built on five different continents; ground, balloon, and satellite measurements, terabytes of data.

Re:Stop trying to win this politically

[bunratty]

That's ice surface area, which tells you only how spread out the ice is, not how much there is. You need to look at the ice mass, which is declining at an accelerating rate.