NSF: It is reasonable to suspect Mann of falsifying data

An investigation by the National Science Foundation into the Climategate scandal has come to the conclusion that there are strong grounds for suspicions against Michael "Hide the decline" Mann and his accomplices. The report concludes:

"As noted above, no specific allegation or evidence of data fabrication or falsification was made to the University; rather, the University developed its allegation of data falsification based on a reading of publicly released emails, many of which contained language that reasonably caused individuals, not party to the communications, to suspect some impropriety on the part of the authors."

We were right all along. Finally, we have been vindicated! Now please can we get back all the countless billions of our tax-payers dollars and euros spent on this fraud?

Obviously, the Warmistas will desperately try to spin this in any ways they can! It's time to jump off the AGW bandwagon now, boys!

Update: As can be observed below, the forces of misdirection and desinformation are already gathering. There are some statements in the report that unfortunately are somewhat ambiguous when taken out of context, and it is those statements the trolls predictably are trying to spin. They include:

"Although the Subject's data is still available and still the focus of significant critical examination, no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the Subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results."

"Such scientific debate is ongoing, but does not, in itself, constitute evidence of research misconduct."

 "Concerning False Claims, 18 USC #287 and 31 USC ##3729-33 and False Statement, 18 USC #1001, we examined the elements of each suggested offense and have concluded that there is insufficient evidence of violation of any of these statutes to warrant investigation."

"We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct withing the definition of the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. ... We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence."

While some unscrupulous individuals will claim that this means that Mann is innocent like a little lamb with a shiny white fleece that has just been white washed, we know that what it really says is that Mann and his Team have hidden all the evidence, just like they did "hide the decline of global temperatures the last decades." Indeed, we know and have always known that the Team-tribe is up to no good. Why are they trying to hide that Arabs colonized Greenland during the very very hot medieval period? We are very skeptical about the whole AGW thing, and nothing you say is ever going to change our mind! We stand up for the truth, against enviro-tyranny.

Update 2: Marc Morano at Climate Depot agrees with my analysis:

"It doesn't conclude there is 'nothing wrong' with Mann's conclusions, all it concludes is there is no basis to conclude he did anything improper WITH NSF FUNDING"

Precisely! Maybe Mann did his falsifications with money he stole from orphans, or earned by trafficking, or counterfeited, or got as bribes from the rising Soviet Union. Until that has been disproved, we have no choice but to consider him guilty as charged!

Wood mashes Mashey

In Chronicle of Higher Education, NAS president Peter Wood (picture) delivers a devastating critique of the warmistas in two articles: Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism and Climate Thuggery. NAS, you may think, National Academy of Sciences, isn't that those people who white washed the hockey stick? Do not fear, this is a different NAS with far more credibility: National Association of Scholars.

In the first piece, NAS president Wood writes about the american showman P T Barnum, who got rich from freak shows and a museum with mermaids and other fake curiosities. That constitutes a truly devastating critique of the state of climate science; a merciless blow that the peddlers of climate apocalypse never will recover from. Once you get compared to P T Barnum (or Hitler) it is game over!

One alarmist who has much in common with P T Barnum is John Mashey. I wrote about Mashey's shameless attacks against Edward Wegman, the worlds best statistician, last autumn. In his piece, Woods writes:

But let’s put aside these vacant thoughts and turn to some serious news. Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of “hide the decline” Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous “hockey stick” chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term. Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. As Science puts it, “His critics say Mashey is more interested in destroying his foes than in debating the issues.” Professor Mann is extolling his efforts at “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”

Trying to find errors is your opponents' publication: what kind of low life would sink so low? Mashey has shown his true colors (green, red, brown), and the innocent Wegman is now under investigation for plagiarism. We skeptics would never do anything so mean. We are honorable people! Remember Climategate!

In the second piece, NAS president Wood documents how the warmists try to silence dissenting voices and cover up scientific facts that undermine their position:

Mann himself has deployed nuisance lawsuits in a similar fashion. He has sued Tim Ball—a Canadian global-warming skeptic, an environmentalist, and former professor of geography—for libel for writing that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his role in Climategate. Mann also threatened a lawsuit against Minnesotans for Global Warming for a satiric YouTube video titled “Hide the Decline.”

Indeed. Instead of engaging in a scientific debate with Ball and Minnesotans for Global Warming, Mann just goes ahead and sues them. But that is because he cannot counter their rock-solid arguments. By thus attacking his strongest critics, Mann tries to make everybody else afraid and thereby he prevents an open and informed scientific debate. "Makin' up data the old hard way. Fudgin' the numbers day by day. Hiding the snow and the cold and a downward line. Hide the decline (hide the decline)." That video was so funny! And scientific! "Oh Climategate I think you have sealed your fate. I hope you do a lot of time, cuz what you did was such a crime."


Mashey and co-thug Coleman try to retaliate in a piece of their own in CHI:

Although we see this elsewhere and ignore it, we were surprised to find articles and comments by Wood in CHE that could be considered libelous. We value the academy for open discussion and seeking truth. We both take academic misconduct seriously and have filed formal, detailed misconduct complaints. Wood’s use of phrases like “tattered reputation,” “statistical trickery and suppression of discrepant data,” “Barnum-esque hokum,” and “academic dishonesty” are not things that credible people publish without showing expertise and evidence. As Christopher Hitchens has so accurately stated: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Much of what Wood writes falls under the category of assertion without evidence, counter to the principles of scholarly discourse.

This is utterly ridiculous and without any merit what-so-ever! Why would NAS president Wood want to libel anybody? He is not taking sides in the climate debate. He describes his honorable intentions as follows:

Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a valid scientific theory? Is it well supported by the empirical data or is it mostly an artifact of computer modeling? I don’t have answers to these questions. I stand, rather, on the side of those who favor rigorous scientific inquiry, transparency, and openness. I am not a climate scientist, but neither do I cede the whole matter of answering such questions to the designated experts. Good science doesn’t limit itself to the views of narrow-cast specialists. Valid observations, corrective criticism, competing hypotheses, and rigorous testing can and often do arise from other sources.

On Hiding the Decline and Rebuilding Trust part III (of LXXV): To Serve Mann

By cartoonist Josh, from WUWT

The final nail in the coffin of global warming is nigh! The ultimate truth of the Climategate scandal is revealed. The downfall and disgrace of the Team is finally coming. Teamster Eugene Wahl has spilled the beans.

Mosher at WUWT reports: 

“Sources confirm that a federal inspector has questioned Eugene Wahl and Wahl has confirmed that Mann asked him to delete emails. Wahl has also informed the inspector that he did delete emails as the result of this request.”

We thank this courageous source, probably the brave Senator Inhofe's office.

And Marc Morano: 

“Climategate’s Michael Mann Caught!? Justice to be Served?! Climategate’s Eugene Wahl ‘has confirmed that Mann asked him to delete emails… Wahl did delete emails as the result of this request’”

So the case is clear: Teamster Mann ordered Teamster Wahl to delete emails. Mann was the bloated spider in the center of the web of deceit and deception spun by the Team; the ayatollah behind the Team's reign of climate terror. The emails in questions are reported to be concerned with a clandestine exchange Wahl had with Teamster Briffa, when Briffa asked for Wahl's assistance in corrupting the corrupt IPCC procedures in order to respond to a hockey-stick-related comment from an IPCC reviewer (who actually was our hero Steve McIntyre). The corruption is claimed to consist of Wahl, secretly and most certainly in violation of the corrupted IPCC rules, sending Briffa a paper he co-authored with Teamster Ammann which had not been published at that time, but that is probably just the tip of the non-melting ice-berg. We can only speculate what tricks, decline-hiding, spaghetti cooking and data massaging was going on in that corrupt paper. It is now clear that nothing in the IPCC reports can be trusted. The public is rapidly losing confidence in climate science due to this sordid affair, and justifiably so. This would never have happened of the IPCC had followed my advise to video record all activities of IPCC authors; to log all their computer activities; to record all their communications and conversations; monitor their physiological parameters (temperature, blood pressure, EKG, EEG etc); to regularly test their DNA for mutations; and to make all this information publicly available in real time on the web. I demand that the IPCC complies with my suggestions for the writing of the next report, due in 2035.

The momentous revelation of Mann's involvement has resulted in a grotesque and malicious ad hominem smearing campaign by notorious alarmists like Joe Romm. While it in some sense may be technically correct that Wahl actually didn't say that Mann asked him to delete the emails but only forwarded an email from Briffa, that is immaterial to the case at hand. We know for certain that Mann was master minding a conspiracy to corrupt the IPCC reports. Joe Romm is only trying to attack the messenger in order to divert the attention from Mann's transgressions, in particular not telling the Penn State investigation about the forwarding. Read for yourself if you can stomach it:

A bunch of widely discredited pro-pollution scientist-smearers — Anthony “shout them down” Watts, Chris Horner, Marc Morano, Steve McIntyre — have spun a partially leaked transcript from the IG investigation into a bunch of libelous falsehoods. Sen. Inhofe has now reposted those stories on the Senate EPW website (here). The most plausible theory is that Inhofe himself leaked the information to right-wing fabricators so he could quote those stories (see below).

Outrageous! Although one could argue that Mann didn't explicitly ask Wahl to delete the emails, but instead forwarded an email from Briffa to Wahl, it is clear that Mosher (on Watt's blog), Horner and Morano where justified to report that Mann did ask Wahl to delete the emails. There is nothing libelous in that! On the contrary, Mosher, Horner and Morano are brave and truth-loving and honorable men (who by the way have since made corrections, sort of)! And so is the highly esteemed Senator Inhofe, that beacon of sanity and integrity in the US Senate. Why is Romm so obsessive about whether the information came from Inhofe? The important thing is that the information is true, or at least was in principle (although perhaps not entirely in practice) true at the time it was deliberated. And if some things happened to be "leaked" and some things were not perfectly true - so what? We shouldn't ask for impossible standards of integrity and perfection. Romm and his fellow alarmists must really be getting desperate, but they know that their house of cards is falling down! Therefore, they are burning all their bridges. We will never get any reconciliation and we will never rebuild the public's trust in climate science if people like Romm have their way! Woe, woe, woe! This misery can only be remedied with even more blogging about the hockey-stick and Climate gate.

Yet, it is comforting to see that the public is unimpressed by Romm's fit of rage. Romm's post only got 50 comments, whereas Mosher's WUWT post has received 490 comments when I'm writing this, so it is quite clear who to trust on this matter. I conclude by citing some of the insightful comments to Mosher's piece:

Tastes like pork I am told.

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The house of cards will soon be coming down.

Kudos to all those stalwart individuals that have doggedly pursued this noble cause. I have never made a “charitable” donation that made more sense and gave better results than supporting this and other climate realist organizations.

Well done!

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If Wahl admitted this… wait my brain is trying to understand why there are no criminal proceedings going on right now.

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Nothing will happen. Orthodox Party members never get in trouble. Only heretics and truth-tellers get in trouble.

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Penn State (and Penn State alumni) better realize that they are NOT too big for this cover-up to severely damage their reputation.

The Blog-Citizens’ Tribunal to Find Out the Truth about the Climate Fraud

Whitewash after whitewash have come out of the official so-called inquiries and investigations of the great Climategate scandal. It has become apparent that only by a concerted effort by independent and unbiased investigators in the blogosphere can we cut through the deceptions and lies of the climate conspirators. There have been some attempts to do this before, most notably by brave climate auditor Steve McIntyre and the noble senator James Inhofe, but they have been too feeble and too conventional. We need some new initiatives, some new leadership! Therefore I call all blog scientists and blog auditors and blog investigators and blog aurors to unite under the banner of Climate Truth and join our considerable intellectual powers and moral forces so we can strike the final nail into the battered coffin of the climate scam.

The famous detective Sherlock Holmes will be our guiding light in this noble endeavour. Holmes was a genius that also worked outside of the official channels, represented by the boneheaded Scotland Yard Gestapo officers. If Holmes’s methods could lead to victory against the abominable Professor Moriarty, then they could also aid us in defeating the abominable professors Jones and Mann and Hansen.

The great Sherlock Holmes once said:

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

We have eliminated the impossible: we can be certain that the fraudsters are not innocent; that their “science” is not free of manipulations and fudging; that their models are no better than video games. It just like when we reason about what controls the climate: once we have eliminated carbon dioxide, we know that it must be the iron core of the sun, cosmic rays, clouds, a recovery from the LIA, underwater volcanoes, Mars, natural 1500-year cycles, and thousands of undiscovered but significant climate drivers and it is not warming anyhow.

But what is the truth that remains in the case of Climategate? Tricks, lies, cheating, gate-keeping, back-scratching en masse – that is for certain, but we need to determine more exactly what all the crimes and misdemeanours of the Hockey team are.

The great Sherlock Holmes also said:

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

We surely don’t want to rack our minds to pieces, so the first step of our project must be to collect all the relevant material. There are lots of people out there in the internets who have a piece of the truth – they must all be heard! And that is the wonderful thing about blog science – everybody can be heard. You don’t need any fancy titles and white lab coats – you just need a sharp wit and an open mind unsoiled by AGW dogma. Indeed, we have listened to the ivory-tower academics for too long, and look where that has led us! It is time that we listen to the average Joe Sixpack instead. Therefore, I want to say to everybody: anything you know, anything you believe, every hunch you have are pertinent to our investigation. As Sherlock Holmes said:

It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.

Do not fear that what you say would be trivial or irrelevant or speculative or wrong: you still deserve to be heard. How can we otherwise know that we have not missed some important piece of information? Your little piece, however improbable, may still remain after we have eliminated the impossible, and then it will have been proven to be true. So whatever you have seen or read or heard about, whatever rumors and whispers you have come across on the web, whatever emails you have managed to download from some university’s mail server: report it. If it is not impossible, it must be true! If you have received an evasive reply to one of your FOI-requests, report it. And if you haven’t received any reply, it is even more important to report it. Silence is the supreme evidence of a crime:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Finally, we need to do what we do best: we need to think. We need to get down into our basements and lock the door and pour though all our material during endless sleepless nights, with only a pipe and a bottle of whisky and our online fellow auditors and investigators to keep us company, and we need to figure out what it all means. And we need to think unconventionally. Our minds must boldly go were no minds have gone before. As Sherlock Holmes said:

In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward.

Indeed, we need to think backwards. Not boring, castrated forward thinking like those ivory-tower academics, but bold and imaginative backwards thinking. And upside-down-thinking, and inside-out thinking, and three-impossible-things-before-breakfast-thinking, and all kinds of unconventional thinking, just like the great Holmes did. We will not subject ourselves to Occam’s razor or other medieval instruments of torture. No matter how labyrinthine their machinations are, we will unravel them:

Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.

With our collaborative effort, we will eliminate the impossible and reveal the hidden Truth, and finally throw down Hansen and Jones and Mann and Briffa and their hockey-club-wielding minions from the top of the Reichenbach Falls! And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech! With the combined powers of hundreds of right-thinking, independent and impartial blog scientists and science auditors, we cannot fail. And finally, the new blog science will replace the old corrupted back-scratching academic science, and that will the final nail into the battered coffin of the climate scam.

• I urge everybody who has some evidence to report to write it down in the comment section below!


• I invite my colleagues in blog science and auditing to cooperate in this effort and to establish posts were good and honest blog citizens can report and analyze evidence!


• I invite other initiatives, such as the investigation that Andrew Montford is conducting for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to join our tribunal under my supreme command!
  

I would like to end with this quote by the Great Detective:

I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.

Alone, we might have feeble powers, but together in The Blog-Citizens’ Tribunal to Find Out the Truth about the Climate Fraud we are an unstoppable justice machine!

Whitewash! Whitewash!

In a pattern which is becoming sadly familiar, two more "inquiries" into the Great Climategate Scandal have "found" that "nobody" had done anything "wrong". As anybody with any rudimentary cognitive capabilities understands, these inquiries are just a whitewash that would make Virgin Mary's bed linen look as black as coffee in Congo! If there was no wrong-doing, why do all these inquiries? Such inquiries are only travesties and tricks performed to hide the decline ... sorry the crime. Everybody knows that! They always give the opposite result of what the truth is! Hence if the inquiries actually had found that Mann and Jones were guilty as hell, then I would have believed these men to innocent like new-born lambs in the arms of Baby Jesus. Unless it was a trick to convict Jones and Mann in order to make them appear innocent. Hah, I'm not that easily fooled! But with the outcome we have seen now, it is obviously an attempt to make Jones and Mann appear innocent in order to make them really appear guilty in order to make them seem innocent, because everybody knows that inquiries always lie. There is only one type of inquiry that could have told us the truth, and that is a Blog Inquiry, in which prominent blog scientists and intelligent layman commenters, unsoiled by the corrupting influence of what passes as "science" nowadays, work together on the Web to express their informed opinions about the truth.
What is obvious irrespectively of these inquiries, which constitute layers upon layers of elaborate deception that only the sickest and most depraved mind could come up with, is that Mann and Jones have fudged and manipulated and tricked the data in order to support an immaculately preconceived conclusion - indeed a conclusion that any right-thinking person by instict must know is wrong. But that is not science - that is closing your eyes to Truth. The so-called AGW theory is an non-falsifiable oxymoron, and theories that are non-falsifiable are not scientific! It has also been disproved many times, by Gerlisch and Tscheuschler, by Soon and Baliunas, by Miskolczi, by Ernst-Georg Beck, by Lord Monckton, by McIntyre, by Inferno and finally by myself! And by its nature of being unfalsifiable and falsified at the same time, AGW theory leads to a contradiction, and logically this means that it has to be wrong. Reductio ad adsurdum!

Are they criminals?

Al'Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones - these are the people who have committed the greatest fraud ever on humankind! They and their henchmen in their peer-reviewed journals, their scientific associations and the humungous money-sucking IPCC.
But are these tricksters and fraudsters criminals? It might come as a surprise to you, but I would say “No!”. And I will explain why. You see, I have perfectly logical reasons for not calling them “criminals”, and as soon as you hear them you will understand what I mean. A criminal is somebody who mugs an old lady, or steals a car, or breaks into somebody’s house and leaves with the plasma TV, or sell drugs to school children. It could even be somebody who pulls a gun a shoots somebody innocent down. These are all terrible deeds, but they affect only one or a few individuals.
Let us now consider Al’Gore and his cronies. They want to throw the whole world into poverty, misery, slavery and tyranny. They want to create a new world order, where they are the supreme overlords. They are not criminals – they are super villains!
So you see, that’s why it is inappropriate to call them criminals. Al'Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones – they are super villains!

Occasio facit furem