Michael Mann
is delusional, frequently ranting that the Koch Brothers are at the head of a vast global conspiracy, claiming in court that he's a Nobel Prize winner, along with claiming that he was exonerated by investigations that didn't even look into him. As Roger Pielke Jr. said,
"If Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him."
Recently Judith Curry, chair of climate science at Georgia Tech, posted:
Richard Feynmann puts it this way: “Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”
I anticipate that the unfolding of future decades will reveal the harm done to science by agenda-driven scientists working to enforce a manufactured consensus on anthropogenic global warming and its dangers.
In the meantime, the BS detectors of the public seem to have been triggered. The failure of the climate science establishment to convince the public can be chalked up to communication strategies that come across like propaganda, the intolerance of disagreement (calling opponents deniers), advocacy by scientists, the Climategate shenanigans, Peter Gleick and the Heartland affair, etc.
She frequently writes about or links to scientists talking about the collapse of ethics and integrity in climate science and what can be done to restore it, but also focuses on the "uncertainty monster", which is a wicked problem, along with black swan events and rapid climate change.
Among the many oddball things that separate climate science from science is the fast-and-loose ways that temperature records are handled. The NCDC in Asheville dropped many state historic average temperatures by a full 2C this March. So oddly, if you live in a big city in one of states with the largest adjustments (almost all states had a large downward adjustment), you are probably living a full 4C above pre-industrial temperatures according to the warmists, even though the actually paper thermometer records might show no change at all.
Interestingly, one of the flaws in the National Climate Data Center's automatic adjustment process was earlier addressed in an article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, in which a scientist carefully measured the grass height around campus and in adjoining neighborhoods to find that contrary to standard plant growth models, grass growth when plotted over time shows a sawtooth wave pattern. The researcher promised to investigate further, and I assume that subsequent attempts to repeat his results would've uncovered the existence of lawn mowers.
In the case of weather station data, plants grow up around the site, slowly and steadily blocking more surface winds and adding a slow positive temperature bias. Then the plants get cut back. The NCDC's automatic adjustment procedure treats the cut back as an anomaly (instead of a return to normal), and splices together the warm-biased signals on either side to form a continually rising temperature curve from the sawtooth waveform created by local environment corrections to keep the station in consistent order. The same thing happens when a station becomes too urbanized and gets moved to a more rural site. The move returns the station to its original baseline signal, but the NCDC procedure undoes the change to pile warming bias on top of warming bias.
Since you can't keep adjusting the modern temperature upwards (we still look at thermometers as a check on the NCDC's frequent and unjustifiable adjustments), the past temperature record has to be adjusted downwards, implying that the people who read the thermometers many decades ago were actually off by 4 or 5 degrees F (and thus legally blind), yet can somehow be trusted to produce aggregate data accurate to a hundredth of a degree.
