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Carbon steel “hockey stick” stronger than ever

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of the Inspector General, having conducted a thorough review and investigation into all allegations of impropriety or scientific misconduct against Penn State University Prof. Michael Mann, has dismissed all of those allegations for lack of evidence and closed the case (attached and/or here).

As reported by Joe Romm at Climate Progress, Mann has been the target of a host of allegations and attacks, many arising out of the iconic status of a graph (inset) that he created in a 1998 paper with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, and others sourced in the emails that hackers stole in 2009 from the the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

As the NSF now reports, none of Mann’s critics ever showed the courage or conviction of actually laying a formal complaint before Penn State, where Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center. But the allegations were so prominent in the blogosphere and in mainstream media that the university took it upon itself to conduct an investigation. The NSF then reviewed Penn State’s exculpatory findings, duplicating some parts of the investigation in greater detail.

The result? No shred of evidence exists to impugn Mann’s work.

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New Zealand-based academic and climate sceptic Dr Chris de Freitas has been caught using material from US lobby groups in lectures to first year university Geography students.

Students who listened to the “Geography 101” lectures on climate from Dr de Freitas, an associate professor at The University of Auckland’s School of Environment, admitted to being “quite convinced” that a scientific debate was still raging over the causes of global warming.

A report in the New Zealand Herald highlighted how Dr de Freitas had ignored key texts, ignored recent extreme weather events and argued that climate change was almost entirely down to natural variations.

In the lecture notes, published by author Gareth Renowden on his Hot Topic blog, one student wrote in the margins that “CO2 has a lot of beneficial effects… don’t believe the propaganda”.

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PolluterWatch is serving up a great tongue-in-cheek “memo to the Koch PR team” tonight, noting the obvious blunders from Koch Industries’ astroturfing and attack squad lately. The Kochtopus keeps revealing just how highly coordinated its media and blogger network is, mysteriously generating defensive and offensive pieces in quick succession at the drop of a billionaire’s hat.

If it weren’t so blatantly obvious in slinging the same mud and honey around the media Koch-o-sphere, perhaps Koch’s ever-ready defender squad might be worthy of compensation? Oh wait, New Media Strategies does get paid by Koch to blatantly and disastrously attempt to edit the Koch profile on Wikipedia. 

And even if Koch’s friends in media claim to rush to the company’s defense out of pure ideological zealotry and not for compensation, there are a few instances where that argument fails to impress.  As PolluterWatch points out, Koch’s PR team recently posted on the company’s Facebook page about a piece written by Steven Hayward that seemed to support Koch’s anti-science position on climate change and predictably tooted the old Climategate dud.

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Spook’s antics would be creepy if they were competent

A self-proclaimed counter-terrorism expert and former CIA case worker is soliciting for “whistleblowers” who will make allegations of impropriety against Dr. Michael Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and author of the apparently bulletproof Hockey Stick climate reconstruction.

Kent Clizbe has been sending letters, annually, to Mann’s colleagues promising them a big payout if they can offer any evidence that Mann has been misusing his federal research funds. In the first such letter that Clizbe sent, more than a year ago, he reported that the U.S. False Claims Act stipulates that whistleblowers can claim up to 30% of any recovered money and that Mann has received $50 million. Clizbe adds: “30% of $50 million is more than $12 million.”

In this single sentence, Clizbe reveals all you need to know about the man: he doesn’t care about the accuracy of his facts; and he can’t wrangle a calculator effectively enough to establish that 30% of 50 is 15. (Neither do his math skills improve over time, in this year’s version, he writes: “Up to 30% of $50 million (the total Dr Mann claims to have received for climate research) could net a whistleblower more than $10 million.”)

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Is Talk of Lawsuit A Trick to Hide His Decline?

George Mason University has confirmed that it is investigating its Professor Edward Wegman, the statistician who was point man in the 2006 political attack on the so-called “hockey stick“ graph.

Wegman, who was chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, was tapped in ‘06 by Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield to assemble a so-called “expert panel” to critique the famous hockey stick, a graph illustrating a thousand-year temperature record as reconstructed by climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. But Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Mashey has since demonstrated that, rather than convene a group of experts, Wegman tapped a couple of grad students and together they produced a report that was generously plagiarized from Bradley’s own work and then twisted - or just misrepresented - to appear to undermine the hockey stick and its creators.