Michael Mann continues to embarrass himself

By D.J. McGuire | Monday, February 6th, 2012 | International, Policy, Politics

Michael Mann – chief global-warming alarmist for Penn State – can never, ever disgrace his institution as much as Jerry Sandusky has.

But it’s not for lack of trying.

Mann first embarrasses himself with a petulant tweet about “journalistic malpractice.” Why, you ask? Well, it seems Mann is convinced that the rather mild winter we’ve had in the eastern part of the country is clear-cut evidence of global warming. There’s only one problem, as Anthony Watts noted (WUWT):

But Romm and Mann both ignore the much bigger story of a bitterly cold winter in Europe with snow reaching into northern Africa which has caused nearly three hundred deaths.

Two-hundred and eighty deaths to be precise – and yes, snow really has hit the southern side of the Mediterranean (Sacramento Bee):

Even North Africa has been affected by the chill, with children who had never seen snow playing snowball fights in high-lying districts of the Algerian capital Algiers. Roads to several villages in the mountainous Kabylia region near the coast were cut by snow.

Contrary to Mann’s opinion, Winter has come on with a vengeance.

Amazingly, Mann even dug a deeper hole in his attempt to explain why one of his favorite temperature proxies (tree ring growth) has failed so spectacularly – volcanoes! Here’s WUWT again, citing Mann’s latest dog’s breakfast:

Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, according to climate researchers, who compared tree-ring temperature reconstructions with model simulations of past temperature changes.

. . .

“The problem is that these trees are so close to the threshold for growth, that if the temperature drops just a couple of degrees, there is little or no growth and a loss of sensitivity to any further cooling. In extreme cases, there may be no growth ring at all,” said Mann. “If no ring was formed in a given year, that creates a further complication, introducing an error in the chronology established by counting rings back in time.”

In other words, volcanoes can cause cooling that wipes out any growth, meaning that observers may accidentally “skip” a year of data and assume warming that isn’t really there (or was actually later), or reject cooling that actually happened.

Of course, that can’t stop Mann from sticking his foot deeper into his mouth.

We know these tree rings capture most temperature changes quite well.

Yeah, except for the part where they diverged so badly in post-1950 temperatures that you removed the data from your “hockey-stick” analysis (thus “hiding the decline” that became known as “Mike’s Nature Trick”).

In fact, as I see it, the volcano adjustment actually makes things worse. Mann is now saying the volcane effect on tree ring data led to proxy temperature data that was too high. However, what exposed the tree-ring circus was post-1950 data that was too low (and thus called into question his use of tree rings to challenge the Medieval Warm Period). Thus, the “adjusted” tree-ring data would be even farther off the mark.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal

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