This story comes from the staff of The Daily Climate

Michael Mann, an influential climatologist who has spent years in the center of the debate over climate science, has sued two organizations that have accused him of academic fraud and of improperly manipulating data.

Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, on Monday sued the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with CEI analyst Rand Simberg and National Review reporter Mark Steyn.

The lawsuit, Mann’s lawyer said in a statement, was based upon their “false and defamatory statements” accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Neither Mann nor his lawyer, John B. Williams of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Cozen O’Connor, were available for comment Tuesday afternoon. But on Facebook, where news of the lawsuit was initially posted Tuesday, Mann said the lawsuit was part of “a battle” to assist climate scientists in the fight against those who attack their work.

“There is a larger context for this latest development,” he wrote, “namely the onslaught of dishonest and libelous attacks that climate scientists have endured for years by dishonest front groups seeking to discredit the case for concern over climate change.”

But he faces a high bar: Mann has played a key role in climate science for decades, and the law generally requires a much higher burden of proof from public figures, said CEI general counsel Sam Kazman.

“I don’t think he’s got a shot at reaching it,” Kazman said in an interview. “Our stuff may have been debatable, but it was solidly based and we had a perfect right to say what we did.”

“We plan to defend the suit vigorously but we think it is a totally unfounded lawsuit.”

In 1999 Mann published a timeline of global temperatures stretching back almost 1,000 years. The graph showed a fairly stable trend until 1900, when temperatures spiked sharply upward. That so-called “hockey stick” diagram became a lightning rod in the debate on whether humans were influencing the climate.

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The climate science literature is vast. It merits broad and deep reading by anyone planning to write about it. The fact is the IPCC forecasts have generally underestimated key trends, including warming (see here) and greenhouse gas emissions and Arctic sea ice loss and ice sheet disintegration. I explain why here. Finally, the IPCC generally overstates uncertainty because it insists on conflating uncertainty in future emissions with uncertainty in the climate’s sensitivity to those emissions. Continuing to take no serious action on climate eliminates almost all of the uncertainty as to whether or not future impacts will be catastrophic. Even while publishing this piece by one of the country’s top climatologists debunking the climate analysis in Nate Silver’s new book, I remain a big fan of Silver’s polling analysis (as does Mann) — Joe Romm.

by Michael Mann

If you’re a science or math geek like me, you can’t help but like Nate Silver. He’s the fellow nerd who made good. His site FiveThirtyEight.com is a must for any serious polling buff, and he regularly graces the leading talk shows with his insightful if wonky commentary. So you can imagine how excited I was a year ago when Nate’s assistant contacted me, indicating that he wanted to come to State College, PA — the “happy valley” — to interview me for his new book on “forecasting and prediction.”

Nate, I was told, was working on a chapter about global warming. He sought me out because he felt my expertise would make me an “excellent guide to the history of climate modeling”. He also expressed interest in my own upcoming (since published) book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars which details my experiences at the center of the climate change debate. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to the meeting.

And so it was on a crisp early November day that Nate arrived at my office in the Walker Building of the Penn State campus. We exchanged pleasantries and proceeded to engage in a vigorous, in-depth discussion of everything from climate models and global warming to the role of scientific uncertainty, and the campaign by industry front groups to discredit climate science (something that is the focus of my own book). As I saw Nate off, I insisted he sample the Penn State Creamery’s famous ice cream before leaving town. I tweeted excitedly about my meeting with him, and by the end of the day Nate had even added me to his relatively short list of twitter followees. Certain our discussion had been productive and informative, I awaited Nate’s book with great anticipation.

And so I was rather crestfallen earlier this summer when I finally got a peek at a review copy of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t. It’s not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier; He accepts that human-caused climate change is real, and that it represents a challenge and potential threat. But he falls victim to a fallacy that has become all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science. Nate conflates problems of prediction in the realm of human behavior — where there are no fundamental governing ‘laws’ and any “predictions” are potentially laden with subjective and untestable assumptions — with problems such as climate change, which are governed by laws of physics, like the greenhouse effect, that are true whether or not you choose to believe them.

Nate devotes far too much space to the highly questionable claims of a University of Pennsylvania marketing Professor named J. Scott Armstrong. Armstrong made a name for himself in denialist circles back in 2007 by denouncing climate models has having no predictive value at all. Armstrong’s arguments were fundamentally flawed, belied by a large body of primary scientific literature — with which Armstrong was apparently unfamiliar — demonstrating that climate model projections clearly do in fact out-perform naive predictions which ignore the effect of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. As discussed in detail by my RealClimate.org co-founder, NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, Armstrong simply didn’t understand the science well enough to properly interpret, let alone, assess, the predictive skill of climate model predictions.

That Nate would parrot Armstrong’s flawed arguments is a major disappointment, especially because there are some obvious red flags that even the most cursory research should have turned up. A simple check of either SourceWatch or fossil fuel industry watchdog ExxonSecrets, reveals that Armstrong is a well-known climate change denier with close ties to fossil fuel industry front groups like the Heartland Institute, which earlier this year campaigned to compare people who accept the reality of climate change to the Unabomber, and secretly planned to infiltrate elementary schools across the country with industry-funded climate change denial propaganda.

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Today a Virginia judge ruled that the University of Virginia (UVA) doesn’t have to release the emails of climate scientists like Michael Mann to the anti-science American Tradition Institute (ATI).

The anti-science crowd knows that they can’t win on the science. Indeed they seem to have written off smart people entirely. But like someone addicted to cigarettes, they have been trying to reproduce the high from the massive Climategate exercise in smoke blowing.

To do that, the deniers need fresh emails to razzle dazzle the gullible so they won’t see the climate change that is all around them.

The good news is that ATI doesn’t get to read climate scientists’ emails. Here is what climatologist Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, wrote on his Facebook page:

Breaking: A victory for science! ATI loses ATI/UVa FOIA case. Judge issues final order. Affirms the university’s right to withhold scholarly communications and finds that the documents & personal emails of mine demanded by ATI were indeed protected as the university had contended.

I am gratified for the hard work and vigorous defense provided by the university to protect scholarly communications and raw materials of scholarship. Fortunately Virginia has a strong exemption in the public records act that protects research and scholarly endeavors. The judge ruled that the exemption under Virginia’s public records protecting information in furtherance of research on scientific and scholarly issues applies to faculty communications in furtherance of their work.

This finding is a potentially important precedent, as ATI and other industry-backed front groups continue to press their attacks on climate scientists through the abuse of public records and FOIA laws and the issuing of frivolous and vexatious demands for internal scholarly deliberations and personal correspondences.

How extreme is ATI? Last year they were singled out for criticism by the traditionally staid American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS Board issued a statement on “Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists”:

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by Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Eric Steig, via RealClimate

It’s been a tough few months for tree-rings, perhaps unfairly. Back in April, we commented on a study [that one of us (Mike) was involved in] that focused on the possibility that there is a threshold on the cooling recorded by tree-ring composites that could limit their ability to capture the short-term cooling signal associated with larger volcanic eruptions. Mostly lost in the discussion, however, was the fact–emphasized in the paper—that the trees appeared to be doing a remarkably good job in capturing the long-term temperature signal—the aspect of greatest relevance in discussions of climate change.

This week [July 8] there have been two additional studies published raising questions about the interpretation of tree-ring based climate reconstructions.

Update 7/12/12: Media Matters comments on the latest misrepresentations of the Esper et al study discussed in our article: ‘Surprise: Fox News Fails Paleoclimatology’
Update 7/13/12: Further comment from Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute in Huffington Post UK “The World’s Most Visited Newspaper Website Continues to Regurgitate Nonsense from Climate Change ‘Sceptics’”
Update 7/14/12: Some additional context provided by this LiveScience article

The first of these by Steinman et al (Mike is again a co-author) appeared in PNAS, and compared evidence of winter precipitation changes in the Pacific Northwest over the past 1500 years using a physical model-based analysis of lake sediment oxygen isotope data to statistical reconstructions of drought based on tree ring data. Steinman et al note that the tree-ring and lake estimates track each other well on multidecadal timescales, but show some divergence in their lower frequency (i.e. centennial and longer timescale) trends. They conclude that this divergence may simply reflect the differing and, in fact, complementary seasonal information reflected by the two proxy records, noting in the abstract:

differences in seasonal sensitivity between the two proxies allow a more compete understanding of the climate system and likely explain disparities in inferred climate trends over centennial timescales.

The authors amplified this point in their press release (emphasis added):

Tree ring and oxygen isotope data from the U.S. Pacific Northwest do not provide the same information on past precipitation, but rather than causing a problem, the differing results are a good thing, according to a team of geologists.

Nonetheless, some of the coverage (e.g. “Scientists see ancient climate patterns in lake-bottom ‘muck” by Lauren Morello, E&E/Climatewire, July 3, 2012) emphasized conflict between scientists over the discrepancies, rather than the more positive message about making use of complementary strengths of diverse sources of information about past climate change. In other words the ‘signal’ (moving forward with the science) became buried in the ‘noise’ (scientists on record arguing with each other).

The principle that different types of proxy data are complementary in the information they provide is in fact the motivation for the development of “multiple proxy” (multiproxy) reconstructions of climate (see e.g. this commentary by Mike from a decade ago). A new paper today is worth discussing for just this reason.

Jan Esper and colleagues have an article in Nature Climate Change that introduces a new reconstruction (N-Scan) of high-latitude (Fennoscandian) summer temperature changes over the past two millennia based on Maximum Latewood Density (‘MXD’). The most exciting–and in our view important–development is that they seem to have greatly ameliorated the “divergence problem” that has plagued some surface temperature reconstructions based on these types of data; given that the the revised MXD data appear to be able to track the most recent warming provides increased confidence in the estimates they provide of past temperature changes.

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ABC’s Bill Blakemore has a 5-part interview of the most vindicated climate scientist in America, Michael Mann. All 5 videos are posted below with links to their transcripts.

Mann discusses climate science and the ongoing “efforts to intimidate climate scientists and create confusion about their findings.” Mann is author of a terrific new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.

Science writer Chris Mooney put it well in his review of the book, “A Decade Ago, Conservatives Attacked a Scientist—And Created a Leader.”

Here are the videos:

Part 1 — “ ‘New McCarthyism’ Described by Climate Scientist Michael Mann” (transcript here):

Part 2 — “Climate Denialists Worse Than Tobacco CEOs Lying Under Oath, Says Mann” (transcript here):

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by Michael Mann

As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked, politicians have demanded I be fired from my job, and I’ve been subject to congressional and criminal investigations. I’ve even had death threats made against me. And why? Because I study climate science and some people don’t like what my colleagues and I have discovered. Their attacks on scientists are part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged in a cynical effort to discredit climate science.

My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which featured what is now popularly known as the hockey-stick graph. Using what we call proxy data – information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores – my co-authors and I pieced together the puzzle of climate variability over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.

By itself, this finding didn’t indicate that humans were solely responsible for the warming, but it was a compelling demonstration that something unusual was happening and, by inference, that it was probably related to human activity. Over the last few decades, the evidence, based on work from thousands of studies, has become much more robust and conclusive.

Nevertheless, our graph depicting the anomalous warming trend became an icon in the climate-change debate. Since then, I’ve found myself a reluctant, and almost accidental, public figure in the larger discussion about human-caused climate change.

Being caught in the middle of this “debate” has given me an opportunity to talk about the stark reality and dimensions of the problem. As the staid scientific journal Nature put it, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the accepted scientific evidence, and we must fight back against the disinformation that denies this real and present danger to the planet.

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You can help fight the denier attacks on Michael Mann by buying his book, reading it, and then reviewing it at Amazon.com.

The most vindicated climate scientist in America, Michael Mann, has published an excellent new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. How much do the climate science disinformers want to discourage you from reading it? I’ve reported that the deniers immediately launched an attack on the book and on the positive reviews on Amazon.com.

Now Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has decided that rather than just ignoring the book, they would have it ‘reviewed’ by their leading anti-science and anti-scientist editorial page writer, Anne Jolis.

I say “anti-science” because, as recently as Septmber, Jolis wrote an entire ‘opinion’ piece on “The Other Climate Theory:  Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.” Yes, she was pushing the long-debunked “cosmic ray” theory of climate change based on a CERN paper — months after its lead author explained that the paper “actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.” Multiple peer-reviewed papers make clear that cosmic rays aren’t driving significant climatic change.

I say “anti-scientist” because, as forest science expert Simon Lewis wrote here in a 2010 debunking of another one of Jolis’s masterpieces of misinformation:

I asked Peter Cox what he thought about the WSJ article. He was surprised that he was featured in a climate science bashing editorial. While his quotes were correctly transcribed Prof. Cox was not told that the article was about attacking climate science. The same journalist tried the same sleight-of-hand with me over a potential Amazongate article. So memo to scientists. If Anne Jolis of the WSJ contacts you, watch out, or you could find yourself being tricked into starring in an article about scientists not being open and honest.

It’s safe to say that if you ask Jolis to write review of a book on climate science, you know what you’re going to get. And, indeed, the review reveals that Jolis remains a one-trick pony.

Here she is with what I suppose she considers a devastating example of hypocrisy but which is an unintentional revelation of her own biases:

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by Rick Piltz, reposted from Climate Science Watch

In a victory for university scholars, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled today that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli does not have the authority to demand the release of email and other documents related to the work of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Cuccinelli’s global warming denial machine fishing expedition had been criticized even by climate ‘skeptics’ who are no friends of Prof. Mann.  It raised the chilling question of whether the university could protect researchers’ ability to privately and freely correspond with one another.

The Washington Post and Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch online reported.

The Court’s 26-page ruling is here (PDF).

The court’s ruling was on the question of Cuccinelli’s statutory jurisdiction vis-a-vis the university. From the Times-Dispatch:

The Virginia Supreme Court today sided with the University of Virginia in its fight against the state attorney general’s investigation of former U.Va. climate scientist Michael Mann.

The court upheld the Albemarle Circuit Court ruling setting aside Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demands for documents related to grants Mann receive to study global warming.

Cuccinell sought the information under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

But the high court ruled today that the university is not “a person” under the act, and the term “corporation” as used in the statute does not include state agencies such as public universities. …

“Certainly, I do think that it’s important for the university to be able to protect the privacy of its researchers and the ability of scientists to ask tough questions,” said Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group. “This is a victory for science in Virginia.” …

Amen to that, Michael.

When the Cuccinelli inquisition was initiated two years ago, we wrote (Free the Cuccinelli 40: Virginia AG demands e-mails of Michael Mann and 39 other scientists):

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One of the world’s top climatologists talks climate science and climate science denial:

Related Posts:

• WashPost: “The Scientific Finding that Settles the Climate-Change Debate” and “Confirms” the Hockey Stick Graph
• Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann and the Freedom of Inquiry
• Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration

• Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause