Michael Mann, the scientist who created the "hockey stick" graph to demonstrate how global temperatures have changed over the last 700 years, is going to war.
Mann, along with his sidekick, virologist Peter J. Hotez, has decided that Republicans are a threat to America and humanity and must be "destroyed."
The @GOP must be destroyed for American Democracy to survive. It really is that simple.
— Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) September 17, 2023
The two hysterics have written a book titled Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World, and they are not kidding around.
“The future of humankind and the health of our planet now depend on surmounting the dark forces of antiscience” they warn on page three.
On page 27, they sound the klaxon and ring the bells. “Unless we find a way to overcome antiscience, humankind will face its gravest threat yet – the collapse of civilization as we know it.”
“Antiscience,” claim Mann and Hotez, is “politically and ideologically motivated opposition to any science that threatens powerful special interests and their political agenda.”
Yes, the irony is lost on Mr. Hockey Stick. Climate change, a powerful special interest, has seen its political agenda threatened by other scientists who have questioned its work. Those questions are not based on politics and ideology, but on careful observation and research using the scientific method.
Roger Pielke, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote a book review, of sorts, that swats away many of Mann and Hotez's arguments with ease.
It's a snap when a scientist is debating ideologues.
Pielke's response is posted at Minding the Campus:
Much of the book is spent denigrating those the authors see as enemies within these five categories. I counted 137 people who they namecheck as part of the antiscience cabal threatening the world. Many on the enemies list are not Republicans, or even on the political right. That seeming incoherence can be quickly resolved by recognizing that the list is simply people Mann and Hotez don’t like for one reason or another.
Full disclosure: I’m listed as enemy #136, oddly, in their enemies sub-category “The Press.” They explain that I am on the list because of my book, The Honest Broker, which argues that scientists should fully engage in democratic processes and discusses the different ways this might occur.
Their enemies' list includes many of the authors’ critics and political opponents. Mann repeats his longstanding beefs with Bjorn Lomborg (#70) and Judy Curry (#92) over climate. Hotez does the same on COVID-19 origins, criticizing Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (#133 and #134), co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
The five categories remind me of a radical left grad student's thesis on "Enemies of Socialism." There are plutocrats, Petrostates, and the three "P's": pros, propagandists, and the press.
"For a book supposedly about threats to science, it is not strong on scientific accuracy in the rare places that it actually discusses science," writes Pielke. Why let the facts get in the way of a good polemic?
“Deadly weather extremes exacerbated by human-caused warming – floods, storms, droughts, wildfire and extreme heat – lead to many millions more lives lost per year," Mann and Hotez claim. Pielke points out that even the sources they cite to "prove" their statement don't support that claim. In fact, the number of dead from natural disasters is in the thousands or tens of thousands. That means that Michael Mann is off by several orders of magnitude.
No matter. Mann and Hotez have bigger fish to fry. They are out to expose the conspiracy that elected Donald Trump in 2016.
Don't these guys watch the news?
For instance, they reference the 2009 leak—or theft, or hack—of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, known as Climategate. The emails revealed climate scientists, including Mann, engaging in conduct that many observers found troubling or unprofessional, though multiple subsequent investigations cleared the scientists of research misconduct. Mann and Hotez claim that “Climategate may well have indeed constituted a test run for Russia’s influence campaign in 2016 to elect Donald Trump.” Um, sure.
Clearing Mann of research misconduct was preordained. Independent scientific oversight today has become a rubber stamp, lest the scientists sitting in judgment themselves wind up in the dock.
Despite their large social media presence, Mann and Hotez ultimately see themselves as lonely warriors. Democrats may be the only alternative to evil Republicans, but even so, the authors lament that “the leadership of the Democratic Party has not prioritized standing up to the antiscience machine of the GOP and their malevolent plutocrat allies” (p. 97). Journalists are apparently too dumb to wage this fight: “They are poorly equipped to litigate the contentious, often technical, debates about the science.” The public, who barely appear in the book, are similarly ignorant: “The public does not have a deep understanding of what it is we actually do as ‘working scientists’” (p. 225).
"For Mann and Hotez, social media is where these civilization-defining battles play out, explaining of X and other platforms: 'One’s following – the number of followers one has—is crucial currency in the social media world,'" Pielke writes.
"Lord, what fools these mortals be," giggles the fairy Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Blinded by a towering arrogance, obsessed with the shallow stupidity found on social media, and unaware that their monumental hubris causes them to place themselves far above the rest of us mortals, Mann and Hotez are the primary exhibits of scientific blindness to any and all points of view that don't jibe with their own. Disagreement with them amounts to apostasy and heresy.
That such small minds have such a large influence on scientific inquiry is a tragedy.
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