Serial Nobel Peace Prize hoaxer Michael Mann is maintaining his fake claim to have won the prestigious award in a new HBO documentary — four years after he was exposed for lying to a Washington, D.C. court.
Mann has had to withdraw this inaccurate claim on numerous occasions since 2007 — most dramatically, in 2012, he was forced to admit that a sworn affidavit he submitted to a D.C. court contained the lie about being a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Four years later, the claim is again repeated in the HBO documentary which has just had a theatrical release in New York.
Mann’s repeated exaggeration of his qualifications is significant: He stands accused of exaggerating and manipulating data in his academic work. Mann was the author of the famous “hockey stick” graph which purported to show that world temperatures had been stable and flat until a violent upswing caused by industrialization.
In a sworn affidavit, Mann described himself as a Nobel Prize Winner, and said the fact that he was the recipient of such a prestigious prize compounded the libel.
“It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient,” the affidavit stated.
However, the Nobel Prize committee said that Mann was not a winner of the prize, and that working part-time for the IPCC which won the prize does not entitle people to claim they are a winner. In a statement to National Review, a committee spokesperson stated emphatically: “Mann has never won the Nobel Prize.”
Mann was forced to resubmit his sworn statement removing the Peace Prize claim, and he had to scrub the claim from numerous university and professional websites. The re-occurrence of his fake claim to be a Nobel laureate is likely to weaken his legal case against the CEI and Steyn given that they are basing their defense on allegations that he has fabricated scientific findings and statistics.
The hockeystick graph [bottom graph below] claims that the 20th century showed unusually rapid warming -- and thus suggests a strong human influence. The graph also does away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, which were shown in earlier IPCC reports [see top graph below].
It was soon found that the Hockeystick graph was in error and did not deserve continued reliance.
Canadian statisticians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated errors in Mann's statistical analysis and in the use of certain tree-ring data for calibration. In fact, they showed that Mann's algorithm would generate a Hockeystick graph -- even if the input data was pure noise.
It is worth noting that the IPCC no longer uses the Hockeystick to support human-caused warming.
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. When they fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
More:
HBO Documentaries Fall For Serial Nobel Prize Hoaxer Michael Mann
IPCC 's Bogus Evidence for Global Warming
MIT Technology Review - Global Warming Bombshell
The rise and fall of the Hockey Stick
