Saturday, November 3, 2012

The hockey stick man is really a hockey puck

Nobel Warming



The story so far:
A week and a half ago, hockey-stick progenitor Michael Mann sued National Review for the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“.
It was news to me that Dr. Mann was a Nobel Prize recipient. It was also news to the Nobel committee:
No, no. He has never won the Nobel prize.
First strike.
Now the actual winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has weighed in on Dr. Mann’s claim to be a Nobel laureate. The other day the International Panel on Climate Change in Geneva issued the following statement:
The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.
Second strike*.
On the other hand, as far as I know, Graham Spanier (the Penn State president whose “investigation” exonerated Dr. Mann in part on the grounds of his Nobel Prize) still thinks his colleague is a Nobel Prize winner. So there’s that. True, he’s just been indicted for perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and child endangerment, but that’s no reason not to cite him in Dr. Mann’s amended Statement of Claim.
*UPDATE: And now his fellow IPCC contributors. Professor Richard Tol tweets that Mann “was not entirely truthful in a court case“.

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