How thoroughly did Penn State University investigate a top climate scientist who brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to the school? A growing number of critics say they hardly looked at all.
Penn State ended a two-month probe into the work of Michael Mann, a top climate scientist whose "hockey stick" graph of climbing world temperature helped galvanize support for the climate change movement, on Wednesday.
The probe stemmed from the release of thousands of hacked e-mails from a server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England that showed the internal debate and, some say, the manipulation of data, to support the scientific underpinnings of the case for global, man-made warming of the planet. Mann's e-mails were among those released and critics charged that he used "tricks" to make his data match studies that confirmed warming trends. link
No one believes in the hockey stick anymore--it's been thoroughly discredited. So what is to be done now? Why, double down on global warming, of course.
This entire scam was about getting grants. It used to be publish or perish was the way you got tenure. Now the administrations gauge success by how many millions in corporate or philanthropic grants you bring in. That's what determines your pay and your worthiness. So once the IPCC and WWF weighed in on the validity of what we now know to be cooked numbers, Mann was golden. He could do anything, talk to anyone, literally write his own paycheck. Then the facts came out, the reality of the exaggeration and lies made everyone realize that these guys are made of the same stuff that those traveling medicine showmen of the nineteenth century.
ReplyDeleteIt's more then just grants. There's a whole back-scratching ecology going on here.
ReplyDeletePoliticians, doing what politicians naturally do, expand the scope of their power using the credibility of science. In return the politicians direct public funding to the scientists who produce the rationale for the expansion of the politician's power.
This isn't the first such confluence of science and politics. John Maynard Keynes was being widely-challenged in academe in the 1950's and carries little weight outside lefty political circles now but he did right well for himself and his acolytes telling politicians what they wanted to hear.
Then there's Rachel Carson, another academic phony whose popularity laid the base for an expansion of political power. The demonization of DDT is still pretty potent although quietly, in areas of the greatest need, the bans against its use are being overcome.
More recently there was the ban on CFCs.
The scientists may be motived in no small measure by fat grants but someone has to providing those grants and the ultimate source of grant money is government.