Climate fraud: The PhD who published the "hockey stick" graph refuses to show his data

Twenty years ago (1999) an American PhD, Michael Mann, published a paper that claimed to have found a) that the Earth's surface temperature had barely varied since the year 1000; and b) that just since 1910 or so the average temp had risen by a totally alarming (and un-natural) amount.

The curve, shown below, resembled a hocky stick, and more than any other paper it triggered the current hysteria called "global warming."  The morons at the United Nations convened an "Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change," which used the paper to scream that sea levels were rising enough to submerge nations, and demanding that industrialized nations stop burning fossil fuels.

That led straight to the Democrats' "Green New Deal" that wants to ban commercial airline travel.

But right away a few dozen very fine scientists suspected the paper was bullshit.  For one thing, Mann had erased two well-known periods when temperatures in or near Europe were far different than today.  One was the "medieval warm period," around 1100--1300, when the temperature in frigid Greenland was warm enough to allow European settlers to grow grapes!

The second, around 1560 to 1660, was called the Little Ice Age--so cold that the Thames River in London froze solidly enough to support a horse.  The existence of these anomalies demolished the notion that CO2 was driving any change in climate.  So why were both these periods absent from Mann's graph?  Inquiring minds wanted to know. 

One of the skeptics--a Canadian with a PhD in physics--claimed Mann's paper was a fraud, and said so in print. So 8 years ago (2011) Mann sued the guy for slander and/or defamation.

The case ground very slowly through Canadian courts, largely because Mann's attorneys kept asking for delays, which Canadian judges are quite willing to grant (which they naively believe shows that the parties are looking to settle the matter without going trial). Finally, early this year the judge ordered Mann to produce his data.

Mann didn't, and a couple of weeks ago the judge threw out Mann's defamation case.  Far more significantly, the judge ordered Mann to pay the legal expenses of the man he'd sued--which by now are surely in the millions.

The point of this story is that Mann refused to produce his data because in selecting the data he chose to use--the width of tree rings--he'd only selected 14 samples to use, even though he had access to over 200.  This is a huge and basic violation in the scientific community, called "cherry-picking your data."

Mann also used a custom-built computer program that was total garbage.  Another skeptic found that the custom program was so goofy that when it was given random data that averaged to a known temperature, the program still showed significant warming,  So, garbage.

Mann's paper is perhaps the most important single event in triggering "global warming" hysteria, because it was easy to understand and it scared the public.  Politicians--recognizing a vote-getting issue--began churning out grant money and proposing ever-more-ghastly "fixes" for the non-existent problem. 

Virtually everyone who saw that graph was convinced that humans were destroying the climate.  Not one person in a million bothered to wonder whether the graph was a fraud.  Cuz hey, the guy has a PhD, right?  And why would he lie to us, eh?

And everyone jumped on-board rather than risk being left behind by the "cool kids."