The downfall of climate change poster boy Michael Mann: ‘If Mann cannot even be trusted to tell the truth when he’s under oath & in court on pain of perjury, why on earth should any of us take him seriously on the subject of climate change?’
By Marc Morano
March 21, 2025
7:39 am
https://www.spectator.com.au/2025/03/the-downfall-of-climate-change-poster-boy-michael-mann/By James Delingpole
Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring.
Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – he’d become the poster boy for the alleged global warming apocalypse. Never before had a scientist demonstrated the threat of imminent climate catastrophe so graphically or dramatically.
But from the start, Mann’s thesis came under attack from an array of critics. They argued, for example, that the proxies he had used to recreate early temperatures (e.g. tree ring data) were unreliable; that his statistical methodology was flawed; that his algorithms were so corrupt that whatever data you input, you’d always get the same unscientific, politically driven hockey stick shape.
