“And yes, there is empirical, peer-reviewed support for the conclusion that climate deniers, in general, are truly awful human beings.” (- Michael Mann, below)
Michael “Climategate” Mann cannot get out of his own way. His arrogant, condescending social tweets speak for themselves–just as the words, sentences, and paragraphs of the East Anglia emails did. He is not the kind of person you would want in just about any endeavor, much less as a climate scientist trying to present a case.
This post traces Mann’s angst on X and then at BlueSky, his successor to X.
This is my final post on this platform (aside from my social media team’s pro forma posts noted below) until it is no longer owned by Elon Musk. “But on X, my social media team is reposting things” [Joe Romm?]. The idea is to make twitter truly “ex” with BlueSky emerging as the medium of choice for all but the trolls & bots, who are then left barking into the ether. Jan 20 [2024] is the date for my X-odus.”
And how has that gone Michael?
Here are a sampling of Mann’s anger and despair at his critics, and even the Left that is weakening in the face of utter rejection from the political majority. Start with this one:
“A note to trolls who comment on my posts: I hide your comment so nobody sees it, then I block you, mute you, and report you appropriately (e.g. “hateful entities”), which is a 4x hit to your account based on twitter’s algorithm.” (here)
And then his headlines:
“Scientists brace ‘for the worst’ as trump purges climate mentions from website…”
“The keys to the car have been given to the polluters and fossil fuel plutocrats and they intend to drive it off the climate cliff.”
“Conservative and Concerned about Climate Change? You’re Not Alone – A Conversation with Bob Inglis and Michael Mann”
“Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price”
“‘They Know They’re Lying’: The Fossil Fueled War on Science, Humanity: Latest #BradCast“”The US is poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests.”
The US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is unfortunate, but multilateral climate action has proven resilient and is stronger than any single countries politics and policies.”
“I just reported [X] as a ‘violent & hateful entity’. You can too.”
Mad at Allies
“@HuffPost has offered no explanation of why it has chosen to act as an enabler of fascism, racism, bigotry, misogyny, and authoritarianism.”
“The sad irony of an account that purports to speak for science (a) referring to the overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change as a matter of “belief” while (b) ignoring what the science actually says here
“To save the planet, stop reading The [Washington] Post.”
“Note to journalists: If you are writing about these wildfires and not mentioning climate change at all, you are complicit w/ an agenda-driven campaign of misinformation by the right.”
“one of the more dangerous forms of trollbot, the ‘divider’. They pose as climate activists but they are actually ‘agent provocateurs’, whose m.o. is to create conflict, discredit experts, and divide the community of climate advocates. Make sure to report and block!” (January 11, 2025 on X)
“A reminder, Bjorn Lomborg & the WSJ editorial page habitually team up to promote disinformation about climate change and extreme weather events, especially wildfire.”
“MAGA is everything that is evil in this world. And they must be viewed and dealt with as such.”
“These people constitute a threat to us and the planet: #PeterThiel #ElonMusk #VladmirPutin #MBS #RupertMurdoch #LeonardLeo #DonaldTrump #CharlesKoch“
“Actually, the greed of a small number of malicious plutocrats & autocrats we can count on the fingers of our hands: #Thiel #Musk #Putin #MBS #Murdoch #LeonardLeo #Trump.”
“The malicious lies spread by Musk, Putin, Trump & their MAGA parrots represent an existential threat to us and the planet.”
“Self-styled climate “centrists” deflecting attention from the PRIMARY underlying contributor to these disasters (fossil fuel burning and human-caused warming) are a free gift to polluters and petrostates.” January 11, 2025
‘Wildfires will get worse as the planet gets warmer.”
“Trump continues to be one of the most despicable people on the planet. He hates America and Americans (unless they bend the knee). An utter disgrace.”
“Well, @WSJ/Murdoch are a central cog in the fossil fuel disinformation machine, and Lomborg is their chosen liar-for-hire.”
“And yes, there is empirical, peer-reviewed support for the conclusion that climate deniers, in general, are truly awful human beings.” here
“The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.”
More Recently (BlueSky)
“Scientists decry Trump energy chief’s plan to ‘update’ climate reports: ‘Exactly what Stalin did’ [yeah, that was me]” (12 days ago)
“Zeldin and EPA doing ‘opposite’ of protecting Americans from environmental threats with rollbacks. Lee Zeldin parrots discredited fossil fuel industry climate denier talking points.” (5 months ago)
“To be fair, the reputation and credibility of those five individuals [of the DOE science study] was already in tatters.” (17 days ago)
“There’s a reason it’s called the “enDANGERment finding”. Carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning represents a danger to both us and our planet.” (19 days ago)
“I don’t understand how any parent could so willingly serve as an enabler of the destruction of our world.” (20 days ago)
“I can’t think of anyone more qualified to present antiscientific climate denial propaganda than these five. And I can’t think of anyone more likely to seek out these fossil fuel apologists than Christopher Wright.” (22 days)
“It’s naive and unhelpful to argue this is just about some old man and his grudge against wind turbines. In fact, it’s in service of an agenda promoted by his deep-pocketed plutocrat backers. To ignore that connection is to play into their disinformation campaign. (23 days ago)
“Wondering why Trump is suddenly spending all his time bashing renewable energy? It’s to placate the petrostate actors & fossil fuel interests who installed him in the first place. He’s begging them to stand by him, knowing the very worst is yet to come….” (24 days ago)
“Sadly, it’s young American males who are buying into a really warped sense of masculinity (with plenty of help of course from a full court press by polluters, petrostates, plutocrats, and yes in many cases our press). Don’t simply blame the messenger.” (June 26, 2025)
“Trump (and more to the point, the polluters whose decades-old, focus-group-tested climate denial talking points he’s parroting) aren’t this ignorant. They’re banking on the fact that the American public is.” (2 months ago)
Final Comment
This is enough to keep a psychologist busy. Mann stepped into his own manhole, and he keep digging down. Like Al Gore, he hurts his cause more than helps it, as 97 percent of his colleagues (just an estimate) are more rational and quieter than he is on the same subject.
To put it bluntly:
Michael “Piltdown” Mann is scum.
Yeah, time has not been kind to Mann – he’s obviously not well. But about this …
“Mann stepped into his own manhole, and he keep digging down.”
Mixed metaphor?
Your cargo cult didn’t do that well either.
Winning!
It’s droll to see the occupants of one silo celebrate when another slams its lid or blows its top.
The fact remans that though Mike’s career as a media go to guy has unsurprisingly faltered,, the media hype in which he indulges no more impacts the validity of the science he evangelizes, than the antithetical PR campaign you API pals conduct adds credibility to the decrepit case Steve Wright has been charged with representing as a “Critical Review”
Because no matter how many hockey sticks Mark Steyn and Marc Morano break over their knees on cable, or how many copies of Unsettled Steve Koonin’s Dallas publisher can strive to sell, the the blade of Mike’s stick remans firmly attached to its scientific handle.
He got the sign right on radiative forcing three decades ago, but the DOE report cohort have been spinning their wheels ever since, and have left a paper trail too conspicuous to erase:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2025/08/time-for-critical-review-of-critical.html
Russell: You lost me and many others with “you API pals…” Ad hominem is not very convincing, which is why climate alarmism has lost public and political favor.
Russell Seitz, are you nuts? Three decades ago, he was fabricating data! What are you, a paid lackey?
Hello! You mention the value of a psychologist in understanding Prof. Mann. Well, I am one of those people, and I’ve got identical academic credentials to Jordon Peterson; though I specialized in forensics and statistics, rather than gobbledegook. Forensic science is predicated on evidence as filtered through the legal system using the Daubert Standard. Evidence structures the reality of the natural world.
Since MBH98, there have been 63 comprehensive, peer-reviewed reconstructions of Earth recent climate, all pointing to the conclusion that human emissions are causing an increase in Earth’s temperature. There have been zero publications that say otherwise. That describes the difference between evidence and the absence of evidence.
You mention the use of “ad hominem” in linking your position to the American Petroleum Institute. There are roughly a dozen heavily funded similar organizations supporting your position on climate. In studying the conglomeration of positions within and between these groups and various adherents, one can discern no coherent scientific argument: It’s not happening; it’s happening, but won’t be bad; it’s happening, but humans will adjust, etc., along with the collection of 100 or so bogus arguments as outlined by SkepticalScience.com.
The USA spent over $10 trillion on the Cold War to guard against the remote chance that the USSR would attack us. What, pray tell, is the probability that the climate scientists are correct in their understanding of the atmosphere? Give the evidence, it can only be reasonably concluded that it’s far greater than ‘remote’. We should probably be paying attention, no?
When Charles Manson was denied parole in 1997, the parole board noted that he “had no indication of remorse, no insight into the causative factors of the crimes, lacked understanding of the magnitude of the crimes, [and] had an exceptional, callous disregard for human suffering. In my mind this list of sociopathic features characterizes perfectly what we presently confront in our current state of affairs.
I would conclude with a note on your reference to “climategate”. Your pejorative use of this term was demolished 15 years ago after 8 independent investigations found nothing of substance. It would seem from the totality of your screed that “ad hominem” is your only argument, and it’s flat as a pancake.
Have a nice day!
Lots to rebut in your comment. Michael Mann cheated and got caught in real time as the Climategate emails showed. The damage to science is contained in the words, sentences, and paragraphs of the huge release. Judith Curry’s account of Climategate speaks for itself as she was demonized and left ‘the cause’ for higher scientific and moral ground. judithcurry.com/2014/12/01/the-legacy-of-climategate-5-years-later/
You are mischaracterizing the climate position of the non-alarmists. And you are avoiding the other science discipline–CO2 science–that quantifies CO2 enrichment. Positive and benign warming is important, and the time series data is not alarming. The new DOE science report, the new standard, presents the optimistic CO2/climate position well.
Your Charles Manson reference is bizarre to the debate. You lose credibility. Climate mitigation policy is the true threat to human betterment, not physical climate change, which can be addressed and adapted to with fossil fuels and free market wealth. I close with this quotation:
“The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.”
– Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127.
Dr. Dan Cady,
As so thoroughly detailed in Andrew W. Montford’s meticulously researched book “The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science” (based on the incredibly dogged work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Ph.D. in their attempt to verify and reproduce MBH98), the Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper is an example of scientific misconduct (at best) and outright fraud (at worst).
In spite of Mann’s refusal to properly disclose the underlying data, McIntyre and McKitrick showed that
(1) Principal Components Analysis was improperly used,
(2) bristlecone pine tree rings are an inexact and poor proxy for historic temperatures, and
(3) appending a graph of time-series temperatures obtained by instrument measurement to a graph of proxy-derived historic temperatures without clear and prominent disclosure is quite inappropriate.
Mikey Mann wrote:
“There’s a reason it’s called the “enDANGERment finding”. Carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning represents a danger to both us and our planet.”
Yeah, no. AGW / CAGW describes a physical process which is provably physically impossible.
Energy does not and cannot spontaneously flow up an energy density gradient, therefore “backradiation” (ie: energy spontaneously flowing up an energy density gradient) is physically impossible, therefore the “greenhouse effect (due to backradiation)” is physically impossible, therefore “greenhouse gases (due to the greenhouse effect (due to backradiation))” are physically impossible, therefore “AGW / CAGW (due to greenhouse gases (due to the greenhouse effect (due to backradiation)))” is physically impossible, therefore all of the offshoots of AGW / CAGW (carbon footprint, carbon credit trading, carbon capture and sequestration, net zero, degrowth, climate lockdowns, banning ICE vehicles, replacing reliable baseload electrical generation with intermittent renewables, etc.) are all based upon that physical impossibility.
https://www.patriotaction.us/showthread.php?tid=2711
If Mann claims that energy CAN spontaneously flow up an energy density gradient, he MUST also then claim that water can spontaneously flow up a pressure gradient (uphill), or he MUST also then claim that different forms of energy obey different physical laws. Neither is the case, therefore Mann would only embarrass himself in making such a claim.
Further, CO2 (what Mann calls “carbon pollution”) enhances flora greening and drought resistance which enhances food production for fauna, and makes is EASIER for corals and mollusks to undergo calcification:
https://www.reddit.com/r/climateskeptics/comments/1gsv82i/corals_and_mollusks_were_being_lied_to/?rdt=62203&sort=new
In short, the warmists are lying. They are lying via inverting reality, by flipping causality. Because the easiest lie to tell is an inversion of reality… they needn’t invent entirely new physics to explain and describe their claims, and most people are too scientifically-illiterate to discern between reality and flipped-causality inverted-reality anyway. Michael Mann is banking on the stupidity of the masses… thus we educate the masses as to the actual scientific reality.
The “peer review” system is irretrievably broken due to the corruption of the academic/scientific community. It’s like bragging that 63 “peer reviewed” studies all said Cocaine was completely harmless, and then learning that all the “Peers” who were consulted were Cartel members.
Just a reminder, how many “experts” and peer reviewed papers are there pretending there are no biological differences between men and women and that having surgery and taking medication can turn a man into a woman or vice versa? How many of the reviewers and journals take that position?
News flash: Science has been hopelessly corrupted by politics. At this point “peer reviewed” is a meaningless credential.
It’s perfectly obvious that men and women are biologically different. I leave it to your psychoanalysis to determine whether “academicians” and “scientists” who pretend otherwise are lying or deluded. Climate “science” has the same problem. Correlation does not imply causation. In general, CO2 levels trail temperature change. I would recommend Michael Schellenberger’s book, “Apocalypse Never:How Climate Alarmism Hurts Us All” for a competent review of the data.
Well, unsurprisingly, I got several incoherent replies, all of which fail to acknowledge that the greenhouse effect has been introduced in grade school since at least Plass (1956). On the issue of the 63 reconstructions, “poisoning the well” appears to be the most popular fallacy; well done! BTW: McIntyre and McKitrick were entirely discredited in the Mann trial. Eight independent investigations into ‘climategate’, including the Royal Society, found absolutely nothing to support claims of deception or wrongdoing. Saying otherwise is simply stupid. As to politics corrupting science, politics has always corrupted society, not science; the scientific method has not budged from its original mechanism & intent, but the use of the knowledge gained has been placed in the service of ideology and self-interests. All you have are lies. Good luck!
Critics of the Climategate/IPCC ‘consensus’ can be accused of thinking for themselves. Read the Climategate emails; don’t look for exonerations that come from the very institutions and consensus at risk from that smoking gun. The new DOE science report succinctly makes the case for CO2/climate optimism, which should be welcomed by everyone in the debate since mitigation policy has failed. IT is adaptation time, which means ending climate policies that make energy less reliable or more expensive.
“exonerations that come from the very institutions and consensus at risk from that smoking gun”
This is simply another case of poisoning the well.
As to the DOE report: it wouldn’t even meet criteria for a masters thesis. It’s just a collection of every denier argument found twitter for the past 15 years. Dumb.
Again, just read the emails from Climategate, words, sentences, paragraphs, and context that cannot be whitewashed away.
“… the DOE report: it wouldn’t even meet criteria for a masters thesis.” You lost all credibility right there–the report is a summary science by very top scientists. Let’s talk about the benefits of CO2/climate for a change. It is a great story that most of the public is already sold on.
Daniel Cady,
It all started with 1972’s The Limits To Growth and it has gone on ever since.
The imprimatur of accuracy shrouding output from computer models has been repeatedly used by con artists to bamboozle the public and the gullible (see the evidence deficient “Catastrophic/dangerous, CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming/climate change” CONJECTURE, also see Wall Street and the 2008 meltdown caused by computer-based models of mortgage-backed securities, also see the 1998 debacle of Long Term Capital Management).
As a general rule, if you don’t know what the acronym GIGO stands for, do not believe anything being sold to you if it emanates from a computer model.
If you don’t understand why John von Neumann said, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk”, do not ever trust any computer model.
The historic global temperature record is quite brief. Satellite-based measurement of the global lower atmosphere temperature only commenced in 1979. The historic temperature record prior to that time is completely inaccurate and unreliable.
Climate “science” (and I hesitate to use that word to describe what is obviously a young and immature field) clearly does not understand the climate system. Anybody who claims otherwise is not being honest. There are major unknowns, not least of which are (1) climate sensitivity and (2) attribution.