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"Climategate" was meant to "intimidate" scientists, says Mann

Jan 16, 2012; 4:32 PM ET

Dr. Michael Mann in the news once again with some strong comments to a British newspaper........

Dr. Michael Mann, who is the Director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center and most well known for his "hockey stick" rendition of long-term climate change was recently interviewed by The Independent (UK).

"Climategate" was meant to "intimidate" scientists, says Mann (via The Telegraph.)

Here are some key excerpts from The Independent's interview.......

"I've been the focus for attack by those who deny the reality of climate change for so long that it almost seems like forever," the professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University says. "I'm a reluctant public figure, but I have embraced the opportunity to communicate the science."

Mann believes the theft of the emails was not the work of a random hacker, but part of a sophisticated campaign. "It was a very successful, well-planned smear campaign intended ... to go directly at the trust the public had in scientists," he insists. "Even though they haven't solved the crime of who actually broke in, the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups."

Climate contrarians argued that Mann and his colleagues were concealing their research methods because they had something to hide. In reply, Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness. "What they are trying to do is to blur the distinction between private correspondence and scientific data and methods, which of course should be out there for other scientists to attempt to reproduce.

"When we first published our Nature article (with the Hockey stick temperature graph) in 1998, we went back six centuries," Mann says. "A year later we published a follow-up going back 1,000 years with quite a few caveats. In fact, the caveats and uncertainties appeared in the title, and the abstract emphasised just how tentative this study was because of all the complicating issues.

"It's frustrating that to some extent all of that context had been lost and the result has been caricatured. Often the errors bars are stripped away, making it appear more definitive than it was ever intended."

What are your thoughts about Michael Mann's comments?

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

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