Letter in Wall Street Journal

The reasons that climatologist Michael Mann is as successful as he is are multiple:

1. He told the United Nations something that it was dying to hear (he offered certainty when all else saw uncertainty)
2. He has brought serious money to the universities that house him (and run cover for him)
3. He is an extremely talented propagandist

I discuss this in a letter just published by The Wall Street Journal.

Although Michael Mann has the ear of the media in the United States and the United Kingdom, at a minimum, he complains of sailing into the wind of special-interest disinformation. Alas, this is its own potent form of disinformation.

(Please let it serve as the occasion when you choose to buy and enjoy my book, available for Kindle and in paperback.)

Letter follows:

My Oily Millions

In Anne Jolis’s review of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” (“The Climate Kamikaze,” Weekend Books, March 16), Miss Jolis notes that “In his book, [Michael] Mann dubs the unauthorized release of his emails a ‘crime’ and claims that the ensuing ‘witch hunt’ constituted ‘the most malicious’ of ‘attack after vitriolic attack against us’ by the ‘corporate-funded denial machine.’ ”

The reviewer summarizes Mr. Mann’s incessant claim of big-oil bullying perfectly. This indeed is, as the expression goes, how Mr. Mann rolls. And it’s true not just about Mr. Mann and his emails, but about nearly every instance of anyone daring to question the version of climate science promulgated by Mr. Mann.

This is all a bit hard to take. I myself am a skeptical blogger and author, yet I am in no way funded by Big Oil. In fact, my three-and-a-half years of toiling on the subject of climate change has yielded approximately $4,000 worth of income. I’m not proud of this fact as a father, husband or man, but it does undercut the constant conspiracy theories about funding behind global-warming skepticism. Meanwhile, as I’ve noted elsewhere, mainstream climate scientists themselves have received grants totalling more than $1 billion from Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and other large energy companies.

Mr. Mann’s book largely sticks to the familiar conclusions of climate science. Readers might be interested to learn that the current interglacial period, the Holocene, is the coolest of the last five. The one before ours, the Eemian, which ran between approximately 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, likely saw temperature averages of 2° Celsius warmer than today, and sea levels about 15 feet higher. Climatologically, if humans could time-travel to the most ideal time to live on Earth, we would be unlikely to find a better moment than right now. The Holocene, including and especially our own moment within it, is a beautiful climactic nest.

As for those who would convince the public that the sky is falling, one has to ask: Who benefits from such frightening claims?