The Problem with Michael Mann, and the Whole Environmental Movement
In the suit against his detractors, Michael Mann claims to have won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has not in fact won the Nobel Peace Prize, but has merely been associated with an organization that won it. That he didn’t say it this way, but instead said that he himself had won it, tells us a couple things about him.
First, it shows that he’s not very good with details. One would expect scientists, especially scientists who want to have an enormous effect on the lives of everyone on earth, to be rather good with details, but apparently Mann is not.
Second, the way that he is not very good with details is that he exaggerates things. This in fact has been the big problem with the environmental movement right from the start. Things have been wildly exaggerated, but we are nevertheless supposed to believe them because “it’s science.” My wife likes to tell of the camp she went to in the early 1970s when she was about eight years old. One of the counselors said that the air was so polluted that in a few years people would probably have to live underground. We all know that that prediction didn’t come true. Naturally, it’s unfair to talk about predictions made by some kid who was probably not yet out of his teens, but are the older ones any better? George Will had a column on it a few weeks back (here) in which he mentioned various predictions of doom by environmentalists that didn’t happen.
It’s sad that society keeps listening to these people, but unfortunately too many intelligent people, especially in the legacy media, have been taken in by it all. Will in his column mentioned the book The Limits to Growth that appeared about the same time my wife was at that camp. None of these people ever thought much about the limits in the other direction, namely shrinkage. We are seeing the limits to shrinkage in Greece, where as Mark Steyn has endlessly pointed out, there are 100 grandparents for 42 grandchildren. You just can’t have people retiring at 50 when there are so few younger people around to support them. Yet, progressives still whine about the limits to growth.
Anyway, to get back to Mann, his insisting that he won the Nobel Peace Prize should be a signal to any sensible person that if he exaggerates about something in a public forum where his claim was easily seen through almost at once, he is likely to have a habit of exaggerating in other areas as well, especially in obscure scientific journals where it may be more difficult to determine if he’s exaggerating or not. Accordingly, his science should not be trusted. Since most of us aren’t scientists, we rely on trust, but with people like Michael Mann exaggerating things, we just can’t trust them.
And that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but it should be.
