They were sure after 1998 that the climate was spiraling out of control due to global warming. They were also sure that the fate of the planet depended on them getting the word out.
In order to spur action, they took the liberty of systematically manipulating the temperature data to cool the past and warm the present. This was partly done under the thinly veiled guise of “USHCN corrections” which are otherwise known as “complete crap” or “shit confirmation bias on a shingle”
Sometimes you have to do really bad things to save the planet (Peter Glieck™ ) but something went terribly wrong – temperatures started going down. This led to further manipulations and thrashing around idiotic ideas like Chinese aerosols, missing sea ice, evil and unnatural La Nina’s, etc.
The problem is, once they turned to the dark side, there was no going back. Science be damned – this is now about saving their sorry reputations and incomes for as long as they can.
They have lost any good reputation they might have had among intelligent people. Now the only people they are fooling are the village idiots. At the present time we seem to have a lot of village idiots but I have hope if we sceptics keep pounding them with the truth that they will come over to the light.
shit on a shingle, 😆 I havent heard that one in a while.
My dad made us kids SOAS for dinner quite often. It was a staple food during the Great Depression he said, but never called it “SOAS”. I didn’t know it was called that until my wife told me her dad ate it as a kid. She refused to eat it because of the name.
Personally I have good memories of SOAS 🙂
I believe you are correct. It was relatively reasonable to be worried in 1998 that the global temperature was spiralling out of control – there was a theory that predicted it would, and all the best evidence pointed to temperature being increased in a horrific rate. They were convinced that they needed to save the world.
Then the temperature dropped. They thought it to be just a year-to-year fluctuation and that the temperature would soon continue its deadly pace. They needed to convince people about the impending doom, even there were one cooler year in the mean time. But then there were two. Three. Four.
The more years passed without exceeding the 1998 temperature, the more emotionally invested they became. When the data refused to prove what they “knew”, that investment and sub-concious guilt about all those white lies turned into cognitive dissonance begging to be resolved.
Cognitive dissonance (believing two mutually exclusive facts to be true) is extremely strong motivation for a person to believe anything (now matter how ludicrous to an outsider) that leads to resolving the conflict.
They knew the world was about to end. They knew the data didn’t prove it anymore. They knew they were right, but they also knew there were people who were quite effectively proving them wrong. The resolution to the CD was to become totally paranoid about evil deniers trying to destroy them and the world. And then the gloves came off.
It was no longer little white lies, it was whatever it took. Before Climategate few could have believed how much hostility there actually was towards those that disagreed.
PS: I found rather interesting email conversation from the year 2003: http://di2.nu/foia/1051202354.txt
I’m pretty sure some psychiatrist would be able to come up with some diagnosis on Michael Mann’s condition. But that’s not what is interesting about it. Check out the cc-list on this paranoid rant: Pachauri, P.Jones, Hansen, Salinger… etc. This is the most comprehensive list of climate science insiders I have seen anywhere.
All listening Mann ranting like a maniac about a study made by two scientists in which they dared to come to a different conclusion.