Michael Mann has taken a lot of abuse (some of it hosted on this site) over his original “hockey stick” graph showing that the recent (and ongoing) rise in global temperature is an anomaly.

If you’re going to trash someone, you probably owe it to him to trash what he’s actually saying, rather than simply knocking down straw-man caricatures of what he’s said. So, in that spirit, here’s 16 minutes of Michael Mann speaking for himself:

People like Michael Mann and James Hansen didn’t ask to be public figures. They were just perfectly ordinary scientists drawn by their own curiosity to dig into what was, at the time, the obscure field of using computer models to investigate long-term changes in climate. But these ordinary guys just happened to come across a truth that made them targets for people who are selfish and evil enough to sacrifice the welfare of the entire human race (literally) in pursuit of their own short-term economic gain.

To their credit, scientists like Mann and Hansen have continued to speak the truth despite the persecution it has brought them. If you think your competing truth is more compelling than theirs, go ahead and bash them. You’ll be wrong, and an objective observer will quickly realize that you’re either dishonest or ignorant or both, but hey, that’s what blog comments are for. So go ahead and put yourself on the record, and let history be the judge.

This entry was posted by jbc on Thursday, December 15th, 2011 at 9:14 am and is filed under global warming, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.