Month 11, Day 23: Surprise!

The 2006 report criticizing Michael Mann and his colleagues for methodological slip-ups was in large part plagiarized, reports USA Today.

Goodness. I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!

There are two important things to understand about the news that a 2006 report to Congress which fostered a Republican cottage industry of climate conspiracy theorizing was substantially plagiarized. Dan Vergano’s article correctly notes that plagiarized material in the report doesn’t necessarily invalidate its conclusion that the climate scientists whose work Dr. Wegman examined made methodological errors. But the corollary point is that such problems don’t necessarily invalidate the climatologists’ conclusions. Innumerable subsequent studies have validated their work; the world is indeed getting hotter exactly as Mann and his colleagues predicted. Not that this will make a difference to the “climate zombies” entering the House of Representatives, who are now poised to spend the next two years holding irrelevant hearing after irrelevant hearing, wasting the time of scientists who are struggling to address the most significant threat humanity has yet faced in its millennia of existence on this planet.

Warren Senders