PrintMarch 28, 2012
The Science of Half-Baked Ideas
The more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just came out with a book to remind us how anyone who disagrees with him is a shill for dark forces. He's a bully, and in the ClimateGate e-mails, he bullies even his colleagues.
It's déjà vu all over again, of course. Fifty years ago, another academic published a shabby little paper and then succeeded in bullying everyone into endorsing his view that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease. Gary Taubes describes this researcher's personality in Good Calories, Bad Calories:
Henry Blackburn, the long-time collaborator at [the University of] Minnesota, described him as "frank to the point of bluntness, and critical to the point of sharpness." David Kritchevsky, who studied cholesterol metabolism at the Wistar...(Read Full Article)
