Testifying before Congress, climate scientist Michael Mann denies any affiliation or association to the Climate Accountability Institute despite his apparent membership on the Institute’s Council of Advisors.

CONGRESSMAN CLAY HIGGINS: “Are you affiliated or associated with an organization called The Climate Accountability Institute?”

DR. MICHAEL MANN: “No. I mean I may have corresponded with people.”

CONGRESSMAN CLAY HIGGINS: “You’re not affiliated nor associated with them?”

DR. MICHAEL MANN: “I can provide– I’ve submitted my CV you can see who I’m associated with and who I am not.”

Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method

US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

March 29, 2017

But a link to Climate Accountability Institute’s website features Michael Mann as one of the groups’ ‘Council of Advisors.”

http://climateaccountability.org/about.html

Update: March 31, 2017: James Delingpole of Brietbart reports Mann’s own CV lists his role

Mann told the Congressional hearing he had no association or affiliation with the Climate Accountability Institute (one of the numerous ad hoc organisations formed in order to give the harassment of climate sceptics an air of scientific credibility). Yet according to his CV he sits on the Climate Accountability Institute’s advisory board and has done since 2014. (Mann’s CV states: “Advisory Board, Climate Accountability Institute, 2014-“

#

Related Information:

Via Ron Arnold’s website:

Michael Mann’s Affiliation with Climate Accountability Institute

As of July 2014, Mann appears as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) on the organization’s website. His affiliation connects him directly with the organized efforts to prosecute climate skeptics via RICO statutes, which got its start with Naomi Oreskes, co-founder of CAI.

RICO, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization, is a law designed to battle organized crime, but was later used in civil cases, particularly against tobacco companies that were subject to billion-dollar lawsuits to compensate for the health problems of their customers. Oreskes conflated tobacco with fossil fuels, seeking to enforce penalties sufficient to destroy the fossil fuel industry through prosecution of both producers and advocates, particularly climate skeptics.

Mann’s affiliation with this effort indicates his dedication to prosecute “deniers.” (The environmental left has chosen this term specifically to equate those skeptical of catastrophic man-caused global warming to Holocaust deniers. Mann refuses to use the term “skeptic.” ) Mann’s allegiance to prosecution for skeptics is symbolized by his advisory status with the CAI, and his close ties to its allied group, the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Collusion with the RICO20

The RICO20 refers to 20 scientists — including professors from nine universities and scientists from two institutes — who signed a letter known as the RICO 20 letter, sent to the U.S. Attorney General and the President of the United States on September 1, 2015. It called for a federal criminal investigation into possible “racketeering” and collaboration among entities questioning the science backing the hypotheses of human-caused, catastrophic climate change.

The leader of the effort, George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla, also operated a now-defunct and controversial nonprofit climate group, the Institute of Global Environment and Society, which was almost totally funded by millions in federal grants. Shukla said he got the idea to make a splash in academia by gathering many professors who would support Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s public call for prosecution of climate skeptics using RICO in an op-ed in the March 29, 2015 Washington Post titled “The Fossil-fuel Industry’s Campaign to Mislead the American People.”

Shukla’s recruitment of academics stalled when a result some feared — angry backlash from skeptics and the media — quickly appeared. Shukla and the scientists were reassured by Sen. Whitehouse, as discovered in emails of the conspiracy obtained by FOIA lawsuits. The scientists sought help in dealing with the blowback, and Michael Mann provided it. He introduced Shukla to two veteran activists — one from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and the other from ClimateNexus — requesting their help and guidance for the RICO20. Mann’s affiliation with the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) linked him with UCS, which had helped form CAI and co-hosted the attack workshop in LaJolla, California in 2012. His cordial introduction of Shukla to his UCS friend is revealing:

Climategate Scandal

The Climategate scandal erupted on November 19, 2009, when a collection of email messages, data files and data processing programs were leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The emails revealed scientific fraud and data manipulation by scientists bent on maintaining belief in the hypothesis of catastrophic man-caused global warming despite data revealing its flaws.

A person who calls himself “Mr. FOIA” is recognized as the insider who leaked the emails. On three occasions — in 2009, 2011, and 2013 — “Mr. FOIA” copied thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations. Mann was the key U.S. player in the Climategate scandal, according to John Costella, who edited and annotated a 2010 report titled “The Climategate Emails.” Costella wrote:

Mike Mann leapt from relative obscurity to international fame with his “hockey stick”, a graph of global temperatures from 1000 AD to the present, which was the showpiece at the launching of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report in Shanghai in January 2001. The hockey stick became a corporate logo for the IPCC, but because it rubbed out the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historical record, it was subjected to a US congressional inquiry. Eventually it was shown that random data fed into the algorithms used by Mann to produce his hockey stick from bristle cone pine tree ring data, also yielded hockey stick results.

Costella also wrote: “The Climategate emails show us how a small cabal of climate scientists, based at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State University, were able to control the temperature record fed into the critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and which comprised the foundation on which the whole global warming structure was based.” Costella concluded “that this was a real conspiracy is beyond argument. The word ‘conspiracy’ is used by the players themselves. In any conspiracy there is a tight inner core and then suc­cessive rings of collaborators, who accept the leadership of the central core.”

Mann defends himself by saying Penn State looked into the e-mails and decided that he had not suppressed data at any time. However, an inquiry conducted by the British parliament came to a different conclusion. “The leaked e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure,” the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee announced in its findings.