Michael Mann has a splendidly bonkers article in the Huffington Post, hammering on the theme that he is being got at by green lizards from Alpha Centauri.

Or something like that.

The Kochs, Scaifes & others have used their billions to construct a vast "Potemkin Village" (in the words of science historian Naomi Oreskes) of denialism, by funding groups like "Americans For Prosperity", the "Heartland Institute", the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" and a whole cadre of other front groups, organizations, and hired guns implicated in the campaign to discredit climate science and climate scientists. I should know since, as I describe in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, I found myself at the center of that campaign more than a decade ago because of my scientific work establishing the unprecedented nature of recent global warming.

You wonder whether more level-headed upholders of the global consensus are at all embarrassed by this sort of thing. The "big oil conspiracy" theory of global warming scepticism seems to thrive among people like Mann, seemingly requiring absolutely no evidence to sustain it. The left-wing media seems to lap it up without question. But is the tale of sceptics feeding off Exxon's millions any more credible than green lizards from Alpha Centauri taking over Michael Mann's brain?

Like him or not, Mann is a figurehead for the "community"; you would have thought that they would want someone less obviously weird to be getting all the headlines and putting their case.