Open Letter to Michael Mann
In response to his admission that he is going crazy.
Dear Mr. Mann,
First, I am sorry that you’re dealing with mental health issues, but I must disagree that “climate denial” is the source of your difficulties. No one denies “climate”. Seriously, every living human being from 9 to 99 knows that the our climate changes — day-to-day — month-to-month — year-to-year. Our beef is with the claim that your climate models are “settled science”.
How can something that is a fact — something that is settled — change every single year? Each year the various organizations researching climate change release new data showing their estimates of past temperatures. These numbers continue to be revised downward — more and more each year — those of us who you call deniers are skeptical. Why would past temperatures keep going down? Are climate scientists going back in time and cooling the earth or are they just revising their estimates to make our current temperatures seem higher?
The earth didn’t warm for more than a decade based on the old historical temperatures until those historical temperatures were reduced — making our current temperatures seem higher in context to the revised past. Maybe the scientists are just getting better data from the past. Maybe their models are better. Maybe their computers are more accurate. I don’t know the answer — but what I do know is that we’ve been told that this “science” has been settled for decades. It doesn’t seem like anything is settled.
How can we be sure our future models — models predicting the future — are accurate when we admittedly have no idea what our past temperatures were? In my experience, and it is limited, it is far easier to predict the past than it is to predict the future.
I don’t know anything about climate science other than what I read in the press. Just this week I read about a new study that predicts our future climate might be a lot cooler than it is today — despite human activity. The model suggests that solar activity will decline by 60% between 2030 and 2040 — the last time that happened the earth went through a mini ice age (1645–1715 Maunder Minimum). I watch PBS and see stuff like this:
It seems like you guys (i.e. scientists) don’t know much other than the fact that our climate is going to change. There is nothing settled at all about the climate in 2020s, 2030s, 2040s — don’t even pretend like you can predict anything in the 2050s. So please stop suggesting that we’re denying climate — we accept climate. What we deny is your irrational claims that you’ve figured out the past and the future when it comes to the climate.
Regards,
