Flashback: Video Mocks Michael Mann in ‘Hide the Decline’

November 14th, 2014 2:14 PM

Five years ago, a huge document hack and leak occurred at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The incident became known as ClimateGate and the leaked files and emails damaged the credibility of global warming alarmists in many people’s eyes.

Following the scandal, Minnesotans for Global Warming, a group critical of climate alarmism, responded with this “Hide the Decline” video mocking Michael Mann, one of the researchers who’s name showed up in the leaked emails.

The video mocks Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC), for comments he made in an email to researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). His “hide the decline” remark became infamous.

Among numerous other jabs, the video poked fun at Mann for “totally inventing” the well-known hockey stick temperature graph, but still thinking of himself as “so smart.” His graph was placed in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 report according to Scientific American. But they noted, his hockey stick had been criticized for “data points were too sparse to constitute a true picture, or that his raw data were numerically suspicious, or that they could not reproduce his results with the data he had used.”

Even University of California, Berkeley, physics Professor Richard A. Muller wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, saying he know the hockey stick graph of global warming was wrong. He said it “portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity.”

Mann is currently embroiled in a libel lawsuit he filed against a critic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Mark Steyn of National Review.