Climate activist Michael Mann

Though he has claimed to be a climate scientist for decades, Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania has been proven time and again to merely be a leftwing global-warming activist, faking data to make it appear the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing global warming, falsely claiming he was a Nobel laureate winner, and acting to destroy the careers of anyone who challenged the veracity of his research.

Sadly, when these facts were discovered almost two decades ago, about the time the climategate emails were released, the climate science community ignored the facts (a very bad thing for scientists to do) and acted to defend Mann. Thus he was able to continue to publish while keeping his job as a professor in academia, first at Pennsylvania State University and then at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mann’s ability to survive fraud and abuse of power however has finally come to an end, and it did so because he decided to go on line after Charlie Kirk was assassinated to joke about that murder and to slander Kirk by reposting comments that called Kirk “head of Trump’s Hitler Youth.”

Though Mann subsequently denied that was what he was doing, deleting some of his worst tweets while claiming to condemn such violence, it appears no one believes him. As a result, he announced yesterday that he resigning his position at Pennsylvania University in order to become a full time political activist. From his resignation statement:

I have reluctantly come to the position that the science policy advocacy work I am doing, especially surrounding my new book “Science Under Siege” with vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, at times feels in conflict with the nonpartisan role demanded of me as an administrator at a university with an established institutional neutrality policy.

Particularly at this moment in time, I don’t feel that I can forsake the public scholarship and advocacy that I am doing and have thus decided to step down from the VPC role.

At last Mann is being honest, at least in terms of his political biases. He has never been non-partisan, and as a result his leftist leanings poisoned all the research he participated in. Now at least we all know where he stands. He no longer is hiding behind a curtain of being “an objective scientist”.

Mann more than anyone illustrated the decline in American science during the 21st century. For decades he put advocacy and politics above real research, faking data and viciously libeling those who questioned his work in order to prove human-caused global warming. When the climate science community chose to favor his political advocacy and blacklisting over good science, it showed that Mann’s dishonesty had seeped into all levels of science.

That he is no longer a practicing scientist is a good thing. His resignation from academia might also be the first sign — albeit a weak one — that academia is finally beginning to clean up its act.