Whose top ten list is better: Scorsese, Tarantino, Coppola, Woody Allen, or Michael Mann?

Deniers have only themselves to blame. Without them, no one would have ever heard of Michael Mann. The Hockey Stick paper was never intended to be anything more than a little experiment in building a multi-proxy reconstruction.

In terms of AGW, it is just one of thousands of pieces of supporting evidence. If it had never been written, everything would be the same – except for Michael's notoriety. Mann never sought the attention and, in fact, shied away from it.

If you look at the media stories that appeared immediately following the paper's publication, there is a noticeable absence of first-hand interviews with him. That is because he did not want attention and passed that task on to one of his coauthors. I guess you could say that Mann will have the last laugh since he will make more money thanks to Deniers that he ever did or could have doing research.

But you are right about one thing – it leaves less time for research. And maybe that is the best strategy for the anti-AGW crowd – pay scientists more than they can earn working. Jim z -- Those who believe without that proof are little more than religious fanatics.

As are those who deny and lie about scientific evidence - and about scientists. Edit -- It is your non-question that is not relevant since neither Michael nor the Hockey Stick are critical to AGW or climate science. If not for Deniers, the hockey stick would have been forgotten a week after the IPCC report appeared and no one would have heard of Michael Mann.

In hindsight, appearing on the IPCC cover seems like a big deal. Even with media coverage, it would not have amounted to anything if McIntyre had not gone Don Quixote on it. The brief history goes like this.

Over a period of 2-3 years, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes in the US - and Keith Briffa and some others in Europe were doing exactly the same study using slightly different data. (The results are almost indistinguishable.) Then the IPCC announced that they would use one of the papers for its cover. That sparked a little competition between the two groups, but no one else in the field was really interested.

By the time it hit the IPCC cover it was already old news among researchers. Neither Mann's nor Briffa's research provided any new scientific information or knowledge. Even though they used a somewhat different approaches, their end results were always going to look just like everyone else's data - for the simple reason that is the way the data look like.

The warming trend is a physical reality and that is what the empircal data show.

I've said it before. I try my utmost to create as C02 as humanly possible. The is no way in Hades I can keep up with the likes of Mann, Jones, Hansen and Gore.

Think about that. The leading climatologists advocating that C02 is evil make a carbon footprint that is MASSIVELY larger than a skeptic who tries to make as much C02 that he can in his daily life. These clown are the most hypocritical people on earth and they have no belief in the manure they are spewing.

"Do as I tell you to do, not as I do. Now give me your money.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.