Climate alarmist Michael Mann thinks the attacks on his climate science and his credibility are akin to Nazi persecution.
Speaking at the May 13, commencement address of Green Mountain College, Penn State Meteorology professor Michael Mann borrowed and adapted the words of a Holocaust victim to describe himself.
After complaining that “never before have we witnessed science under the kind of assault it is being subject to right now in this country,” Mann shamefully modified the words of a Protestant pastor and “outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler.”
“First they came for the immigrants and I did not speak out—Because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for the scientists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a scientist. Then they came for the environmentalists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not an environmentalist. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. Friends, let this not be our legacy,” Mann said.
Protestant pastor Martin Niemoller penned the original poem after seven years in Nazi concentration camps and it mentioned Socialists, Trade Unionists and Jews.
Mann’s adaptation insulted the millions of people butchered by the Nazis during the Holocaust by minimizing the severity of the atrocity with his comparison. Scientists and environmentalists are not being imprisoned, tortured or murdered by the U.S. government for their climate alarmist views.
As offensive as his analogy was, Holocaust rhetoric has become common language among climate alarmists to deride their critics. Many individuals including former Vice President Al Gore, Bill Nye and media outlets have falsely labeled skeptics of global warming alarmism “climate change deniers.”
The Associated Press condemned use of the term “denier” in 2015 specifically because it conjures up the idea of Holocaust denial. Yet climate change activists, including Mann, continued to use the phrase.
In that commencement speech, Mann portrayed himself as a victim of “fossil fuel interests and front groups and politicians” who pointed out flaws with his “iconic hockey stick” chart of global warming.
“The curve tells an unmistakable story, namely that the current warming spike is unprecedented as far back as we can go. Our continued burning of fossil fuels is the culprit,” Mann described.
What he failed to mention was that his graph, which shows temperatures spiking in the late 20th century, was based on “poor mathematics,” according to critics.
Two Canadian scientists discovered Mann’s hockey stick graph was created using an “improper normalization procedure” which “tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not,” the MIT Technology Review explained in October 2004.
Penn State investigated Mann in 2009 after leaked emails suggested climatologists may have manipulated data to “hide the decline” of temperature.
Mann also filed a defamation lawsuit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Mark Steyn of The National Review in 2012, after they published stories critical of Mann.
The court, which did not decide the case until December 2016, dismissed Mann’s “claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress,” but “refused to dismiss the defamation claims against NR and CEI,” National Review reported.
The ruling “represents an unprecedented threat to the freedom of speech in our nation’s capital,” the National Review editorial board stated on Dec. 23, 2016.
