I always thought that it was because of his skin color.

But I always regarded the Nobel Peace Prize as an expensive joke anyway.

Reasons.

Sadly not true. The fashion for some scientists to make names for themselves by producing misleading headlines for their supposed evidence has yet to fizzle.

Was 2014 the warmest it has ever been globally? No.

The satellite records (either one) show no special warmth for 2014 and the BEST record shows no statistical significance to the claim that 2014 was the hottest. Why? Because the tiny increase was well within the error bars of the mean temperature statistic

Has the global warming hiatus ended? No. Do the climate models reflect this? No.

That said, should Congress be making such a determination? No it shouldn't. But what this Congress is certain to do is cut the funding of climate change to the bone. Then we'll see how much was real and how much was money-powered hype.

Malaria is not a warm weather dependent disease. England in the 16th Century had malarial marshes (in the middle of the Little Ice Age) and the largest malarial outbreak of the 20th Century occurred in Arctic circle Russia.

The real vector of malaria is poor sanitation, which in turn is a function of poverty and lack of economic development.

Crap. The fact is that Wikipedia has demonstrated conclusively that trolls can get organized and can swamp legitimate scholarship in order to promote bullshit theories and rewrite history.

This is how evolution by natural selection actually works. Yes 'out-thinking' is too strong a word.

When civilization collapses, everyone who has a typewriter will be looked on with awe and envy.

His work has not been vindicated numerous times. Quite the reverse.

Not true. A meme that has been produced that M&M cherry-picked runs but nothing in the peer-reviewed literature.

Steve McIntyre has written extensively on this canard.

tl;dr It's simply untrue.

They are serious allegations. They might also be correct as well.

Are they all in it for the fame and fortune? Are they all paid off in some grand, global illuminati-style secret cabal to all tell the same alleged fabrications?

No. But they are in the star system of academia where the person with the most fame gets the most money and the fast track to tenure. Global warming is a huge waterfall of money into academia and anyone who wants an academic career will go with the flow or be drowned by colleagues.

Steyn compared Penn State's investigation of Mann to be as consistently useless as the one conducted on Jerry Sandusky (by the same failed administration). And to his credit, Steyn wants Mann in court and pleads justification that Mann deliberately tortured data in the service of corrupt science.

And thoroughly debunked (in peer-reviewed journals, natch) by McIntyre and McKitrick as an artifact of one proxy (Sheep Mountain) being artificially weighted hundreds of times more than any of the others. Without that one proxy, there would be no Hockey Stick shape and no academic career for Michael Mann.

The kicker is that in Michael Mann's files was clear evidence that he ran his algorithm using all proxies except Sheep Mountain (which would have shown no Hockey Stick shape) and then buried the result. He also claimed on more than one occasion not to have used the R2 metric which would have shown no statistical skill in his construction - which wasn't true because the calculating code for R2 was also in the files AND he put the calculated R2 into a diagram of the global locations of the proxies in his original publication.

Even more fun is that the Sheep mountain proxies used by Mann have been re-sampled and show no signs of the temperature sensitivity since 1980 when Mann's original data ended.

Regardless of people's position on AGW, a lot of climate scientists have come to the conclusion that what Mann did and continues to justify is scientific fraud.

Kool-Aid time:

1. They are likely to be far safer.

In your dreams.

2. They use road space much more efficiently, increasing the carrying capacity by a factor of five.

Then what you have is a train. Also, when traffic is heavy, I bet you won't find any more carrying capacity if everyone is in an SDC.

3. Many people, due to age or disability, can't drive.

Also children and goats are excluded as well. Its so unfair.

4. They decrease costs for companies that pay people to drive.

They put taxi drivers out of work? Truck drivers? Seriously?

5. They make public transportation much more affordable and accessible, by replacing big fix-route buses with small flex-route vans

In other words, a tram system. Good luck getting that happening.

6. Some people just don't like to drive, and would rather snooze or catch up on email.

Very few people like to drive and would rather be doing anything else. But its not an economic driver of anything.

In order to achieve anything like that, everyone would be compelled to have a self-driving car and all current cars would be scrapped. Good luck with getting that to happen in America.

The problem is not simply the behavior of the driver, its the behavior of everything else. One way you could reduce the carnage would be to insist on alcohol and other drug tests before the engine can be switched on. Another would be to address the huge numbers of truck drivers hopped up on amphetamines and other substances to keep them awake to drive crap around the country for people to buy.

I've yet to see a test of what happens with a self-driving car when it has a tire blow-out at 60 mph. I suspect it won't be pretty. Or what happens when it encounters an accident or incident involving the police.

Then there is the problem of liability. If an SDC hits another - who is responsible?