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?

The daily commute is a timesink, but I work from home. Did you never consider that that would be far less expensive and problematical than a self-driving car?

Or you could have got the train. They're really fast in France.

Yet again another believer in something that does not exist.

SDCs have already been driven millions of miles on public roads. Their safety record is better than humans. They may not handle all unknown situations, but that is more than compensated by not driving drunk, falling asleep, or texting on a cellphone.

And the reality could hardly be different

...what Google is working on may instead result in the automotive equivalent of the Apple Newton, what one Web commenter called a “timid, skittish robot car whose inferior level of intelligence becomes a daily annoyance.” To be able to handle the everyday stresses and strains of the real driving world, the Google car will require a computer with a level of intelligence that machines won’t have for many years, if ever.

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

This is the one I like. My wife has a medical condition that keeps her from driving. Man would she love to just jump in the car and go somewhere when she wants to.

She already has this option, It's called a taxi.

Oh, look an AC calls me a troll!

Why does anyone need a self-driving car? What is the obvious technical or economic advantage of not having a human driver?

This is all about rich people creating playthings because that's the only reason this is even being discussed.

This has happened so often its not even funny.