Filmmaker and anti-fossil fuel activist Josh Fox’s new global warming movie features a climate scientist who has been repeatedly criticized for falsely claiming to be a Nobel Prize winner.
Climate scientist Michael Mann, known for his “hockey stick” global warming chart, is featured prominently in Fox’s film, “How To Let Go of the World -and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change,” as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in 2007 — a patently false claim.
The film has already been criticized by journalist Phelim McAleer for calling Mann a Nobel Prize winner, which he is not.
“In Josh Fox’s new film Mann was captioned as a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner,” McAleer wrote on Facebook. “After the San Francisco screening I wrote a piece pointing out how this lie was again being repeated and contacted HBO and Fox to see if they would be re-editing to reflect the truth.”
Fox’s film claims Mann is a “co-winner” of the Nobel Prize, which is not true. The Nobel committee has consistently said Mann and other climate scientists were not awarded the prize in 2007.
That year, the Nobel committee awarded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore the prize for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”
“Mann has been called out on many occasions for falsely claiming he is a Nobel Peace prize winner,” wrote McAleer, who produced the pro-fracking documentary “Fracknation” as a response to Fox’s anti-fracking “Gasland” series.
“The committee has always been quite clear that he is not a Peace Prize winner,” McAleer wrote.
Mann even repeated the claim in his lawsuit against conservative pundit Mark Steyn and National Review, despite the fact the Nobel committee has said Mann is not a laureate. Both National Review and the Environmental Policy Examiner contacted the Nobel committee to see if it recognizes Mann as a prize winner.
Here’s what it told the Environmental Policy Examiner:
1) Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
2) He did not receive any personal certificate. He has taken the diploma awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and to Al Gore) and made his own text underneath this authentic-looking diploma.
3) The text underneath the diploma is entirely his own. We issued only the diploma to the IPCC as such. No individuals on the IPCC side received anything in 2007.
In his defense, Mann has said the IPCC gave him a “certificate” acknowledging his contribution to its climate reports that eventually won the United Nations body the Nobel. The IPCC handed out these certificates to about 2,000 scientists and experts who also helped write the group’s reports.
The Nobel committee, however, has been clear that only those named in the prize (in this case the IPCC and Gore) can claim being Nobel Laureates. For years, Mann claimed on his personal web page he “shared” the Nobel Prize with the IPCC and others.
Now, Man’s personal page only claims he “contributed” to the IPCC’s winning the Nobel in 2007.
“Even after all these public announcements Mann continued to make the claim and perhaps most embarrassingly of all was forced to change a sworn affidavit in a court case after he again made the fake claim,” McAleer wrote, referring to Mann’s legal battle with Steyn and National Review.
McAleer is not happy HBO has not forced Fox to correct his film to reflect Mann did not win the Nobel Prize.
“I received my response last night when the film aired on HBO – the Nobel Peace Prize lie remains – HBO seems doesn’t care about the truth or correcting the record or even the basic rules of journalism. It’s sad that all this energy and resources are being used to push falsehoods by fakes,” he wrote.
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