Mann told the NAS panel: „I am not a statistician“. No one on the panel contested that claim.

A friend sent me Mann’s bio distributed as part of today’s Margolin Lecture at Middlebury College, which says that the focus of his research is „the application of statistical techniques to understanding climate variability and climate change from both empirical and climate model-based perspectives“ and the „development of statistical methods for climate signal detection“. I guess one of the methods is Mannian principal components. The bio says that his research has been the subject of a feature story in the Wall Street Journal – is that the one where he said that he wouldn’t be „intimidated“ into disclosing his algorithm?