Writes climate scientist Michael Mann, along with lawyer Peter J. Fontaine, in the NYT op-ed "We Don’t Have Time for Climate Misinformation."
In 2012... the two blog posts attacking the hockey stick graph appeared, comparing Dr. Mann, then a professor at Penn State, to Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State who had been convicted of abusing young boys.
As a jury has now decided, those posts were defamatory and were published with actual malice — meaning the defendants either knew the allegations were false or showed reckless disregard for the truth, a difficult hurdle for plaintiffs considered public figures to clear. But we did. And the hockey stick graph in the meantime has become firmly ensconced in the wall of evidence that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet at a pace and scale unseen.
Yet the machinery of disinformation, waged in part by the fossil fuel industry, continues to seed doubt, divert attention and delay action. Indeed, one of the defendants said in court that he stood by “every word I wrote about Michael Mann” and “his fraudulent hockey stick.” Both defendants are likely to appeal....
That last link goes to a Washington Post article about the trial, and there you'll see the name of the defendant — Mark Steyn.
Posts
98 comments:
This biggest danger in modern America for defendants is that you will more than likely face a jury full of morons.
"when scientists and lawyers join forces" means when lawyers work pro bono for a scientist while suing someone who must self-fund.
Mann lost his case in Canada because he dragged his feet. He dragged his feet in the DC case as well but DC courts are a joke.
He’s a sociopath. So is his lawyer
A scientist practices science, not lawfare. A scientist shares his data and his methodology, explains his procedures, and holds them transparently as part of scientific proof-finding. Anything else, isn't science. The 'hockey stick' isn't scientific because the data and the methodology have not been shared, and can't be duplicated.
Mann won his lawsuit in the same way that Mann defended his hockey stick.
He won a defamation suit. It did not vendicate his faulty science. In fact it proved he cooked the books. What it did do is make it very hard for any individual to question his methods without being sued.
Science is dead. Has been since forever, but especially since liberals took over education...
" a difficult hurdle for plaintiffs considered public figures to clear."
Not in DC.
"And the hockey stick graph in the meantime has become firmly ensconced in the wall of evidence that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet at a pace and scale unseen."
Who are you going to believe? This guy:
Stephen McIntyre, B.Sc. Mathematics, University of Toronto (1969), Graduate Scholarship, Mathematical Economics, MIT (1970), PPE, Oxford University (1971)
or a DC jury?
Oddly enough, the page where I got those facts about McIntyre's CV, a news article, has been scrubbed by the web. It's probably in the web archive, but one of the funniest things I remember reading was that supposedly an effort had been made to make the web archive searchable, but it had been abandoned because of the size of the search index required, which made me laugh, because the "technical challenges" involved were actually trivial, and even my small team of non-elite programmers had overcome it for a system we were working on back in the '90s, when native integer sizes were pretty limited by the CPUs available to us plebes. Worse case they could use whatever Google is doing, and require date ranges in the query, which would be fantastically valuable, but of course such power must be restricted to those in the regime.
I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed. For that reason I'm glad Mann won.
I think the pursuit of stamping out disinformation isn't going to succeed, however.
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Utterly despicable, and dishonest.
Michael Mann is the very definition of "Climate Misinformation"
I want to puke.
So yet again, a charlatan triumphs over truth.
McIntyre was a retired engineer who said himself that he saw the Hockey Stick paper, and was familiar with the mathematical techniques that Mann employed, and thought it would be a fun little project to replicate self-declared Nobel Prize winner, Michael Mann's work. And thereby hangs a tale.
Think of McIntyre's experience as when Shrek was just having a peaceful retirement in is cozy home, enjoying life, when a knock came at his door. It's a classic "hero's journey."
The critics take issue with pivotal 1990 climate change research that relied on tree ring proxies and sampled just a handful of trees (the Yamal peninsula in artic Russia). One rapidly growing tree with thick rings is said to precipitate all sorts of hand wringing and trillions of dollars spent.
https://climateaudit.org/2009/09/30/yamal-the-forest-and-the-trees/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/01/steven-mcintyre-vs-the-spawn-of-yamal-enchanted-larch-ii/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/25/after-25-years-manns-other-nature-trick-unraveled/
What’s disheartening is is that the jury was comprised of such complete and utter morons (but what else should we expect in DC?), as not a scintilla of credible evidence was presented which supports their finding. Anyone who followed the trial knows that Michael Mann is a complete fraud, as is his hockey stick.
It's not that global warming isn't real - it is - but rather that it's magnitude and real world implications have been so grossly distorted for political purposes. That global warming fearmongers are acting in bad faith is obvious. As Mann's attorney (who should be disbarred for misconduct) told the jury, and as Mann now advocates, anyone who disagrees must be punished. Fuck Michael Mann. I hope and pray there are a few decent and principled judges who hear the appeal.
Science by consensus is a joke, and its proponents are evil.
The hockey stick is the poster child for disinformation. NEVER, ever been proven correct.
I listened to most of the trial and it was an absolute bloodbath, destroying mann’s “science” and tactics for the world to see. In addition to big shot Wharton statistics professors calmly and clearly explaining the manipulative methods Mann used to manufacture the hockey stick, the trial revealed that Mann had conspired to get his colleagues to delete emails (what kind of scientist does that) and that the supposedly “independent” scholarly replication of the hockey stick was a sham - the academics could not replicate it themselves and committed a huge breach of ethics by secretly contacting Mann to ask how he did it (neglecting to inform their readers they had done so). The trial also found constant puerile vicious defamatory emails sent by Mann about any scientist who disagreed with him, implying the female ones slept their way to their professorships. Finally, as to the legal matter at hand, the trial showed that Steyn 100% believed what he wrote at the time - and still does. There’s about a hundred other similar points, as each day truly was a disaster for Mann….
But then the DC jury comes back a day later with a unanimous verdict against Steyn, ordering him to pay a million dollars.
An absolute joke.
Mann worked at the time, and still does, in Pennsylvania. Steyn is in New Hampshire. But Mann shopped it to a crazy partisan DC jury who would’ve fined a ham sandwich a million dollars for criticizing global warming. There is no justice left in this country, such a farce. Surprised they didn’t tag on an extra judgment ordering Trump to pay 90 million to Mann too just for kicks.
This was the inevitable outcome from a miscarriage of justice. Disinformation indeed.
The case went on for a decade because that was Mann's strategy and intent. He wanted the case to stretch out a long time as a form of punishment. He did the same thing with a case in Canada against Tim Ball, but the Canadian courts got fed up with his stalling, dismissed the case, and ordered him to pay the defendant's legal fees. As I understand it, Mann has not paid up and given he is out of jurisdiction he cannot be forced to do so. He did successfully bankrupt Hall.
Mann is not a nice person.
I'm surprised this op-ed was not in the Washington Post. It fits the "democracy dies in darkness" pledge quite well.
What we are now seeing is the end-game of the long march through the institutions. The corrupt minions of the Biden Regime ride forth from the Black Gate in their grotesque, gibbering multitudes, to seize their victims, and drag them back to its reeking lair, from which there is no escape. An obscene caricature of law is enacted, by perverted criminals, their hideous, misshapen limbs and engorged appendages wrapped in black robes. The expected verdict issues, from the maw of the horned beast. The tumbrels roll, and the blade drops. It's a pity Bosch did not live to record this "Justice".
This only ends after 49% of us citizens enjoy an extended stay in a reeducation camp.
"I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed. For that reason I'm glad Mann won."
The reason the comparison to Sandusky was apt, is that both Mann and Sandusky had been "investigated" by Penn State, and found to be blameless. Of course it wasn't "needed". That of which Madison Man is unsure need not be mentioned. Right, Madison Man? Those who make reference to facts of which you are ignorant must be punished! Well, congratulations, MadMan. The DC jury agreed with you. Perhaps some day soon, you will get to meet them.
We don't have time for free speech.
That is the point. We must make the hard choices without further reflection, argument, or evidence.
As history demonstrates, you cannot, and will not, go against The Church.
There is no collective feeling the right people won this case. It’s the palpable absence of relief that justice was served, as with the OJ verdict. There’s a couple Jonny Cochrane’s out there but they are not amongst us…
"I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed. For that reason I'm glad Mann won."
Why wasn't it needed to point out that the same people who exonerated a pedophile exonerated Mann? Oh, you were supposed to stop at "compared to a pedophile" and not think any further about it. That's how cults like the Democratic Party, for example, keep their followers in line, by throwing out tropes that stop them from thinking any too deeply.
This is from an article on cults from Psychology Today:
"Behavior modification techniques are employed, such as rewards/punishments, thought-stopping, and control of environment (isolation or restriction of access to others) [media censorship]. And then the new identify is reinforced and the old identify suppressed. [Control of the entertainment and news media]"
McIntyre finished first in the Canadian national high school mathematics competition of 1965.
How many of the DC jurors finished pre-Calc?
Michael Mann claimed for years that he had won the Nobel Prize. It was so bad that the Nobel Committee had to issue a press release clearing up this misinformation.
how was this a legit inquiry
https://judithcurry.com/2024/02/08/jcs-expert-report/
Mann is a sociopathic cultist. His work is so stupidly corrupt it is not even wrong, it is just some weird thing he hangs out there. Mister Nobel Laureate liar. I’ll wait for the appeal before I listen to his adolescent preening.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/14/yes-popular-mechanics-scientists-have-miscalculated-our-global-warming-timeline/
Context. In Justice Alito's dissent in 2019, he presciently wrote (emphasis added):
The petition in this case presents questions that go to the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press: the protection afforded to journalists and others who use harsh language in criticizing opposing advocacy on one of the most important public issues of the day. If the Court is serious about protecting freedom of expression, we should grant review...
The petition now before us presents two questions: (1) whether a court or jury must determine if a factual connotation is "provably false" and (2) whether the First Amendment permits defamation liability for expressing a subjective opinion about a matter of scientific or political controversy. Both questions merit our review...
This question — whether the courts or juries should decide whether an allegedly defamatory statement can be shown to be untrue — is delicate and sensitive and has serious implications for the right to freedom of expression. And two factors make the question especially important in the present case...
First, the question that the jury will apparently be asked to decide—whether petitioners' assertions about Mann's use of scientific data can be shown to be factually false — is highly technical. Whether an academic's use and presentation of data falls within the range deemed reasonable by those in the field is not an easy matter for lay jurors to assess...
Second, the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors' determination will be colored by their preconceptions on the matter. When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties. And when, as is often the case, allegedly defamatory speech is disseminated nationally, a plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff 's point of view...
[To be continued]
[Continued]
The second question may be even more important. The constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression serves many purposes, but its most important role is protection of robust and uninhibited debate on important political and social issues... If citizens cannot speak freely and without fear about the most important issues of the day, real self government is not possible. To ensure that our democracy is preserved and is permitted to flourish, this Court must closely scrutinize any restrictions on the statements that can be made on important public policy issues. Otherwise, such restrictions can easily be used to silence the expression of unpopular views...
In recent years, the Court has made a point of vigilantly enforcing the Free Speech Clause even when the speech at issue made no great contribution to public debate... In United States v. Alvarez, 567 U. S. 709 (2012), the Court held that the First Amendment protected a man's false claim that he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. In Snyder, the successful party had viciously denigrated a deceased soldier outside a church during his funeral...
Climate change has staked a place at the very center of this Nation's public discourse. Politicians, journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans discuss and debate various aspects of climate change daily — its causes, extent, urgency, consequences, and the appropriate policies for addressing it. The core purpose of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression is to ensure that all opinions on such issues have a chance to be heard and considered. I do not suggest that speech that touches on an important and controversial issue is always immune from challenge under state defamation law, and I express no opinion on whether the speech at issue in this case is or is not entitled to First Amendment protection. But the standard to be applied in a case like this is immensely important. Political debate frequently involves claims and counterclaims about the validity of academic studies, and today it is something of an understatement to say that our public discourse is often "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."
The full dissent is worth the read and can be found here.
I could not hope to say it better than that. Too bad the others on SCOTUS held opposing views that day. This verdict is a mockery of the 1st Amendment and the concept of defamation altogether. Tell me again how a public figure has high bar! Not when you're a darling of the Left.
I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed.
Because Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State who went to prison for covering up for Sandusky, also covered up for Mann, including directing the "independent inquiry" to change their conclusions and clear Mann after the faculty had voted to censure him for falsifying data. If we had decent journalists anymore you would have known that already.
Prior to the hockey stick and global warming orthdoxy, we archaeologists -- who for decades had attempted to make even reasonable climate reconstructions for smaller regions and limited slices of time -- would never have even considered research that based the entire global climate on a couple of tree ring sequences from a couple of areas. It's patently absurd.
Nevertheless, most fell into line. Even the Little Ice Age, that had been discussed at length as an actual phenomenon of global reach, was thereafter poo-pooed as basically nothing.
That was when I really started realizing that academia had truly started down the path of un-enlightenment.
And I thought all of you (following the lead of Donald Trump) wanted the burden of proof in defamation cases to be lowered.
When I first saw the hockey stick when it came out, I laughed and thought "quadratic residuals."
It used to be that the scientific method was based on doubt, skepticism, and constant testing of assumptions and results. Now it is Holy Writ. The new religious walling-off of certain approved narratives will not result in good science.
People are upset about the jury, but this is the flip side of jury nullification: juries can make factual findings to bring about the result they think is just or appropriate in a particular case.
My first instinct was that the jury had heard "actual malice" and thought it meant actual malice in the sense that any ordinary English speaker would understand it (in which case defendants were guilty, as they had great contempt for Mann), but it sounds like the jury instructions (correctly) avoided reference to the nonsense legal term and spelled out the "actual malice" standard. But it also seems like some trial observers thought there wasn't any proof offered to show knowing or reckless disregard of the truth on the part of the defendants. So the jury may just have decided they wanted the defendants punished.
"... the verdict on human-caused global warming was rendered decades ago."
The verdict may have been rendered, but that doesn't mean it was correct. Lots of people (and causes) have been convicted and later exonerated based upon new information or re-examination of the evidence. Of course if your personal fame and fortune is tied to the original verdict, you will have a strong incentive to defend it.
50 shades of #MeToo
This “climate scam” has been termed urgent for at least a half century now.
The most important lesson here is that DC courts (and DC itself) shouls be abolished. The western portion of DC was returned to Virginia way back. The eastern portion should be returned to Maryland, immediately if not sooner.
Certain words and phrases alert me to lefty bullshit. Misinformation is currently at the head of my list. The word nauseates. Lean in. Our journey. etc
The comparison to Sandusky stems from the now incarcerated former Penn St. president having a toady head an "independent investigation" into Mann who fed the president daily updates and despite the other 3 members recommending censure which would have removed Mann from the university, the president dictated the outcome in a manner that threatened the other members so that they would not oppose him. This is exactly what happened in the Sandusky investigation.
Eisenhower warned us about the threat posed by the scientific-technological elite. It was in his farewell address immediately following his warning about the military-industrial complex. Emphasis added.
https://wp.lps.org/kbeacom/files/2012/08/Eisenhowers-Farewell.pdf
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
First, the question that the jury will apparently be asked to decide—whether petitioners' assertions about Mann's use of scientific data can be shown to be factually false — is highly technical. Whether an academic's use and presentation of data falls within the range deemed reasonable by those in the field is not an easy matter for lay jurors to assess...
And what exactly are Alito's qualifications for assessing "[w]hether an academic's use and presentation of data falls within the range deemed reasonable by those in the field"?
For the record, the defamation lawsuit in Canada was against Tim Ball, not Hall. The court dismissed it because Mann refused to make a case for an inordinate amount of time.
"The 'hockey stick' isn't scientific because the data and the methodology have not been shared, and can't be duplicated."
The data are all public. The methodology is public. That's how the flaw is his initial analysis was detected. McIntyre didn't "debunk" the hockey stick, which has now been reproduced by multiple approaches using multiple different proxies. What he showed was that the analysis method used was wrong. When the correct methods are used ... you still get a hockey stick, just a more robust one.
The scientific community is rife with fake studies that are 'peer reviewed' and published in 'respected' journals. It has become the blight in scientific research and is not an unknown problem.
‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point
Research misconduct: the poisoning of the well
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
These articles/studies cover years. There are reams of such articles. Professor Mann is very much discussed in some of these circles as his work has many errors that are acknowledged by many scientists...but not him. Of course. His work is too lucrative...I mean...important.
If you are ever sued you must immediately counter sue. The other person needs some serious skin in the game. A 10 year suit is ridiculous.
Dr. Graphene.
My question is; Is it warming whether we're here or not? I contend that we are in a solar cycle that will lead to more cool temps.
The comparison to Sandusky was made in the first place by Rand Simberg (the other defendant), and was partially disclaimed by Steyn when he quoted it (ISTR that he wrote that he wouldn't have gone all the way into the locker room with Simberg, or words to that effect). And Simberg's punishment was literally a tenth of a percent of Steyn's. Does that make sense? Obviously Steyn was punished much more harshly b/c he's much more prominent a writer than Simberg.
BTW, the title of the piece on the NYT site is now "A Slap Shot Against Climate Denial." I realize that's a hockey reference, but really a "SLAPP Shot" (i.e., a strategic lawsuit against public participation) is exactly what this was.
Mr. Mann has now molested the justice system like Sandusky molested young boys.
"I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed. For that reason I'm glad Mann won."
“The reason the comparison to Sandusky was apt, is that both Mann and Sandusky had been "investigated" by Penn State, and found to be blameless. Of course it wasn't "needed". That of which Madison Man is unsure need not be mentioned. Right, Madison Man? Those who make reference to facts of which you are ignorant must be punished! Well, congratulations, MadMan. The DC jury agreed with you. Perhaps some day soon, you will get to meet them.”
My understanding was that it was the comparison to Sandusky that earned Mann his punitive damages, and that the truth or falseness of his science was not an issue. How could it have? Steyn was not a Climate Scientist, so whatever he said was obvious opinion. Sandusky is a “convicted serial child molester”. Most see him as a vile person as a result. Essentially implying that Mann was like him was what crossed the line.
Michael Mann is a fraud; emails between him and his zealot buddies showed that they were spinning his hockey stick like crazy. The valid comparison for PSU with Sandusky is that the university defended or ignored his antics when they should have shut them down. Mann is worse than Sandusky because there was some doubt early on about the evidence regarding Sandusky. Although there is a lot of doubt about the evidence for the big climate claims, it is well known that Mann concocted the hockey stick and kept beating it.
Michael Mann is a fraud; emails between him and his zealot buddies showed that they were spinning his hockey stick like crazy. The valid comparison for PSU with Sandusky is that the university defended or ignored his antics when they should have shut them down. Mann is worse than Sandusky because there was some doubt early on about the evidence regarding Sandusky. Although there is a lot of doubt about the evidence for the big climate claims, it is well known that Mann concocted the hockey stick and kept beating it.
"which has now been reproduced by multiple approaches using multiple different proxies"
I have some time, how about you share some links. I am interested in the truth, because it's also been contradicted by multiple studies using multiple proxies, but of course, as Mann admitted in the Climategate emails, any journal editor who gives any exposure to such studies is soon removed from his job.
"Essentially implying that Mann was like him was what crossed the line."
So. basically if you can infer a bad motive by stretching his words far enough searching for "implications' which are not there in the original text, he's guilty. "Show me the man, I will show you the crime."
"And what exactly are Alito's qualifications"
I would put them far higher than a jury drawn from the DC jury pool. Why was the trial held there by to insure the most partisan possible pool of jurors, and who happily will have no ability to understand most of what is being said.
"That's how the flaw is his initial analysis was detected. McIntyre didn't "debunk" the hockey stick, which has now been reproduced by multiple approaches using multiple different proxies. What he showed was that the analysis method used was wrong."
So you agree with Steyn, but think that he should have been dragged through the wringer for colorful language.
"you still get a hockey stick, just a more robust one."
Which shows that temperatures were steadily falling for centuries, and it looked like we were seeing the end of our current interglacial, which is rather long in the tooth, and falling into a renewed ice age, (global cooling) had not the Industrial Revolution come along and saved our bacon.
But ClimateAudit has some questions about the "more robust hockey stick"
Figure 1a of its newly minted Summary for Policy-makers contains what else – a hockey stick diagram. If you thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick was bad, imagine a woke hockey stick by woke climate scientists. As the climate scientists say, it’s even worse that we thought.
It’s hard to know where to begin.
The idea/definition of a temperature “proxy” is that it has some sort of linear or near-linear relationship to temperature with errors being white noise or low-order red noise. In other words, if you look at a panel of actual temperature “proxies”, you would expect to see series that look pretty similar and consistent.
But that’s not what you see with the data used by the IPCC. You’d never know this from the IPCC report or even from the cited articles, since authors of these one- and two-millennium temperature reconstructions scrupulously avoid plotting any of the underlying data. It’s hard for readers unfamiliar with the topic to fully appreciate the extreme inconsistency of underlying “proxy” data, given the faux precision of the IPCC diagram.
He has more
the PAGES2019 is not a “random” selection of proxies, but winnowed through ex post criteria. As Rosanne d’Arrigo explained to the NAS panel many years ago: if you want to make cherry pie, you first have to pick cherries.
The PAGES2019 dataset consists of 257 proxies, selected from the prior PAGES2017 dataset consisting of 692 proxies, which had previously been selected from thousands of proxy series accumulated by many authors over the years.
But despite McIntyres manifest qualifications, when the journal editors are against you, you are not going to get your papers published, and then the rubes can point to a scientific consensus which amounts to only looking at the papers that agree with your conclusions.
But I am sure, even given the publishing blackout on dissenters from the "consensus" these concerns have been addressed the the literature, right?
Imagine if in 1890, physics journals had banned any and all papers that deviated from the current consensus. Or geology journals, we would not have had continental drift. What we are seeing in climate journals is not "science" unless you call the Catholic Church's prosecution of Galileo "science."
Oh, BTW, don't bother using Google to try to find dissenting scientific opinion, because "you can't handle the truth."
Four of the series in the sample are very short – three of them are actually shorter than the instrumental record. These are all coral Sr or coral d18O series, which make up 25% of the PAGES2019 data set. The extremely short records illustrated above are typical, indeed almost universal, in this class of proxy. They do have a pronounced trend in the instrumental period. This contrasts with the lack of trend that one sees in the two long proxies in the middle column above – a tree ring series from Mt Read, Tasmania (also used in MBH98) and a 1983 ice core series by Fisher from Devon Ice Cap on Baffin Island (also available to 1990s vintage multiproxy studies).
The short coral series do not contribute information to the medieval and earlier periods which one is trying to compare to the modern period. So what is their function? Do they contribute anything other than painting a moustache on the non-descript longer series?
Basically the data is cooked. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess anything you want. But if you can't understand the point he is trying to make, and at least show some understanding of McIntyre's comments in your rebuttal, I don't know what you get out of commenting here on this subject and on scientific issues.
Mediocre scientists studying the climate, like Mann, have been very good at attacking people who disagree with their results. Particularly the "hockey stick" result, which an amateur, a very smart one, Stephen McIntyre, showed was wrong. (The fact that an amateur showed how wrong Mann and colleagues were, must have been particularly grating.) The release of their emails over a decade ago showed how they tried to stifle any sort of scientific debate. Judith Curry, a former professor at Georgia Tech who was under consideration for an appointment in the administration at GT, career was so damaged by Mann and others vitriolic attacks that she left academia and started her own company. The action of these climate scientists will leave a dark stain on science long after their careers are over.
Static Ping,
For the record, the defamation lawsuit in Canada was against Tim Ball, not Hall. The court dismissed it because Mann refused to make a case for an inordinate amount of time.
Yes: Mann filed the case and then sat on his hands for the better part of a decade IIRC.
Ball was awarded costs (Canada has a "loser pays" system, I think), but Mann returned to the US and never paid a cent. Ball died indigent. That is the sort of creep Mann is.
The data are all public.
Incorrect, according to testimony at trial he has still not shared his data with other scientists. What others have done, based on leaked details of his methodology, is show that the manipulation Mann used, which he falsely referred to as "smoothing," when applied to virtually any date would produce the same hockey stick shape. There is no question Mann is a fraud. The "hide the decline" emails proved that even if you think his hockey stick graph is fine.
And there's no question the defendants believed he was a fraud, so therefore, spoke truthfully. The jury was star struck by a "famous scientist" and believed Steyn should be punished because he was a "Fox News host." (A quote from an actual juror note to the judge.) Steyn and his lawyer made sure to point out he had merely been contracted to opine occasionally, but the Fox smear stuck in the minds of the hyperpartisan jury. Based on the BMW Supreme Court precedent the $1M punitive award will eventually be lowered to roughly 5 to 10 dollars, in line with the multiple allowed.
Listen to the trial transcripts. The judge is quite a loon as well, having been handpicked after other judges rejected the case.
Incidentally, Steyn wrote (or rather compiled) a book on the hockey stick, titled A Disgrace to the Profession (and promisingly labeled "Vol. 1"). It consists entirely of other climatologists' attacks on Mann and his science. I think Steyn attempted to have it entered into evidence, but was not allowed.
Michael Mann has done more to defame Climate Science than the entire team of Koch Brothers funded deniers.
Our legal system is broken.
MadisonMan said...
I'm not sure why the comparison to Sandusky was needed. For that reason I'm glad Mann won.
I think the pursuit of stamping out disinformation isn't going to succeed, however.
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
***********
Then there are those who refuse to LOOK in the firs place.
I suggest you steel yourself for the ordeal of looking here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
and here:
https://climaterealism.com/
and here:
http://tinyurl.com/36nacexr
to learn the frickin' truth.
Human influenced weather, yes. Human-caused warming/climate (30 years) change, let alone global, no. There is no evidence to indicate that human influence causes more than a perturbation with local or regional effects. Perhaps he is referring to the Green blight to clear green and occupy blue spaces for wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, to recover and process toxic low density rare Earth elements.
That said, release the CO2 for a green and habitable Earth for humanity and all the other organic lifeforms. Spread the carbon in a diversity of individuals, minority of one. Human rights, not rites, to mitigate a progressive climate of viability.
"Global Warming " is now another sacrament of the Democrat Party. It is not allowed to question it as the stakes are too high. The grifters have too much invested and the rewards from all this grift are too great. A DC jury is 99% Democrats so there is no chance that a fair verdict will be reached.
when the verdict on human-caused global warming was rendered decades ago....
Was this during the impending ice age? Or did I miss that?
I practiced law in the District of Columbia for almost 50 years, and for parts of that time I lived in DC and was subject to jury duty. In fact, my understanding was that lawyers were NEVER actually seated on juries, but we had to spend a day in the court house every so often, waiting to be not-called. So as I waited, I listened to my fellow prospective jurors talk among themselves. I decided that I hoped never to have to be a party facing a DC jury. When I heard (most of) Steyn's opening argument on the web, I thought, the jury's going to think he's a smart-ass, and a foreign (Canadian) smart-ass at that. All the anti-global-warming folks thought it was great. I was worried. I was right to be worried, wasn't I?
Goebbels sues Jew defenders or does he just exterminate them?
The Godfather,
Well, what you heard online wasn't Steyn, but an actor reading Steyn's words. Still, the "foreign smart-ass" part is likely true enough.
From what I understand, the Jonny Cochrane moment that sealed the verdict was when Mann's lawyer referred to Steyn and Simberg as MAGA Global Warning denialists in the closing arguments. This was all the argument that the DC jury needed to find against them.
The hockey stick is garbage; it erases the well know little ice age and medieval warm period and has the most stable climate model for the 800 years before the industrial age. The climategate emails showed that Mann "hid the decline" when his tree ring modefluctuatesl dropped in temperature and didn't match the "modern" temperature record that created the blade of the hockey stick.
If they were Galileo, Steyn and Simberg would say "Still it fluctuates."
"Sandusky is a “convicted serial child molester”. Most see him as a vile person as a result. Essentially implying that Mann was like him was what crossed the line."
Really? It is illegal to imply that someone is like someone else, if the someone else is "vile"? I guess I'd best not suggest that you're as demented as F. Joe Biden. And I don't. You're not as demented as F. Joe Biden. In fact, I think you might have been exonerated by Penn State. Oh, wait, that's illegal too, isn't it. That would imply that you were like Sandusky and Mann.
I remember a long time ago the hockey stick model was debunked by putting all sorts of junk data in the model and each and every single time it generated a hockey stick output.
i.e. whatever input was used, the result was the same.
Given I'm aware of that, I cannot believe any reasonable jury could find on the side of Michael Mann.
Well that's one way to describe what happened before a jury of twelve good men (and women) not so true in Washington D.C. Only a guy with a very high sense of self regard would describe the verdict as yielding "settled science".
Mann was not compared to Sandusky. The comparison was between Penn State's investigation of Mann (his science) and of Sandusky (his crimes). Both investigations were jokes. It is illiterate to confuse the two.
Mann's assertion about disinformation is sickening--that is not how science works. You "can publish 1000 papers" and still be wrong.
I believe that it was a jury of six.
Michael Mann is a fraud and an a$$hole who has done immense damage to science in general.
whatever input was used, the result was the same.
Not quite, the input was pink noise, i.e., low frequencies. Since the data was selected, the low frequencies were needed to extrapolate rising temperatures. There were limits, of course, which is why Mann cut off the tree ring data to avoid showing the decreasing temperatures in the tail end. It was, frankly, calculated scientific fraud.
They gave Mann $1 for each of the four (4) defamations alleged. I assume they had to do that to award him the $1 million for suffering. So clearly the jury recognized the claims were bogus, but they just could not let MAGA Man walk away unscathed.
I see where Mark Steyn, being the smartest guy on the planet, represented himself at trial. Now that was a brilliant move. So he can fork over big bucks to some appellate lawyer, who can charge him a small fortune to review Steyn's dopey pro se transcript. The cheap bastard.
Couldn’t happen to a bigger asshole. Someone who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer, indeed .
"We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue," Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. "And today, after 12 years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages."
Steyn can consul himself with that thought as he's writing out that check for a buck.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
"Steyn and his lawyer made sure to point out he had merely been contracted to opine occasionally, but the Fox smear stuck in the minds of the hyperpartisan jury. Listen to the trial transcripts."
"Fake news! Steyn did not have a lawyer-being a moron, he was pro se. What transcript did you "listen" to?
Well, what you heard online wasn't Steyn, but an actor reading Steyn's words.
True. Fun fact, in one post verdict note Steyn reveals the Australian actor providing his voice in the reenactments is also best known as the voice of the Geico gecko in commercials.
He had a lawyer sitting next to him at trial and advising him, Mutaman. Check out SteynOnline.com if you want to make less of an ass of yourself here.
MJB Wolf listens to one sided dramatization, believes it courtroom testimony.
Coulda figured.
A litigator friend of mine once told me that you could have a case that was a slam dunk certain winner, and if you went to trial with a jury, your chances of winning would never be more than 80%. His point was that juries make irrational decisions all the time and that's just part of the system. This case is a perfect example of that. It's also a perfect example of the court erring by not ruling that the opinion that Mann was as morally culpable as a child rapist was just an opinion about a public figure, protected by the First Amendment.
I thought the colorful comparison of the bad scientist to the pedophile football coach was ok.
My wife disagrees. Such negative comparisons are too much, too negative. And, when the side of T-truth uses such negatives against an unproven but popular untruth, the Truth side is discredited.
This is a clear explanation that accurately describes the unfair rhetorical environment we are in when it comes to describing Truth that contradicts most luxury beliefs. It’s also why many don’t like Trump’s exaggerations/ lies.
The elites can be, and very much are, rude and insulting. We Truth supporters will be unfairly ignored, if not actually punished, if we are too insulting. Sad, but real.
It’s the transcript read by actors because recording was disallowed. But sure Mark burnish your bonafides with the other braindead lefties who refuse to examine evidence. It’s still all right there for thinking people to see and hear for themselves.
What Penn State did was so disgusting that referring to it is not allowed. It's like some of the stuff on the Hunter laptop, the video evidence of such vile behavior should never be mentioned in polite company, therefore, Hunter never did it.
The verdict is a disgrace and one of the reasons the justice system in blue states is dead.
One of the climate gate guys lamented that, with tree ring data, he couldn't distinguish warming from reindeer poop.
Douglas B. Levene said...
"A litigator friend of mine once told me that you could have a case that was a slam dunk certain winner, and if you went to trial with a jury, your chances of winning would never be more than 80%. "
A litigator friend of mine once told me that if you represent yourself in litigation, you're a moron.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
"It’s the transcript read by actors because recording was disallowed."
You can't make this shit up.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
"He had a lawyer sitting next to him at trial and advising him, Mutaman."
Like I said, you can't make this shit up. I wonder how much Steyn saved by having "a lawyer sitting next to him at trial and advising him" as opposed to hiring a lawyer to actually litigate the case. Did the lawyer whisper in his ear: "object, Mark, object". "Move to strike, Mark, move to strike"
I love it. And in what jurisdiction is a judge going to allow an attorney, who has not filed a Notice of appearance in the case, sit at the counsel table and advise a pro se defendant.
Hey Mike (MJB Wolf)- free advice- next time you have a dental problem, rather than pay an oral surgeon to pull your tooth, just pay a dentist to advise you while you're pulling it yourself. You can save a lot of money.
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