Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Larry Sanger blocked from editing the encyclopedia he helped create
If you ever needed another example of how far Wikipedia has drifted from its original mission of neutrality and open participation, consider the latest development: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has reportedly been indefinitely blocked from editing the site he helped create.
Larry Sanger blocked from editing the encyclopedia he helped create
If you ever needed another example of how far Wikipedia has drifted from its original mission of neutrality and open participation, consider the latest development: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has reportedly been indefinitely blocked from editing the site he helped create.
According to a New York Post report, Sanger’s offense appears to have been promoting what he calls “intellectual diversity” on the platform and encouraging broader participation from viewpoints that have often found themselves marginalized by Wikipedia’s increasingly ideological editor class.
Sanger launched “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” with the stated goal of restoring Wikipedia’s original commitment to neutrality, transparency, and balanced representation of differing viewpoints. Instead of welcoming that effort, Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators responded by blocking him indefinitely from editing.
The irony is impossible to miss.
The man who coined the name “Wikipedia,” helped write its foundational policies, and co-founded the project in 2001 has now been judged unfit to participate in the encyclopedia he helped build.
Sanger’s Complaint Sounds Familiar
Sanger told the Post he was “flabbergasted” by the decision and described Wikipedia’s governance structure as resembling a “mob or a blob,” where editors often defer to group consensus rather than consistent application of rules.
He further argued that disciplinary actions on Wikipedia lack meaningful due process, with anonymous administrators acting as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury. Anyone who has watched Wikipedia’s handling of controversial topics over the last decade will find these criticisms unsurprising.
The encyclopedia still markets itself as a collaborative project written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Yet Sanger argues that actual control rests with a remarkably small cadre of administrators, many operating anonymously. The Post notes Sanger’s long-standing contention that a tiny group of editors exercises disproportionate influence over content and editorial decisions.
Climate Skeptics Learned This Lesson Years Ago
For readers of WUWT, none of this is news.
Wikipedia’s climate-related articles have been exhibiting ideological bias for years. Articles dealing with climate science, climate policy, skepticism, energy policy, and individual scientists routinely present one side of complex scientific and political debates while minimizing or dismissing competing viewpoints. Editors who attempt to add sourced material that challenges prevailing narratives often discover that neutrality operates in only one direction.
Wikipedia’s “reliable sources” framework has increasingly become a mechanism for enforcing ideological conformity. Sources that align with establishment positions are frequently elevated, while dissenting voices are categorized as unreliable regardless of the quality of their underlying arguments or evidence.
The result is a system where consensus is often treated as proof and where political alignment frequently determines editorial outcomes. That tendency becomes especially obvious in climate-related topics, where Wikipedia has long functioned less as an encyclopedia and more as a narrative-enforement platform.
I have experienced this firsthand.
Wikipedia contains falsehoods and misleading claims on my own biography page. Despite being the subject of the article and possessing direct knowledge of the factual errors involved, I am effectively unable to make corrections.
Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest rules make it extraordinarily difficult for subjects of articles to fix inaccuracies, while anonymous editors with no direct knowledge of the facts are granted final authority over what remains published. The practical effect is that errors can persist indefinitely if they serve the preferred narrative of the editor community. This is one reason many public figures have largely given up trying to correct misinformation about themselves on Wikipedia.
Now even one of Wikipedia’s founders appears unable to challenge the prevailing editorial culture.
The Sanger episode illustrates a deeper issue.
Institutions often begin with noble goals and gradually become captured by those most committed to advancing particular ideological objectives. Over time, procedural neutrality gives way to political enforcement, and diversity of thought becomes less important than conformity of opinion. When the co-founder of Wikipedia can be indefinitely blocked for advocating intellectual diversity, it becomes difficult to maintain the fiction that Wikipedia remains the politically neutral reference source it claims to be.
The encyclopedia remains useful for many technical and non-political topics. But on subjects involving politics, culture, energy, climate, COVID, gender issues, or any other controversial area, readers should approach Wikipedia with considerable skepticism.
The safest approach to Wikipedia is simple:
Never rely on Wikipedia as a primary source.
Follow citations to original documents.
Read competing viewpoints.
Check primary data whenever possible.
And when the annual fundraising banners appear urging you to donate in order to “protect free knowledge,” remember that free knowledge requires intellectual diversity, open debate, and a willingness to tolerate disagreement. Wikipedia has none of that now.
Wikipedia has no factual capital left, it’s time for it to go the way of the Dodo.
There is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting in American public life, and the word is “independent.” When an organization describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan, evidence-based source of scientific advice, what it is really telling you is that you are supposed to stop checking. The brand does the work. You hear “National Academies” and some part of your brain files it next to “the multiplication tables” and moves on.
There is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting in American public life, and the word is “independent.” When an organization describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan, evidence-based source of scientific advice, what it is really telling you is that you are supposed to stop checking. The brand does the work. You hear “National Academies” and some part of your brain files it next to “the multiplication tables” and moves on.
I want to talk about what happens when you do check, because over the past few months a number of people have checked, and what they found is worth your time.
The organization in question is the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NASEM, which Abraham Lincoln chartered in 1863 to give the federal government independent scientific advice. It is about as established as an American scientific institution gets. It also takes in something on the order of 205 million dollars a year in federal funds. And it has had at least two separate credibility problems surface this year, one aimed at judges and one aimed at schoolchildren, which between them tell you most of what you need to know about what “independent” means now.
Let me start with the judges, because that is the cleaner story.
For more than thirty years, federal judges have relied on something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, produced by the Federal Judicial Center and, in its latest edition, developed with NASEM. The manual is the thing a judge reaches for when a case involves DNA, or epidemiology, or toxicology, and the judge needs a neutral explanation of how the science works so they can tell reliable expert testimony from junk. It has been cited in more than 1,700 opinions and handed to thousands of judges. The whole value of the thing is its neutrality. It is supposed to teach judges how to weigh science, not tell them which side to believe.
The fourth edition, the first update in fifteen years, came out at the end of December 2025 with a brand-new chapter on climate science. And the chapter, it turned out, was written by people from one side of an active fight.
The two named authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, are both affiliated with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, an outfit whose stated mission is to develop legal techniques to advance climate litigation. That alone would raise an eyebrow. But the more interesting name is the one that was not on the author list. The chapter’s acknowledgments thanked Michael Burger, the Sabin Center’s executive director, who is also of counsel at Sher Edling, the law firm that has brought dozens of the climate-damage lawsuits against energy companies currently moving through the courts, including cases pending before the Supreme Court.
So we have a reference guide, handed to judges, on a scientific question at the heart of active litigation, written by advocates for one side of that litigation, with a hand from a lawyer who is actually litigating the cases. You do not have to know anything about climate science to see the problem. You only have to know what the word “neutral” means.
It gets worse, and this is the part I find genuinely remarkable. A footnote in the chapter quietly admits that the discussion of attribution science was “adapted, and in some cases excerpted” from the authors’ own prior work. That prior work is a 185-page law review article from 2020 whose lead author was Burger, the litigating attorney, and which argued that attribution science was robust enough to support climate lawsuits.
Warren Kindzierski, in an analysis for the American Enterprise Institute, ran a text comparison between the FJC chapter and that 2020 article. The overlap, in the two sections most relevant to litigation, the detection-and-attribution methods and extreme-event attribution passages, ran between 41 and 48 percent. Nearly half of the most legally important passages in a neutral judicial reference guide were lifted, word for word or lightly reworded, from a litigation-strategy article co-written by a lawyer suing energy companies.
That is not a neutral guide that leans a little. That is a litigation brief with the FJC seal on the cover.
And the climate chapter was not the end of it. Roger Pielke Jr. went through the manual in his Honest Broker newsletter and documented further problems beyond the one chapter that got pulled. A separate review by William Kindzierski and Stanley Young, published by the National Association of Scholars under the title “When Courts Rely on Unreliable Science,” found the broader manual now does something the older editions did not: it repeatedly asserts “consensus” over substantive scientific conclusions, and in several chapters fails to flag known problems with study replicability and research bias. In other words, the document that is supposed to teach judges how to spot unreliable science had, in this edition, started quietly modeling the opposite habit.
What happened next is the actual story
When this came to light, twenty-seven state attorneys general wrote to the FJC and asked them to pull the chapter, on the straightforward ground that the judiciary’s own research arm should not be predetermining contested questions in cases the judiciary is currently hearing. And the FJC, to its credit, did. On February 6, the director wrote back and said the climate chapter had been omitted from the manual and removed from their website.
Here is the part to hold onto. NASEM refused to follow suit.
The FJC, the body actually responsible for the judges, looked at the situation, saw the problem, and removed the chapter. NASEM, the body that calls itself the independent scientific conscience of the nation, kept it. The chapter is still on the National Academies website. It is still in the copies already mailed to judges. NASEM’s president wrote to the Wall Street Journal to say the Academies would not disavow it. When the institution responsible for the audience backs away from a tainted document and the institution responsible for the science digs in to defend it, you have learned which institution is captured.
I want to be fair to the authors, because they are not hiding. Wentz has said publicly that the criticism is bad-faith and aimed at suppressing climate information, that she has never been a witness or counsel in climate litigation, and that the science in the chapter is sound. Some climate scientists have rallied to defend it. Those are real positions and the people holding them may actually believe them. But none of that touches the actual objection, which was never that the science is wrong. The objection is that a document whose entire purpose is neutrality was drafted by partisans, ghost-assisted by a litigant, and half-copied from a litigation playbook. A chapter can be scientifically defensible and still be the wrong thing to hand a judge, for exactly the reasons the manual itself spends its other chapters explaining. If a forensic accountant submitted a damages report with those conflicts, it would be thrown out under the very evidentiary standards the manual teaches.
And this is not a complaint confined to the usual climate-skeptic corners. Bill Barr, who served as U.S. attorney general under two presidents, wrote in the Washington Post that the manual exists to serve a bedrock principle of the legal system, which is that judges are impartial and must receive unbiased help on technical matters, and that the climate chapter had taken a sharp turn away from it. When a former attorney general is writing op-eds in the Washington Post about the integrity of a judicial science manual, the thing has stopped being a niche dispute about climate and become a dispute about whether the institutions that certify neutrality are still neutral.
The manual, it turns out, was one piece of a larger effort. The same authors and institutions are connected to something called the Climate Judiciary Project, run by the Environmental Law Institute, which has set out to educate judges on climate science, including some judges presiding over the very climate cases the education is relevant to. Reporting on newly surfaced documents describes judges being recruited and hosted at events in places like Napa Valley, Palm Beach, and Hawaii. The House Judiciary Committee has opened an investigation into whether this amounts to an improper attempt to influence the federal bench. I do not know how that investigation will come out, and I am not going to pretend the reporting settles it. But the manual chapter and the judicial-education program are clearly branches of the same tree, and the tree is not neutral.
The schoolchildren
That is the judicial story so far. Running alongside it is a second one, which surfaced this week, and it points at the schools.
A parents’ organization called the American Parents Coalition wrote to Congress asking for an investigation into NASEM’s federal funding, after tracing some of it into K-12 curriculum material. Their letter points at a 2023 NASEM workshop on gender identity in schools, a 2024 NASEM report titled “Equity in K-12 STEM Education,” and NASEM-funded organizations producing lesson plans that frame environmental science around systemic racism and recruit students into climate advocacy campaigns. The coalition’s framing is openly political, and you can take their specific characterizations with whatever seasoning you prefer. I have not read every one of the underlying documents and I am not going to vouch for every adjective in a parents-group press release.
But step back from the adjectives and the structural point is the same as the judicial one. An organization that presents itself as the neutral arbiter of what counts as science is putting its thumb on the scale, in the same direction, in two completely different arenas at once. In the courtroom it is attribution litigation. In the classroom it is environmental justice curriculum. The throughline is that “the science,” as delivered by the independent science body, keeps arriving pre-attached to politics.
Follow the money, as usual
And then there is the funding, which is where these things usually end up. The American Energy Institute report that has been circulating traces several million dollars flowing to NASEM from foundations associated with the usual climate-philanthropy names. The Sabin Center, whose people wrote the judicial chapter, is itself funded by climate-litigation philanthropy. The private foundation that helped fund the manual also gives to groups that fund the lawsuits. None of this is hidden. It is all in the footnotes, for anyone who reads footnotes.
I am not telling you that every scientist at the National Academies is an activist, because that would be false and stupid. The Academies do an enormous amount of careful, genuinely neutral work, and most of the people there are exactly what they say they are. What I am telling you is that the word “independent” is no longer doing what it is supposed to be doing. It has become a credential that gets applied at the front door and then quietly suspended once you are inside, on the topics that matter most to the people writing the checks.
The whole arrangement runs on the reputation. The reputation was earned over a century and a half of real work, and it is now being spent down, a chapter at a time, a curriculum at a time, to launder a particular set of conclusions through a name that used to mean “you can stop checking.”
So do not stop checking. When a federally funded body tells you its conclusions are independent and settled and not to be questioned, that is precisely the moment to read the footnotes, find out who wrote the chapter, and ask who paid for it.
A report has just been published by Springer Nature (the company that publishes Nature scientific journal among others), on a global survey of perceived bias in scholarly publishing:
Perceptions of fairness and bias in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: a global survey
A report has just been published by Springer Nature (the company that publishes Nature scientific journal among others), on a global survey of perceived bias in scholarly publishing:
In 2024, they invited submissions from researchers and received 11,866 responses, of which they analysed 8,485. They explain the use of a survey of perception rather than of empirical data: “Bias can be challenging to demonstrate empirically, so this report focuses on perceptions and personal experiences.“.
My submission would have been one of the 11,866, but I don’t know if it was in the 8,485.
My interest in bias, and my submission on bias, was in the area of field bias (their name for it) which is “preference for certain schools of thought or methods“. There have been numerous articles in WUWT about “pal review” and journal bias in climate science, so I am sure that everyone here will understand what I am talking about. In my submission, I referred to a paper that I submitted to a Springer journal and which was rejected after 11 months of review, with the editor personally telling me they did not want yet another paper critical of the climate models. This was from the editor of a journal which was not exactly renowned for publishing papers that were critical of the climate models. Naturally, I interpreted that as bias.
The Springer Nature survey defines bias as:
Bias is a prejudice against or a preference for people based on a group they belong to, often resulting in discrimination or favouritism of those people when acted upon.
Bias can be present against or for numerous attributes, such as certain countries, languages, perceived institutional prestige, seniority, gender, race, ethnicity, disciplines, political beliefs, etc.
Bias can be conscious or unconscious.
Note that there is nothing in their definition of bias which refers to field bias.
It was very interesting to me, therefore, when the survey results, although predominantly based around regional bias, included the following:
That looks to me like 55% say there is pal review or similar, and 36% say there is field bias. Given Springer Nature‘s definition of bias, which indicated that they weren’t actually looking for field bias, that 36% is, to my mind, quite an impressive number. Bear in mind that the survey covered all fields of research, not just climate. Incidentally, the two categories above are not exclusive, so don’t add the two %’s together.
It is good that the perception of bias is now at least a bit out in the open, but what comes next? Springer Nature says:
“… Addressing bias is not only an ethical imperative, but it is also critical to ensuring a more complete and representative global knowledge base, which Springer Nature commits to building. These data underscore the need for publishers to proactively work on widening participation in the research publishing process, reducing bias, strengthening researcher trust, and ensuring that all research is assessed on its merits.”
Shanmugam argues that while peer review serves as a quality-control mechanism for scientific publishing and grants, it suffers from deep, systemic flaws that hinder innovation and fairness.
He notes that Albert Einstein expressed disdain for peer review, and that the system—often conducted as double-blind review to mask identities—loses the transparency essential to science.
The paper “The Peer-Review Problem: A Sedimentological Perspective” is a 2022 article (published in the Journal of the Indian Association of Sedimentologists, vol. 39, pp. 3–24) by G. Shanmugam, a geologist with extensive experience in process sedimentology and petroleum geology.
Shanmugam argues that while peer review serves as a quality-control mechanism for scientific publishing and grants, it suffers from deep, systemic flaws that hinder innovation and fairness. He draws on the history of the process (tracing it back over a thousand years to Syria and its formalization by the Royal Society of London in the 17th–18th centuries), critiques from prominent editors (e.g., Richard Smith of the British Medical Journal and Richard Horton of The Lancet), and examples from multiple fields. The “sedimentological perspective” comes primarily from the author’s own decades-long publishing record (over 200 peer-reviewed works) and specific controversies in sedimentology, where interpretive paradigms (e.g., around deep-water deposits) have clashed with established views.
He notes that Albert Einstein expressed disdain for peer review, and that the system—often conducted as double-blind review to mask identities—loses the transparency essential to science.
Shanmugam acknowledges that peer review has value as a self-regulating tool but insists secrecy undermines it. He calls for geoscientists to contribute more to the discussion, as issues may be less loudly debated in geology than in biomedicine.
This paper aligns with wider critiques of peer review across sciences:
It can be slow, subjective, prone to bias/groupthink, and poor at catching fraud, while sometimes blocking paradigm shifts. Reforms like open review, post-publication commentary, or preprint servers with community feedback have gained traction elsewhere. In sedimentology, interpretive debates (turbidites vs. debris flows vs. contourites, etc.) highlight how “process sedimentology” benefits from rigorous, transparent scrutiny of evidence rather than deference to anointed models.
The Peer-Review Problem: a sedimentological perspective
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had a deep disdain for peer review. The peer-review process, introduced over a thousand years ago in Syria and fully formalized by the Royal Society of London during 1665-1752, is an integral part of quality control in publishing articles and in awarding research grants. However, there are many lingering problems, which include: 1) anointed experts, 2) blind peer reviews, 3) delays, 4) orthodoxy, 5) bias, 6) groupthink, 7) Peer rejection of ideas (including Nobel-Prize winners), 8) inconsistency, 9) politics, 10) fake peer review and plagiarism, 11) “Sham peer review” in the U.S. medical community, 12) settling old scores, 13) online publications, 14) acknowledgements, 15) controversies in geological sciences, and 16) imbalance of peer reviewers in the biomedical research. Transparency, which is the underpinning trait of science journalism, is lost in the secrecy of blind peer review. Under the blind peer review, there are at least eight examples of scientific papers that were rejected before going on to win a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, there are 33 striking cases of peer rejection in science, including the notorious theory of “continental drift” by Alfred Wegener. My own examples of papers in process sedimentology and petroleum geology show that the same manuscript was rejected by one journal, but was accepted by another, suggesting that the blind peer review is obsolete. A solution is to adopt an Open Peer Review (OPR). Barring an open peer review, an alternative path is to publishing the entire peer-review comments and recommended decisions of all reviewers (anonymous and identified) at the end of a paper. This practice not only would force the anonymous reviewer to be objective and accountable but also would allow the entire peer-review process to be transparent.
The Journal of the Indian Association of Sedimentologists (peer reviewed)
Shanmugam lists 16 lingering issues with peer review:
Anointed experts — Reviewers are selected subjectively without standardized qualification.
Blind peer reviews — Secrecy enables bias and fails to fully hide identities (e.g., via self-citations, writing style, track changes, or specific suggestions).
Delays — Reviews often exceed promised timelines (e.g., months instead of 2–3 weeks).
Orthodoxy — Pressure to conform to conventional wisdom stifles new ideas.
Bias — Against certain authors, concepts, negative results, or demographics (e.g., historical gender bias in funding).
Groupthink — Collective resistance to unconventional views.
Peer rejection of groundbreaking ideas — Including papers later tied to Nobel Prizes and major theories.
Inconsistency — The same manuscript can be rejected by one journal and accepted (sometimes without major changes) by another.
Politics — Influences decisions, such as in climate-related topics.
Fake peer review and plagiarism — Fraudulent reviewer accounts or stolen content.
“Sham peer review” — Documented abuses, especially in the U.S. medical community.
Settling old scores — Personal vendettas unrelated to the science.
Online publications — Reduced oversight on some platforms.
While there is a lot of talk about renewables being cheap, Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, gives a simple example of why this is not true. He draws a parallel with the building of railways. Suppose, for example, that a country wants to build a railroad from one end of the country to the other, and puts out a tender. Two bids are received, one of which is significantly cheaper than the other. However, the company that submitted the cheaper bid says that after every 10 miles, there is a three mile gap in the track.
While there is a lot of talk about renewables being cheap, Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, gives a simple example of why this is not true. He draws a parallel with the building of railways. Suppose, for example, that a country wants to build a railroad from one end of the country to the other, and puts out a tender. Two bids are received, one of which is significantly cheaper than the other. However, the company that submitted the cheaper bid says that after every 10 miles, there is a three mile gap in the track. If such a condition is acceptable, the price is really cheap. “Well, obviously, the fact that it’s cheaper doesn’t help, because it’s now useless as a railroad. And electricity systems that are running on wind are useless for the same purpose. You can’t have an electricity system that when the wind dies down, there’s no electricity,” he says. The same kind of problems are true for solar power as well.
The energy system must be reliable
To make the power system work, i.e., to have electricity available all the time with renewables, you need either energy storage capacity or some kind of parallel system of generation. As far as storage is concerned, there are no good solutions at the moment, says McKitrick. One option, he notes, would be to try to create a lake in the sky and pump enough water up there while the weather is windy to use it as a hydro resource in the absence of wind. However, this is not a realistic solution. Another option would be batteries. “No one can even conceive today of how you’d have batteries large enough to run an entire country for anything more than 30 seconds or so,” he says.
And the third option? In order to have a sufficient and continuous supply of electricity, we would need another more reliable source than wind and solar – gas-fired power plants, for example. In other words, you will need to add this cost and essentially build duplicate electricity systems that run at the same time. McKitrick says this is inefficient, silly, and comes with a high cost. “Anything that people talk about is so incredibly expensive that suddenly the cost comparison goes back to where it always was, which is fossil fuel-based systems are inexpensive and 100% reliable,” he says. Nuclear, he adds, is expensive by comparison, but once it is built, the costs of running it are low and it lasts a long time. Hydropower is also good and reliable, but it can only be used where natural conditions are right. “We’ve used them because they’re the ones that work. And when you factor in the reliability, they’re also the least expensive overall. Wind and solar, they will never be competitive because of the intermittency,” says McKitrick.
Depending on the taxpayer
Since renewables are uncompetitive, governments subsidise them, or in other words, taxpayers pay for them, everywhere. McKitrick gives the example of his home province of Ontario, Canada. Around the mid-2000s, Ontario decided to start heavily subsidising wind farm development. “What they sold to the public was Ontario is now going to be a world leader in manufacturing wind turbines and everybody is going to be lining up to buy wind turbines from us. So there will be a great economic benefit,” McKitrick recalls but adds that nothing of the sort happened. “No, we didn’t have any comparative advantage in building wind turbines. We don’t have a wind turbine industry in Ontario. We ended up importing all the parts. The turbines went up and the Government changed and the subsidies disappeared. The whole industry disappeared,” McKitrick explains. According to him, this is what always happens when an industry comes into existence not because private investors have an interest in developing it, but because the Government is handing out taxpayer money to it. “It’s gone as soon as the subsidies are gone. And as long as the subsidies are in place, it’s a drain on your society. It is destroying your national wealth, not building it,” he says.
The energy transition and the deployment of renewable energy is only one part of the climate debate, however. The transition to a decarbonised economy should be preceded by the question of why we are doing it in the first place. Allegedly, it is because human-emitted CO2 has caused global warming and if we do not stop it, if we continue to emit CO2, we will end up with a climate catastrophe, full of hellfire and extreme weather events. But in reality, we should be asking, are these claims really accurate?
McKitrick is one of the many scientists trying to allay people’s climate anxiety. His interest in environmental issues began during his studies at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s. General interest in environmental issues was on the rise, but there weren’t many economists studying the subject or considering the impact of environmental policies on the economy. “I decided to focus on climate change because Canada was beginning to think about whether a carbon tax would make sense. And the economics was interesting and the data was there to work on it,” he says.
In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed between countries, which set a target for greenhouse gas reductions. In general, McKitrick says, the discussions at the time were about climate scientists talking about climate-related issues and problems, but they also wanted economists to come in and talk about the economic impact of the policies that were planned. “There weren’t many people working on the topic, so I would often get invited to these kinds of meetings and I’d see the standard science presentation. I didn’t really have any opinion on it one way or the other. I just took it all in,” he says.
A faulty hockey stick graph
But at around the turn of the millennium, at those meetings, weather data collected by the satellites were presented. “It was, to me, quite an unusual thing, because I’d seen lots of presentations of the surface thermometer data and the description of the global warming problem. Then somebody said there’s also this satellite data that’s measuring the layers of the atmosphere where all this is supposed to be happening and it doesn’t show any warming. Which is unusual,” he says, adding that for some reason it was not considered important. “I thought, wait a second, that’s an important point. We should understand this before we go rushing into some of these expensive policies. We need to ask how solid the science here is,” McKitrick says.
He then became interested in climate science itself, beyond the economic impacts of any climate policy in particular, and looked at the data provided by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example. “Immediately I was struck by the fact that the statistical analysis wasn’t very impressive. That they were doing really rudimentary analyses and it was clear that they didn’t have as much training in statistics as an economist would,” he says.
In 2003, he was contacted by Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician who was working in the mining sector and was interested in replicating paleoclimate studies. He would later start the popular website ClimateAudit.org, which critically assessed the statistical analysis behind climate science claims.
McIntyre explained that he had been trying to understand the data on which University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann et al. created his famous hockey stick graph showing a steep rise in temperatures on Earth in the second half of the 20th century.
Together with McKitrick they then analysed the underlying data that climate scientists had obtained primarily by studying tree rings offering proxy data of the planet’s climate history. McKitrick and McIntyre discovered a significant number of errors in the work of Mann et al. “These are long paleoclimate series, mostly tree rings, things like that, and just graphing them up they didn’t look like hockey sticks. And most of the data series just had no trend at all. And a lot of them even go down in the 20th century,” he says.
They were able to reconstruct the steps that Mann and his co-authors had taken in analysing the data, and they saw that, in essence, Mann et al. had only used the data that showed warming. That is, McKitrick says, Mann and his colleagues extracted 20 out of 400 data series – the ones from which it could be deduced that the rise in temperatures in the second half of the 20th century resembled the image of a hockey stick when plotted on a graph. Understandably, presenting data in this selective way is in itself a bad enough way to conduct research, but McKitrick adds that the selected data itself were also problematic in the Mann et al. work. “The additional problem is those 20 series used are the bristlecone pines, which are known in the field not to be good temperature proxies,” he explains, adding that, ultimately, a graph of any shape could be produced on climate history in this way. The same problems apply to similar hockey stick graphs produced later. “You have no way statistically to say that a hockey stick shape is the preferred outcome versus some completely different shape,” McKitrick says.
Mann vs Steyn: the flawed hockey stick still lives on
McKitrick and McIntyre published their first paper on the hockey stick in 2003 and the work of Mann et al. has been criticised many times since by others, but that doesn’t mean that this graph of temperature rise isn’t presented as truth time and time again. A good example of this is a recent court case in Washington D.C., USA, in which McKitrick was involved as a witness. It is a well-known case in which the same climate scientist, Michael Mann, sued Canadian author and broadcaster Mark Steyn, accusing him of defamation. The case concerned an article by Steyn in the National Review in 2012. In addition to Steyn, Mann sued another author, Rand Simberg, whose earlier article had been commented on by Steyn in his own. Simberg had written of Mann as “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science”. Sandusky was a coach at the University of Pennsylvania – the same university where Mann works – who was convicted in June 2012 of child molestation. A subsequent independent report into the university’s actions revealed that the university’s administration had treated the matter with abject disregard, and rather wanted to cover it up for fear of discrediting the school in the public eye.
But why did Simberg draw a parallel with this case? Mann was one of the main actors in the 2009 Climategate email scandal when a whistleblower or hacker leaked emails stored at the computer server of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world with Mann being one of them. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered.
However, the reason for drawing parallels with the ugly Sandusky affair was that the university had also launched an investigation into Mann, but found no misuse of data. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicised science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet,” Simberg wrote on the blog of a libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute. Steyn quoted Simberg in his article but added that while he himself would not have compared Mann to a child molester in this way, there is a point to what Simberg is saying. “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus,” he wrote.
More than 10 years after the publication of the articles, Mann and his lawyers finally succeeded in taking the case to a jury in Washington, D.C., and the court concluded that Mann had been libelled.
Simberg and Steyn were found to have made false statements and were ordered to pay Mann $1 each to compensate them. However, as the comments were also found to have been written with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm”, punitive damages were awarded – Simberg had to pay $1,000 and Steyn $1 million. Steyn vowed to appeal the decision.
McKitrick comments that, in his view, both the defence lawyers and the experts involved, including himself, did a good job, but that the court is simply a terribly bad place to debate climate science. And in the end, the court was not deciding whether the hockey stick graph was flawed or not, it was clearly a political issue. “In a town like Washington D.C., which leans very heavily Democrat, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Michael Mann’s lawyer, made it clear that the defendants were just evil Right-wing Republican types, probably Trump supporters, and that’s all the jury heard in the end,” he comments.
Reasonable views on climate do not reach the mass media
The critique of the hockey stick graph is, of course, not the only work McKitrick and colleagues have done and published on temperatures. For example, as early as 2004, McKitrick and climatologist Patrick Michaels examined temperature records from the late 20th century and found that they were significantly biased, i.e., they did not remove the warming effect of human activity and urbanisation on temperatures.
In addition, McKitrick has been a reviewer and provided formal commentary on the reports of the IPCC. While these kinds of comments point out shortcomings that could be corrected by the report’s authors, McKitrick says that the recent trend has been to disregard them altogether, with many scientists not seeing a point to send their comments in at all.
On the other hand, it is important to understand what these IPCC reports actually say. If the UN Secretary-General claims that we are on the fast track to a climate hell, can the IPCC confirm this? McKitrick says no. For example, there is a lot of talk in the media about heat waves, major storms and other extreme weather events, and that climate change will make them more frequent and worse. But McKitrick says not to take it too seriously what the press says. “Most of what you hear, at least most of what I hear in the media, is ridiculous. The normal, sensible, scientifically sound work never makes the papers. What makes the papers is the far out, outrageous, speculative stuff about the worst case scenarios. So don’t go by what you’re seeing in the papers,” he says, adding that the IPCC reports do not confirm an increase in extreme weather events. “There is some evidence that heat waves have gotten worse, although not in the United States. The 1930s was far worse than anything we’ve had since. But the major forms of extreme weather, they’re not really trends and we don’t really expect there to be as a result of CO2 emissions,” McKitrick says, noting that the IPCC reports also do not use terms such as climate crisis or climate catastrophe. This is the message being given by Guterres and other political figures.
What role does CO2 play?
As presented by political figures and portrayed as the scientific consensus in the media, one of the main reasons for climate change is human emissions of CO2. But the question actually is if CO2 is even capable of doing anything to change the climate. According to McKitrick, we have known of the warming effect of this gas for 150 years. But can it really have a big effect on the climate? “How will that affect our weather systems and life on Earth? That’s where all the uncertainties are. And most of those uncertainties are still quite large. There’s been very little progress in answering that question. Is it a large effect or a small effect? There’s very good evidence for a small effect,” he argues while adding that current developments in Asia, particularly in China and India, where CO2 emissions are increasing, particularly because of coal-fired power generation, which is growing rapidly, could still be a likely cause for concern exactly because it is happening so quickly. On the other hand, McKitrick says, fossil fuel use is essential for these societies to increase their prosperity. “Wealth and income around the world have gone up a lot and in the process, they’ve made people much less vulnerable to environmental catastrophes and problems of all kinds. So as the CO2 level is going up in the air, so are the incomes or the resources to deal with whatever challenges we encounter in the natural world, and weather vulnerability and things like that. So there’s another side even to that part,” McKitrick says, adding that in the context where Asia is rapidly increasing its CO2 emissions, zeroing out CO2 emissions in the West would not have much effect, even if we really think that reducing CO2 would help prevent climate change. Reduction by us is offset by the increase in Asia.
McKitrick points out that more CO2 has positive effects as well that are not being talked about.
“It’s improved agricultural productivity and it’s turning deserts into green spaces. And so this aspect of it, again, doesn’t make the headlines, doesn’t get discussed in the news, but it’s a very real phenomenon,” he says.
In particular, McKitrick says, it is worth pointing out that the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is also the basis of the climate models that are used to predict our climate future and that are also used by the IPCC in its assessments. There are dozens of these models, and they vary in their predictions of global warming, but McKitrick says that in broad terms they all have one thing in common: they all expect too much warming. These models have been run for decades and today, in black and white, it is possible to see that they are not consistent with reality. McKitrick asks, for example, would we take a stock market analyst who consistently misses the mark in a serious manner? And how long – until bankruptcy? Yet somehow, similarly faulty climate models are still going ahead.
Too little climate debate and too much politics
All in all, in McKitrick’s view, the whole climate debate today is driven by various interests which are both financial and political. And it is these interests that are driving the talk of a catastrophe and of a solution in the rapid development of renewable energy with taxpayers’ money. On the government side, however, this also looks like a good way of expanding power. “Climate is a great story for doing that, because it means every single aspect of life. You now need to have regulatory supervision and government oversight on every single thing that people are doing,” he notes. So clearly the climate debate has also become a political issue. And that includes universities and science as a whole. McKitrick says that Western universities today have become very Left-wing, and this is also affecting scientists and their research. “I think a lot of them do secretly think that I would like it if the papers that I publish are beneficial to politicians on the Left, and I resent it if the work I publish is beneficial to politicians on the Right. So I might even shape my publication and research work with that in mind,” he says.
Scientific journals also make it difficult to publish work critical of ‘accepted’ climate science, while reputable scientific journals accept poor-quality work based on the basic tenets of climate alarmism – for example, McKitrick says, work that argues that climate change could cause frog extinction. Any sensible work on the same subject, arguing, for example, that frogs actually benefit from a warmer climate, will probably be published in a smaller journal. Perhaps rather than restricting freedom of expression, he says, this is more about “the freedom of reach” or limiting the reach of messages that are deemed ‘unacceptable’. “For people who question the consensus, it’s harder for them to get a message out,” he says, adding that it’s even more difficult in the mainstream media, where climate crisis activists attack anyone who disagrees with their vision of a catastrophe and the mainstream press is usually on their side. “So hopefully, at a certain point, people who follow this issue realise that, yes, there’s a filter,” McKitrick says. He adds that the filter is not complete and that it is still possible for anyone who is interested to find factual information to actually read. This is something he recommends everyone to do.
Mark Steyn loses in Washington D.C. in the defamation trial surrounding Michael E. Mann’s unbelievable temperature ‘hockey stick’, while President Biden cannot be criminally charged for taking home state secret papers on the grounds that he is gaga. Only in Democrat America.
Mark Steyn loses in Washington D.C. in the defamation trial surrounding Michael E. Mann’s unbelievable temperature ‘hockey stick’, while President Biden cannot be criminally charged for taking home state secret papers on the grounds that he is gaga. Only in Democrat America. There was initial relief in the usual quarters at the slaying of Steyn, but the ‘settled’ climate science crowd is now stuck with the ghastly Mann and his ludicrous hockey stick. That should be punishment enough for anyone saying the debate about climate change is over.
It has hardly begun, but now there is a new breath of life for the once ubiquitous poster temperature scare that was centre stage in the 2009 Climategate scandal, and has been stinking up the science joint ever since. With Net Zero coming apart at the seams as reality about mass deindustrialisation and starvation beckons, the politicised science stories forecasting climate Armageddon are starting to attract wider public scepticism. As all cults eventually find, the sandwich-board fearmongering starts to wear thin when the forecast disasters fail to come to pass. Self-appointed promoters of irrationality descend into wilder and wilder flights of fantasy to re-capture the fleeting moments when their emotional rantings offered them a temporary place in the spotlight.
Last week a jury in Washington D.C. awarded Mann $1 million in ‘punitive’ damages against Mark Steyn, although damages for Mann’s reputation was set at a derisory $1. In itself, this should see the larger award set aside, since in recent times the Supreme Court has been cracking down on punitive awards more than nine times the damage amount.
The disconnect between the two awards hints at the political nature of the case. Steyn and a fellow writer Rand Simberg had criticised the hockey stick which abolished the Medieval Warming Period. Running a 1,000-year slightly declining temperature line until a sudden claimed human-caused spike in the 20th century removed the concept of natural climatic variation for a whole generation. The court heard evidence from a senior statistician working at Mann’s own University of Pennsylvania that the graph was “manipulated”. First published in 1999, Mann spent years denying requests from other academics for information about his methods. The Climategate leak with emails referring to “Mike’s Nature Trick” and “Hide the decline” blew all that apart. At the end of the recent trial, his lawyer told the jury that Michael Mann was tired of being attacked. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way,” he added.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. attended the trial and he has concluded the mistake Steyn and Simberg made was thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case. Steyn’s frequent contention has been that the graph was fraudulent. “The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put by the prosecution and the defence. Mann simply had to show up,” observed Pielke.
In a statement, Mann said: “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.” Pielke comments that he would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science and climate scientists. “Such legal action may not be limited to climate – debate over COVID-19, also presents a target rich environment for unwanted speech to silence.”
Dr. Judith Curry blames Mann for destroying her academic career at Georgia Tech when he called her a “serial climate disinformer”. Her crime was to challenge the idea of a consensus around the science of climate and the involvement of humans in causing most if not all temperature change. After the verdict was announced, she tweeted that there was no justice from a Democrat, “climate-concerned” jury. “And a huge blow for freedom of speech,” she added.
She is right of course. The seven figure punitive damage was sought not to compensate Mann for any loss of reputation, but to deter anyone else arguing that the ‘settled’ climate activists backing the collectivist Net Zero project are wrong. For Steyn and Simberg to have lost an American defamation case, actual malice, defined as not believing what they wrote about Mann, needed to be proved. The reason many neutral observers of the case believe the result is perverse is that Steyn has spent over two decades criticising the methodology of the hockey stick, and no evidence has been presented that he doesn’t believe every single word he has written.
In commentary posted on Steyn’s website, it was noted that he was a member of the media and “supposedly afforded” First Amendment protections. “If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for everyday citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in D.C. or Montana – anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing.” It was noted that in 2019 the Supreme Court decided not to allow the case to be tried in the higher District of Columbia Court of Appeals, but there was a dissenting verdict from Judge Samuel Alito. He felt the case went to the “very heart” of the U.S. constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and the press. While not making any specific judgements on the case, he identified that the matter at issue was the “protection afforded to journalists and others who use harsh language in criticising opposing advocacy on one of the most important public issues of the day”.
The learned judge was also aware of the pitfalls of installing a jury to decide on the matter, noting, “the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be coloured by their preconceptions on the matter”. Climate change, he continued, has staked a place at the very centre of the nation’s public discourse. “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,” he said.
Not if the fake Nobel laureate Michael E Mann has anything to do with it, it might be said. A consistent abuser over the years of climate ‘deniers’, he was recently part of a gang of activists and journalists who persuaded Nature Springer to retract a paper by four Italian scientists who had investigated past weather data and concluded there was not a climate ‘emergency’.
Whether Mann gets his $1 million remains to be seen, but his trip to the libel courts, which has been spun out over a decade, will not cost him a cent. Wealthy benefactors are available to fund all his costs. Not so Mark Steyn.
Just over a year ago Steyn was in fine form on GB News serving up a scintillating prime time show on the fledgling channel – with a subversive subtext telling the state regulator of cable news to get stuffed. It was compulsive viewing, although it was never going to last in the highly-regulated Ofcom world of U.K. television. The same man, who in your correspondent’s view is incapable of writing or telling an uninteresting line, is pictured above outside the Washington D.C. court building. It might come as a shock to readers who remember him on U.K. screens as a dapper, bustling presence. Life has not been kind to Mark of late with rising legal bills and three heart attacks. White-haired, gaunt and confined to a wheelchair from which he conducted his own three-week defence in the trial. He clutches a Liberty hockey stick, a fund raising device. The stick has now sold out, but readers can provide support here.
Bravo Mark Steyn, a true radical, free thinker and brave defender of free speech.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
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