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.
The news this past week has been filled by Rand Paul’s Senate hearings exposing the extent of the scientific fraud perpetrated by ex-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci in the matter of Covid-19. First Paul released Fauci’s “diaries,” otherwise known as personal musings recorded in various places on the government’s servers.
The news this past week has been filled by Rand Paul’s Senate hearings exposing the extent of the scientific fraud perpetrated by ex-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci in the matter of Covid-19. First Paul released Fauci’s “diaries,” otherwise known as personal musings recorded in various places on the government’s servers. Then Fauci was compelled to testify, whereupon he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege more than 100 times and never provided a word of substantive testimony.
However, the diaries on their face revealed numerous instances where Fauci’s public statements were blatant deceptions. As just one example, on January 20, 2020, Fauci wrote “Now we know the market was not the source [of the virus], it was the amplifier.” But even as he admitted that in private, he was going to extraordinary lengths in public to cover up that conclusion, apparently in order to deflect blame from himself for having funded the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that actually unleashed the pandemic. Among other things, Fauci induced the writing of papers to promote the theory that the virus arose in the Wuhan wet market — a theory he knew was wrong. From Matt Ridley, writing in Spiked on July 31:
[A] week [after his January 20, 2020 entry, Fauci] conveneda group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper,‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so. . . .
Similar levels of deception characterized everything about Fauci’s Covid-19 regime, from the promotion of lockdowns, to masking, to mandatory vaccination, and more. Dissenters were silenced and ostracized. The overall cost of the deceptions reaches easily into the multiple trillions of dollars. As the level of blatant deceptions has been revealed, millions of people have realized that official government “science” cannot be trusted to any degree. As likely as not, it is no more than a convenient cover story to justify protecting or enriching the politically powerful interests of the moment. As the amount of government funding backing a particular “scientific” narrative rises, and reaches into the hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars, the likelihood that that narrative can be trusted declines until it approaches zero.
So therefore keep in mind that the Covid-19 “science” narrative is not the only recent narrative cloaked with the mantle of “science” that has been showered with government funding into the multi-trillions of dollars. There is a second. That second narrative is the “climate” scare — that is, the claim that human use of hydrocarbon fuels and release of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere is leading to some kind of existential climate crisis.
Is there any reason to believe that the still ongoing climate scare narrative is any more trustworthy than the Covid-scare narrative has proven to have been? Both have been backed by a vast research apparatus, almost entirely government funded, which looks to lose most of its funding and associated careers and promotions and prestige if there really is no underlying existential crisis.
Fauci’s disgrace came from a world of perverse incentives. His goal as a public servant should have been to get the public through the pandemic with the least possible death, costs and inconveniences. But his personal fame, funding and wealth could be maximized by exaggerating the danger of the virus, deflecting away from himself the blame for the origins of the problem, and demanding sacrifices from the public in the form of lockdowns, masking or the like.
Very comparable perverse incentives bear on the “climate scientists” who continually proclaim a climate crisis and demand sacrifices from the public. Without a manufactured crisis, there is no need at all for 95% of them. In my recent post on the litigation concerning the Endangerment Finding, check out the list of some of the dozens of organizations trying to preserve this underlying basis for hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding, supposedly to “solve” the climate crisis.
In fact, we’ve known at least since the Climategate emails were released from the University of East Anglia way back in 2009 that the whole climate scare has been characterized by data manipulation, orthodoxy enforcement and suppression of dissent. Fauci’s embarrassment from his conduct as to Covid-19 serves as a timely reminder to remain skeptical at all times about government-funded science, and even more so when the money involved reaches into the trillions.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve it they just speak up.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:
“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.
But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics might be heard:
Our new research has produced worrying findings. Climate misinformation may be more effective than we’d like to think because of a phenomenon called the illusory truth effect In short, we are more likely to believe a lie if we encounter it repeatedly. Worse, the effect works immediately – a lie seems to be more true even after just one repetition.
Repetition, boys and girls, is “insidious”:
The study’s lead author, Mary Jiang, from the Australian National University, said: “The findings show how powerful and insidious repetition is and how it can influence people’s assessment of truth.”
But it is only “insidious” when skeptics repeat things, not when the State says the same thing a thousand times, and starts the repetition at kindergarten. These researchers live in an academic fishbowl.
The survey was swamp of irrelevant questions on boring things skeptics hardly ever say like “Global warming will not increase skin cancer”. But one question they designated as misinformation may have gone off like a bomb in the survey:
“Emails seized from prominent climate scientists suggest conspiracy and data manipulation.”
Clearly these researchers have never read the ClimateGate emails where esteemed professors admitted in writing that they use “Mikes Nature trick” to “hide the decline”. However, as is their way, they suggest conspiracies themselves based on nothing but their avid imagination. At the Conversion (that academic site that banned skeptics) they let their hair down — seemingly afraid skeptics might use AI bots to wipe out their “public support” (that was created through decades of mindless repetition).
As our social media feeds fill up with AI-driven bots, sheer repetition of lies may erode the most essential resource for action on climate change – public support. Traditional media has a different problem – in their commitment to presenting both sides, journalists often platform climate sceptics whose untrue claims add to the repetition of misinformation.
Somehow they lie to themselves that “journalists” are committed to presenting both sides and often platform climate skeptics. Where have they been for the last 10 years — not apparently doing any background research for their paper. If they spent half an hour reading skeptical blogs they’d know that belief in climate change levitates on billion dollar propaganda campaigns, a million lines of “carbon is pollution” and mass censorship. The academic world has trained a generation to hate the sixth element of the periodic table, and these psychologists would probably think that’s a good communication strategy.
Their Holy Arc is “the consensus” — that quintessentially unscientific philosophy of polling the scientists you haven’t sacked yet
Australian universities are nothing if not hotbeds of GroupThink.
What can we do to protect ourselves, they ask, and the answer is to chant the permitted litany. In an immature science it’s absurd that 999 climate scientists out of 1,000 say the exact same thing, but this is their garlic to ward off the vampires:
Researchers have found one reliable solution – come back to the scientific consensus. For decades, scientists have researched the question of whether our activities are the main cause of rising global temperatures. Many different lines of evidence from rates of ice melt to sea temperatures to satellite measurements have now answered this conclusively. The scientific consensus is now 99.9% certain, a figure which has only grown over time. Drawing on this consensus may work to protect us from accepting sceptic arguments by reminding us of the very large areas of agreement.
They write as though they are children afraid of catching of catching typhoid: “Drawing on the consensus may work to protect us from accepting skeptic arguments”. Lord help us all, in case we find a skeptic persuasive!
It’s so pathetically intellectually feeble. And indeed, their conspiratorial minds are unleashed, they see “actors” with “an agenda” and never for a moment guess that they are the actors and their agenda is to protect the establishment that pays them:
There’s a systemic problem here. Never before in history have we been able to access so much information. But our information environments are not benign. Actors with an agenda are at work in many areas of public life, trying to shape what we do or do not do. We need to learn more about how we can battle the power of lies on repeat.
Jiang Y, Schwarz N, Reynolds KJ, Newman EJ (2024) Repetition increases belief in climate-skeptical claims, even for climate science endorsers. PLoS ONE 19(8): e0307294. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307294
Experiment 1: N = 47 (Judging by the dated questions this was done about ten years ago).
“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.”
“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.” The sub-title of Popper’s 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, in which he argued that science progresses through inspired conjectures checked by attempts to refute them through criticism, is “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.” Now, a six-person jury in Washington, DC has refuted Popper’s formulation of the uniqueness of science, finding in favor of climate scientist Michael Mann in the defamation suit he brought against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn dating back to 2012.
Central to Mann’s case was his attempt to reconstruct global temperature over the previous millennium – the iconic “hockey stick” graph. The graph shows global temperatures purportedly falling for centuries and suddenly shooting upwards with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Mann’s hockey stick representation was derived principally from selected tree ring data based on the assumption that tree rings constitute accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by confounding factors such as rainfall, seasonal variability, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The results that Mann produced are also sensitive to decisions on and application of statistical techniques.
There can be little doubt of the hockey stick’s historic importance in the development and propagation of what became the dominant scientific paradigm of climate change. In 2001, the hockey stick was given star billing in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, where it appeared twice in the synthesis report, twice more in a diagram combining past and future temperature change, and again on the third page of the Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers. Gerald North, a leading atmospheric physicist at Texas A&M University and one of the most cited authors in the geosciences, had no doubt as to the significance of the hockey stick. “The planet has been cooling slowly until one hundred and twenty years ago, when, bam! It jumps up,” North told Science in 2000. “We’ve been breaking our backs on [greenhouse] detection, but I found the one-thousand-year records more convincing than any of our detection studies.” For Mann, the hockey stick was his ticket to climate super-stardom.
In keeping with Popper’s premise about science, however, Mann’s hockey stick aroused criticism from its first appearance. In response, Mann engaged in distinctly anti-Popperian efforts to suppress all criticism of the hockey stick and discussion of rival temperature reconstructions that might raise awkward questions about its scientific validity. A rival reconstruction by fellow paleo-climatologist Keith Briffa, for example, derived from tree ring data obtained from northern Canada and Siberia, showed a noticeable decline in temperatures over the latter part of the 20th century – opening up a divergence with the instrumental record. If tree rings suggested declining temperatures when temperatures were actually rising, then how could climate scientists put any confidence in tree rings as thermometers? Up could really mean down.
Briffa then wrote a paper for Science comparing the rival reconstructions. As we know from the Climategate emails leaked in 2009, Mann contacted the editor of Science. “Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us,” he wrote, copying in one of his co-authors, Raymond Bradley. After Science published Briffa’s paper, Mann tried to patch things up. “Thanks for all the hard work,” he emailed colleagues. The sentiment didn’t go down well with Bradley. “Excuse me while I puke,” Bradley emailed Briffa.
Such shenanigans are small beer compared to the surgery undertaken on the graphs of proxy reconstructions showcased in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. To deal with Briffa’s question-inducing temperature decline, Mann, as lead chapter author, and a tight-knit team resorted to the simple expedient of truncating adverse data that could serve as a “potential distraction/detraction,” Mann explained to his colleagues, and thereby hiding the temperature decline shown by Briffa’s proxies when temperatures were rising. The gambit also involved using actual temperature data to smooth the proxy curves in what became known as “Mike’s Nature trick,” something Mann had done previously in a paper submitted to that journal.
There was a more fundamental problem with the construction of the hockey stick. Analysis conducted by Canadians Steve McIntyre, a former mining engineer with a strong grounding in mathematics, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick using an algorithm based on a fragment of Mann’s computer code, found that running statistically trendless “red noise” produced hockey stick shapes 99 percent of the time. In other words, you could get hockey sticks from random junk data if you had enough of it.
Mann included in his proxy data set a series of bristlecone and foxtail pines from the western United States that had been selected by researcher Donald Graybill to study the possible effects of carbon dioxide fertilization on tree growth. To get the hockey stick from the data, Mann needed both the algorithm and Graybill’s tree ring data. Did Mann know what he was doing? Inside his directory of North American proxy data, Mann had a folder which he had labelled BACKTO_1400-CENSORED containing the North American data except all sixteen of the Graybill series. When the numbers from the CENSORED folder were run, the blade of the hockey stick disappeared.
While the blade of the hockey stick showed a sharp, anomalous rise in global temperature coinciding with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, its shaft also performed a critical function in radically revising the previously accepted climatological record by showing a steady decline in temperatures from the end of the first millennium. What previous generations of climatologists called the Medieval Warm Period had disappeared.
The Medieval Warm Period presented a twofold problem to the new climate change orthodoxy. It implied a much greater amplitude of natural variability beyond the bounds posited by the new scientific consensus of human-driven climate change, and it challenged the catastrophist narrative of global warming. If the prosperity of the Middle Ages and Viking settlement of Greenland occurred during an extended period of unusual warmth, then modern societies, too, could survive and prosper in a period of rising temperature.
In written congressional testimony in 2011, the climate scientist John Christy recalled discussions on the preparation of the Third Assessment Report when he pressed for inclusion of the findings of a 1998 paper in which Greenland ice-borehole temperatures provide a 20,000-year reconstruction. “Their result indicated a clear 500-year period of temperatures, warmer than the present, centered about 900 AD,” Christy testified. Despite – or, perhaps, because – of the importance of the paper in contradicting the hockey stick, the Third Assessment Report ignored the paper altogether.
Mann went further in a 2008 paper that presented a 2,000-year temperature reconstruction. The reconstruction was derived from sediments from Lake Korttajarvi in Iceland analyzed in a paper by the Finnish geologist Mia Tiljander. But Mann’s reconstruction inverted the Tiljander proxies, so warming became cooling and cooling became warming. According to Matti Saarnisto, one of Tiljander’s co-authors, the Medieval Warm Period was shown in a mirror image. In an email he’d received from Bradley, who despite his previous experience was still one of Mann’s co-authors, a large group of researchers had been handling extensive material and “at some point it happened that this graph was turned upside down.” Was this done on purpose or by mistake? “It has been turned upside down twice in Science, and now I doubt if it can be a mistake any more,” Saarnisto said, adding that the authors belong to a group “skeptical about this Medieval Warm Period and have tried to hide it to some extent.”
***
Mann’s defamation suit revolved around two issues. The first relates to Simberg and Steyn linking the investigation of Mann at Penn State, where he was professor of meteorology, to the university’s investigation and cover-up involving football coach and convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky. Penn State president Graham Spanier was later convicted of child endangerment for his role in the Sandusky cover-up. As Steyn told the court in his opening statement:
the same scoundrel who protected Sandusky also protected Michael Mann. So, we’re not comparing Mann with Sandusky; we’re comparing the investigation of Mann with the investigation of Sandusky – because both investigations were controlled by the same chap: a corrupt convicted criminal called Graham Spanier.
Of the two defendants, Simberg’s language was the less delicate and more direct. As Steyn told the jury, quoting directly from his original piece, “I’m not sure I would have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point,” distancing himself from Simberg’s statement that Mann could be regarded as the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.
The second issue relates to Simberg and Steyn describing Mann’s hockey stick as fraudulent. Though this was less inflammatory than the linkage made between Mann and Sandusky via Penn State’s respective investigations into their conduct, the jury believed that it was the greater offense. It imposed just $1,000 in punitive damages on Simberg but $1 million – one thousand times more – on Steyn. (The jury awarded Mann a dollar each from Simberg and Steyn to compensate him for damage to his reputation.) The massive differential in punishments the jury meted out to the two defendants can only be explained by the jury’s political bias. Steyn has a high profile as one of the most accomplished of conservative commentators. Evidently, the DC jury decided to make an example of Steyn and discourage any public questioning of today’s consensus of human-caused climate change.
In his opening statement, Steyn argued that it is not for the courts to adjudicate science. “A scientific theorem that requires validation by a courtroom verdict is not science at all,” Steyn argued. In principle, a court should be able to assess whether evidence used to make a scientific claim has been knowingly distorted, omitted, concealed or, in some other way, manipulated to produce a desired result. After all, fraud is not limited to theft but includes the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation.
Mann’s lawsuit demonstrates that the courts – at least, a court in the nation’s capital with politically biased jurors – are not capable of objective evaluation. Such cases also involve federal rules on the admissibility of evidence proffered by expert witnesses and the Daubert standard for scientific evidence. In a 39-page report, climate scientist Judith Curry gave her opinion that it is “reasonable” to have referred to the hockey stick in 2012 as “fraudulent” in the sense that “aspects of it are deceptive and misleading.”
However, Judge Alfred S. Irving excluded Curry’s report, which catalogued the manipulations of data to get a hockey stick shape and quoted severe criticisms of the hockey stick made even by climate scientists supportive of the climate-change consensus (most of these made privately). For his exclusion, the judge cited grounds that “the methodologies of the expert must be grounded in the scientific method, such that another person with similar expertise could replicate them.” Ruling on the inadmissibility of her testimony, Judge Irving said: “To wit, her expert report does not contain any explanations of her methodologies, making it impossible for the Court to find her testimony reliable.” There is little theoretical difference between cataloguing evidence to determine fraudulent misrepresentation in financial and commercial cases and evidence to assess scientific fraud; it would be absurd to require fraud investigators to set out their methodologies and expect different investigators to compile identical reports.
The trial closed with Mann’s counsel, John Williams, making a naked appeal to the jurors’ political prejudices. Williams urged the jury to award punitive damages so that no one will dare engage in “climate denialism” – just as Donald Trump’s “election denialism” needed to be suppressed. “In 41 years of trying cases to juries,” John Hinderaker wrote on the Powerline blog, “I have never heard such an outrageously improper appeal.”
Steyn related in his opening statement that Mann had chosen not to sue him for describing the hockey stick as fraudulent in any of the English-speaking jurisdictions lacking the free speech protections of the First Amendment. The upshot of Mann’s victory, Steyn warned, would be that “you cannot call his hockey stick a fraud in the United States, but you can in all the countries that chose, unlike you rebellious guys, to remain within the British Empire.”
This points to the biggest issue at stake in the trial. On the northeast wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, is carved a short extract that Thomas Jefferson had drafted for a bill on establishing religious freedom. Its preamble provides the philosophical justification for why the First Amendment is ranked first:
truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
As Popper argued, free argument and debate are not only essential for the advance of scientific knowledge. They also constitute the fundamental requirement for the maintenance of a constitutional republic.
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny.
Black is white, hot is cold. That is what we are continually being asked to believe, including by the counsel for Michael Mann in his defamation trial again Mark Steyn.
I am angry that information can be so misrepresented, and I am also angry that for so many years John Abbot and I have not been properly supported in our fight for the parallel data to enable some checking of the last thirty years of thermometer temperature data for Australia.
If you listen to Day 5, Mann in the Box, you will hear Ann McElinney incredulous that climate scientists could believe tree ring data from 1134 AD, but not 1980 (I might have got those years wrong). Thus, the need to ‘hide the decline’ and for ‘Mike’s trick’, which is swapping to thermometer data from proxy (tree ring) data as convenient, which is routinely done by climate scientists as detailed in the Climategate emails.
As Ann explains, from Michael Mann’s own words, the infamous hockey stick graph that created so much impetus for action on climate change, is reliant on tree ring data that are assumed to be reliable back some centuries but are known to not be reliable since the 1980s – it makes no sense.
Welcome to the world of climate science where hot is cold and black is white. And more specifically to my world where I have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the temperature data for Australia, and much of the rest of the world, is not reliable for at least the last thirty years. I have shown this through my blog series, Hyping Maximum Daily Temperatures (Parts 1- 7).
Specifically, that the switch over to automatic weather stations where temperature is increasingly measured as electrical resistance through platinum resistance probes that are susceptible to electrical interference particularly at airports, and that can be calibrated to measure how ever many degrees warmer (or cooler) that Andrew Johnston, the current head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, might deem appropriate.
I’ve been assured over the last few years, including by Andrew Johnson, that the change from mercury thermometer to platinum resistance probe is not the cause of, nor a contribution to, global warming as reported on the nightly television news. If it was, this would be evident as an increase in the number of hot days and their average temperature – just the same as what we are told has been caused by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
They treat us like mugs (by which I mean idiots or lazy ducks in a park), and for the most part my colleagues behave as such. Thank goodness for Mark Steyn. Finally, someone who calls black for black – except when he is joking.
The most straightforward way to know the effect of the change to temperature probes – and to distinguish this from the potential effects of warming from carbon dioxide – would be to compare the automatic readings from the probes with the manual readings from mercury thermometers at many weather stations over many years.
The bureau has been collecting this data as handwritten recordings on A8 forms. There is no official list but, piecing together information, I am confident that parallel data – measurements from probes versus mercury – exists for 38 weather stations and from many of these there should be more than 20 years of daily data available to enable comparisons. Access to all this information, and its analysis, would enable some assessment of the consequence of the equipment change. The issue is doubly complicated by the bureau using more than one type of probe, changing the type of probe used, and the type of data transmitted electronically – initially averaging values and then changing to the recording of instantaneous values.
It was back in 2015 that I first tried get the parallel data for Wilson’s Promontory Lighthouse. (You can read the letter I first sent to the Bureau by CLICKING HERE, and an overview of the saga by CLICKING HERE.)
Then in December 2017, after John Abbot told me that I had been going about it all wrong, I challenged him to get the data for me. Thus began his attempt to get this data through Freedom of Information (FOI).
After some years, and so much correspondence and denial, rather than hand over the temperature data to John Abbot, we ended up at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) with me as the expert witness and him representing himself. That was in February last year, nearly a year ago. Except that trial never proceeded, for reasons I still don’t understand except that Andrew Johnson does not want Boris Kelly-Gerreryn to have to give evidence under oath, for reasons that I do understand.
So, we were forced back into mediation. I was contacted sometime after this by a lawyer concerned that we were representing ourselves. I encouraged him to put the word out through his network that we should get some help, some assistance preferable from someone who understood how difficult it is to win at the AAT and a lawyer experienced in the same. Then I get a phone call from John Roskam asking about all of this because Stuart Woods had contacted him having seen the note from this lawyer to the network of Australian lawyers who ostensibly concern themselves with issues of public interest. Yes, I confirmed, it would be good to get some legal assistance, and that was the last I heard of it.
John Abbot has though received more correspondence from Boris Kelly-Gerreyn specifically a letter dated December 7, 2023. In this letter, the bureau is back to denying that any of this parallel data exists. Boris Kelly-Gerreyn is the General Manager, Data Program and Chief Data Officer, Bureau of Meteorology.
It is the case that in climate science: black is white, and hot is cold and the Conservative side of politics seems, for the most part, to just go along with all of this. The planet is boiling and all of that, let’s go nuclear, say the sitting ducks. Etcetera. Etcetera.
I had been scrolling through Michael Mann’s Twitter account, until Friday when I discovered I was blocked. Blocked even though I was yet to retweet or comment on anything to do with the defamation trial that he has brought against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg – yet to comment on Twitter or anywhere else.
I had been scrolling through Michael Mann’s Twitter account, until Friday when I discovered I was blocked. Blocked even though I was yet to retweet or comment on anything to do with the defamation trial that he has brought against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg – yet to comment on Twitter or anywhere else. I can’t image that he is blocking everyone because according to Google, Mann has over 20,000 followers and tweets so much that he is acknowledged as one of the ‘top 50 science stars of Twitter’.
But for sure he is blocking me, at least since Friday.
I can’t image that it is just for the weekend, that he has blocked me. Michael Mann doesn’t take weekends off. He didn’t even take Martin Luther King Jr. Day public holiday off.
If you listen to Mark Steyn’s opening comments in his defamation trail, on that day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Michael Mann the ‘vicious blowhard’ – as Steyn describes him in his opening remarks in court room 518 of the District of Columbia Superior Court where Steyn is defendant and also representing himself in a defamation case brough by Mann – Mann was suggesting on Twitter that because Steve McIntyre is sceptical of the consensus on climate change, sowing doubt and all the rest, he is a racist and homophobe. I would like to go and see exactly what is written, but I can’t – because I’m blocked.
As Steyn also commented in his opening remarks, it seems Mann can damn anyone he wants as a racist and homophobe but he himself, Michael E. Mann, should be protected from offensive commentary, by the defamation laws.
It is twelve years since Michael Mann began defamation proceedings against Steyn for insulting him, in particular for Steyn claiming that his last 1,000-year reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures is a fraud. Further, Steyn quoted from a Competitive Enterprise blog by Rand Simberg claiming:
Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.
It is the case that Jerry Sandusky was finally convicted in 2011 of 52 counts of sexual abuse of young boys over a 15-year period from 1994 to 2009, with senior Penn State university staff failing to tell police of reported incidences of rape dating from 1998.
It was in November 2009, soon after the release of the incriminating Climategate emails that Penn State University announced it was going to launch an inquiry into allegations about Michael Mann’s conduct: 1. Suppression and falsification of data 2. Deletion of emails and data 3. Misuse of confidential information 4. Deviation from accepted academic standards.
It ended up being nothing more than a two-hour interview with Mann, and without interviewing any of his critics, was done and dusted within a couple of months clearing Mann of all allegations. But not providing any documentation of the specific evidence relied upon. This was apparently in contravention of even the universities’ own policies.
In the lead up to the Mann v Steyn defamation case – that is now being heard in court room 518 of the District of Columbia Superior Court – Mann has been forced to hand over an e-mail where he described this Climategate inspired Penn investigation into his conduct as a ‘cover our A$$es’ exercise.
This trial is being promoted by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer as ‘Climate Change on Trial’. I hope this is what comes to pass.
Ann and Phelim are going to great lengths to get the details of the trial to all of us, every day. They are in court, and have actors reenacting critical exchanges from the court room. They have a dedicated new podcast series, that you can subscribe to here:
The bad news keeps coming for Professor Michael Mann. The Judge has declared that he and his lawyers presented false data to the court – ironically in a case where he was denying using false data. Mann has also had his million dollar punitive damages award slashed. This story will run and run. We bring you a special update episode.
The court case is expected to run until about 6th February, we are three days into it now, but the first days were mostly procedural and jury selection.
I have much more to write about all of this. So much that I have been having trouble knowing where to start with a first blog post.
So here it is, my first blog post, so you can at least get yourself up to date by at least listening to Day 3, that is a good place to start.
I have known Mark for a long time, and he has included my take on the hockey stick in his book on this topic (A Disgrace to the Profession) and also in his deposition for this trial – yes, I am quoted in that document.
I will write much more about all of this soon. Because in the end it is about the veracity of historical temperature reconstructions, something that many of you will know has preoccupied me for over a decade, for almost as long as it has preoccupied Mark Steyn.
I had the pleasure of giving the vote of thanks for Mark Steyn when he was in Brisbane in February 2016. He gave a similar speech in Melbourne, as part of the same tour sponsored by the IPA. You can listen to his Melbourne IPA speech here:
***** I apologise for having so many ‘parts’ to different blog series open at the moment. It is my intension that this series about Steyn v Mann will collide with my ARC series. But I’m still working on all of that: ARC part 5, and Kuranda part 2. I’m always thinking, and checking, to the extent I can already anticipate how if Mark Steyn is successful at making this trial about climate change, I will also be able to update you on my ongoing FOI saga with the bureau over the parallel data. You see I do have something in common with Mark Steyn, and it is not that I can sing (I can’t sing, Mark can sing), it is that we both care deeply about historical temperature reconstructions. We both want them to be accurate.
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