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.
Because sometimes, the science isn’t settled—but the bill is due.
After more than a decade of legal proceedings, climate scientist and courtroom hobbyist Dr. Michael E. Mann has been ordered to pay $530,000+ in legal fees to National Review and Mark Steyn.
Now, Dr. Mann faces his greatest existential threat yet—not rising temperatures, but rising legal bills.
It’s time to Help a Mann Out.
Fundraiser Goals
$531,000 — Covers court-mandated payments and leaves just enough left over to commission a new graph.
$750,000 — Includes overhead, paper shredding, and rebranding the phrase “academic integrity.”
$1,000,000 — Unlocks a new round of litigation and enough surplus for a small Himalayan glacier-naming ceremony.
Donation Tiers
$100 — The Summary Judgment Tier
Receive a thank-you email generated by a neural network trained on RealClimate blog posts.
Includes access to a redacted copy of the amicus brief you weren’t allowed to read.
$1,000 — The Discovery Phase
Includes all previous perks.
Comes with an official Michael E. Mann Action Figure — complete with:
Hockey stick (nonfunctioning),
Courtroom suit (non-removable),
Red phone labeled “LAWYER HOTLINE,”
Slice of tree ring proxy data for conversation-starting decor.
Warning: Action figure may litigate.
$5,000 — The Offset Package
All previous perks, plus:
A printed certificate indicating you’ve offset the carbon footprint of one legal brief.
Credits backed by post-modern climate ethics and four peer-reviewed feelings.
$10,000 — The Non-Interactive Dinner Experience
All previous perks.
A 45-minute Skype dinner with Dr. Mann.
Rules:
You may not ask questions.
You must nod politely.
All dialogue must be pre-approved by a university communications officer.
Shipping & Handling
The action figure will be shipped in packaging designed to resemble a congressional subpoena.
Carbon credits will be sent by email (please print them to make them real).
Legal Disclaimer
“Help a Mann Out” is a parody campaign. Donations are not tax deductible, unless your accountant also believes CO₂ causes inflation. Michael E. Mann is not affiliated with this fundraiser and likely has his lawyer on speed dial already.
Don’t delay. Give today. And remember—when the temperature graph goes up, the legal defense fund must too.
Today, we raise a cheer for reason, justice, and the unyielding spirit of free expression! Today, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia delivered a resounding blow to overreach in the long-running defamation lawsuit brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against conservative commentator Mark Steyn.
Today, we raise a cheer for reason, justice, and the unyielding spirit of free expression! Today, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia delivered a resounding blow to overreach in the long-running defamation lawsuit brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against conservative commentator Mark Steyn. In a Final Judgment Order, Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. reduced Steyn’s punitive damages from an astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000—vindicating Steyn, protecting open debate, and sending a powerful message about the limits of legal bullying.
This decision marks a triumphant turn in a 12-year legal saga that began with Steyn’s 2012 blog post criticizing Mann’s iconic “hockey stick” graph, a cornerstone of climate change narratives. Back in February 2024, a D.C. jury awarded Mann a symbolic $1 in compensatory damages and slapped Steyn with a jaw-dropping $1 million in punitive damages, alongside a similar $1,000 penalty for Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The awards, disproportionate and chilling, threatened to silence critics of Mann’s work and set a dangerous precedent for free speech.
But justice has prevailed! The court’s ruling not only slashes Steyn’s punitive damages to a reasonable $5,000 but also declares the original $1 million award unconstitutional—too excessive, too punitive, and out of step with the actual harm (or lack thereof) Mann suffered. This isn’t just a win for Steyn; it’s a victory for every skeptic, scientist, and citizen who dares to question orthodoxy in the public square. The $5,000 figure, aligned with the jury’s nominal $1 compensatory award, restores proportion and reaffirms that robust debate—however sharp—remains protected under the First Amendment.
Adding to the celebration, Mann has been ordered to pay over $500,000 in legal costs to National Review, Steyn’s co-defendant in the case. This award, rooted in D.C.’s Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law, recognizes the frivolous nature of Mann’s decade-long legal crusade against those who challenged his research.
For years, skeptics have watched this case with bated breath, fearing it could muzzle honest inquiry into climate science. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, central to his reputation, has long been a lightning rod—challenged by statisticians, researchers, and commentators like Steyn for its methodological flaws and data handling. Steyn’s post, while biting, was an opinion, not a factual falsehood, and the jury’s initial $1 million penalty seemed less about justice and more about punishing dissent. Today’s ruling overturns that injustice, ensuring that critics of public figures like Mann can speak without fear of financial ruin.
This moment isn’t just about numbers—it’s about principle. The reduction to $5,000 sends a clear signal: courts won’t tolerate weaponizing defamation lawsuits to silence debate. It’s a rebuke to Mann’s “lawfare” tactics, which have drained resources from Steyn, National Review, and CEI while raising millions in crowdfunding from supporters rallying for free speech. Now, those supporters can celebrate a hard-fought victory, knowing their voices helped tip the scales.
Steyn himself has weathered this storm with grit, representing himself in court and refusing to back down. His resilience, paired with the court’s wisdom, has preserved a critical space for scientific skepticism and public discourse. Meanwhile, the over $500,000 in legal costs awarded to National Review—and the potential for CEI file for and secure similar relief—underscores the absurdity of Mann’s claims and the toll they’ve taken on his opponents.
Let’s raise a glass to this triumph! The slashing of Steyn’s penalty to $5,000 isn’t just a legal correction—it’s a beacon for free speech, a shield for honest inquiry, and a reminder that truth emerges from open debate, not courtroom battles. The fight for reason continues, but today, we celebrate a monumental step forward.
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.
A right-of-center pundit is appealing a February ruling that found him liable for defaming a prominent climate scientist, and legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he may have a good chance at a successful appeal.
A right-of-center pundit is appealing a February ruling that found him liable for defaming a prominent climate scientist, and legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he may have a good chance at a successful appeal.
A Washington, D.C., jury concluded that Mark Steyn — a right-of-center political pundit who referenced a separate blog post comparing climate scientist Michael Mann to serial pedophile Jerry Sandusky for the former’s purported data manipulation in his signature 1998 “hockey stick” climate model — liable for defaming Mann. Steyn is appealing the court’s decision that he must pay Mann $1 million in punitive damages on top of $1 in compensatory damages, and legal experts told the DCNF that his case may be strong enough to win on appeal.
“Michael Mann’s counsel did something you’re not supposed to do. He invited the jury to send a message that these attacks on scientists have to stop and the jury, being a D.C. jury, decided they were going to send that message. Now, that’s explicitly forbidden, both in the District of Columbia and in the United States at large,” Steyn told the DCNF. “You’re supposed to be trying ‘Fred Smith.’ He’s the guy in the dock. You’re not sending a message to millions of other potential ‘Fred Smiths’ out there. But that’s what they did.” (RELATED: Mark Steyn’s Case Against Climategate Scientist Is Taking So Long A Key Witness Died)
Beyond Steyn’s contention that Mann’s counsel “invited the jury to send a message” to critics of consensus positions on hot-button issues like climate change, legal experts told the DCNF that the ratio of compensatory and punitive damages could open the door for a favorable outcome for Steyn’s appeal.
“It appears to me that Steyn has strong arguments that the punitive damages awarded are excessive under current law, particularly under Supreme Court decisions invalidating exorbitant punitive damage awards that are disproportionate to the actual damages suffered by the plaintiff,” Jonathan Adler, the director of Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s environmental law center, told the DCNF. “By this standard, a one-million-to-one ratio between punitive and compensatory damages would appear to be quite problematic.”
“That said, there are some complicating factors. On the one hand, punitive damages will always appear disproportionate in which compensatory damages are nominal. On the other hand, the arguments against disproportionate punitive damages would seem to be augmented by the First Amendment concerns,” Adler continued. “If, as the jury concluded, Mann suffered no measurable harm from what Steyn wrote, the primary function of the punitive damage award is to discourage potentially inflammatory commentary about matters of public concern, and that raises serious First Amendment problems.”
Anthony Fargo, the director of the Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies at Indiana University, agreed with Adler’s assessment of the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.
“The appellate court is likely to look at this thing that jumps out at me here is the punitive damage award. I think an appellate court would be reluctant to second guess the jury as far as its findings of fact,” Fargo told the DCNF. “What they will probably raise an eyebrow at is the disproportionate amount of the punitive damage award as compared to the compensatory damage award.” (RELATED: Climate Activists Want Michael Moore’s Doc Panning Green Energy Banned, Say It’s Chock Full Of Misinformation)
Usually one hope to make money from a book. Steyn’s probably cost him a million dollars: https://t.co/ZQMIl774zx
The “hockey stick” model was the result of combining several climate proxies into one model, purportedly demonstrating that global temperatures have increased drastically in the past several decades compared to the preceding centuries. Critics, including Steyn and Rand Simberg, have gone after the “hockey stick” model for many years, contending that it should not be considered credible because of its purported flaws.
“The fact that a verdict was rendered against [Steyn] when you had a statistics expert like Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania testifying that Mann engaged in ‘improper manipulation’ of data that made his signature climate model ‘misleading’ demonstrates that the jury ignored the legal principle that the truth is a defense to any defamation claim,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “From a legal standpoint, Steyn should have the ability to appeal on the basis that the jury ignored his defense that his criticisms that Mann had manipulated data were the truth, and therefore the jury committed a grievous legal error when it found against him.”
National Review’s editors wrote Wednesday that the outlet — which Mann also sued before a court order led to the outlet being dropped from the suit — is looking to “recover more than a million of the dollars that we have lost defending [its] unalienable right to free speech” from Mann. Before National Review was dropped from the suit, Mann wrote in emails that the outlet is a “filthy organization” and a “threat to our children,” according to the outlet.
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“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.”
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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.
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.
A Washington, D.C. jury has found that conservative writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg defamed climate scientist Michael Mann.
The jury deliberated for close to a full day before reaching its decision.
At issue were two blog posts, one by Steyn and one by Simberg, comparing the investigation into alleged academic misconduct by Mann, then a Penn State professor, to Penn State’s handling of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s former head of athletics who raped and molested children.
“If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?” Steyn wrote in his post, which quoted Simberg’s.
The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each plaintiff. It also awarded $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn.
The jury found that the statements at issue were defamatory and published with reckless disregard for the truth. They also found that Mann suffered actual injury from the statements’ publication.
Mann sued Steyn and Simberg, along with their respective publishers National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Group in 2012, claiming the posts damaged his reputation as a climate scientist.
In a trial that stretched on for three-and-a-half weeks, Mann claimed he felt like a pariah in his community, noting he once received a dirty look from someone in a grocery store. He said he lost significant grant funding after the blog posts were published, but was not able to produce any evidence linking this to the posts.
Steyn and Simberg argued that Mann’s stature, earnings and reputation have only improved since 2012, meaning that even if he had been defamed, he had suffered no damages, which the plaintiff in a defamation suit must prove.
On episode 97 of Climate Change Roundtable, The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely break down what happened in the trial, how this criminally unjust jury decision came to be, and what this means for the First Amendment rights of anyone who questions alarmist dogma in public.
The Climate Trial of the Century is over, and the result is an absolutely travesty of justice. A D.C. jury ruled yesterday that Mark Steyn must pay $1 in compensatory damages and an absurd $1 million in punitive damages to climate media star Michael Mann for his claimed defamation. His co-defendant, Rand Simberg, was socked with paying $1 in compensatory damages, but only $1,000 in punitive damages.
We followed the trial every day for nearly four weeks, and we can tell you that it was a disgrace to the professions in our legal system, the “profession” of juries to administer justice, and the professions in alarmist climate science. In short, the whole thing was a disgrace.
On episode 97 of Climate Change Roundtable, The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely break down what happened in the trial, how this criminally unjust jury decision came to be, and what this means for the First Amendment rights of anyone who questions alarmist dogma in public.
Mark Steyn to pay punitive damages of US $1,000,000. The wicked have won.
Michael Mann set out to sue a high-profile conservative magazine, The National Review, Inc., and a much-despised right wing think tank, The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), for questioning the cross of climate change denial, the infamous hockey stick graph.
After 12 years, and probably much more than $12 millions dollars in legal expenses, Professor Mann has never been sent a bill. Others pick up this tab – Mann’s legal expenses – just as they might pay the tab, he has running at a bar.
That is a long time to keep the tab running, and there are some very rich people with very deep pockets in this world. And those people are mostly on the side of virtue, when it comes to issues of ‘climate science’, as it is called.
A jury in the Washington DC Supreme Court has ruled in their favour. And the damages are being awarded against the men who wrote the articles suggesting the hockey stick chart is a fraud. The National Review, Inc. and the CEI, the publishers they stepped away from this fight, leaving the foot soldiers holding ‘the baby’, so to speak.
The compensatory damages are US$1 from each of Mark Steyn who wrote the article that was published by the National Review and Rand Simberg who wrote the article published at the CEI blog.
The punitive damages are $1,000,000 for Mark Steyn and $1,000 for Rand Simberg. Though Steyn was actually quoting Simberg.
Punitive damages, to be paid to Michael Mann are punishment.
Doesn’t everyone believe in catastrophic human caused climate change. Is that what the jury were thinking?
They have thrown the book at Mark Steyn, with three times the force, perhaps because Mark chose to represent himself.
Perhaps because Mark Steyn has not been to university. Perhaps because Mark Steyn is the example that needs to be set.
Dr. Michael Mann qualifications:
Education: A.B. applied mathematics and physics (1989), MS physics (1991), MPhil physics (1991), MPhil geology (1993), PhD geology & geophysics (1998). Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, Yale University
Academic career: tenure-track assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia; associate professor in the department of meteorology Pennsylvania State University; Director of PSU Earth System Science Center; full professor in 2009; Distinguished Professor of Meteorology. Lead author on the IPCC Third Assessment Report
Awards: American Geophysical Union Fellow (2012); Hans Oeschger Medal (2012); Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), etc. etc..
Mark Steyn qualifications:
Went to school.
The above information as it pertains to Mann’s expertise and qualifications versus’ Steyn’s is, as far as I know true, and it is quoted from a guest post by Richard Law, at Matt Briggs’ blog.
How dare Steyn a well-read commentator and musician, question Mann the almost noble laureate, and much respected scientist.
Is Steyn saying the king has no clothes.
I guess, looking on the bright side, Steyn comes away with his head. Simberg too. In the olden days in England, that would not have been the case, they would have been beheaded for being on the wrong side of the mob and the King.
Judith Curry tweeted ‘a huge blow for freedom of speech’. No. This was always a trial about ‘climate science’. It is also a huge blow for the integrity of historical temperature reconstructions.
Well may we say God bless Mark Steyn because nothing will save the climate scientists. Not now.
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This is part 5 of ‘Men at War’, you can read part 4, part 3, part 2 and part 1, at the respective links. And you can listen to the podcast series for much more background, the series by investigative journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’.
I will be writing much more about all of this, particularly the interesting issue of statistical uncertainty that was discussed by one of the expert witnesses, Professor Abraham Wyner. I will be discussing this issue as it applies to proxy temperature records but also the more recent and shorter instrumental record. I will also be discussing it as it relates to assessments of coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef, and whether it is even possible to apply an uncertainty value to categorical data. If you would like to follow along, please subscribe for my irregular email updates.
Arctic sea ice continued its stonking recovery last month, recording its 24th highest level in the 45-year modern satellite record. As reported previously in the Daily Sceptic, the ice climbed to a 21-year high on January 8th. Good news, of course, for ice fans and polar bears, but frankly a bit of a disaster if you are forecasting future summer swimming galas at the North Pole to promote a collectivist Net Zero agenda.
Arctic sea ice continued its stonking recovery last month, recording its 24th highest level in the 45-year modern satellite record. As reported previously in the Daily Sceptic, the ice climbed to a 21-year high on January 8th. Good news, of course, for ice fans and polar bears, but frankly a bit of a disaster if you are forecasting future summer swimming galas at the North Pole to promote a collectivist Net Zero agenda. Live by the sword, die by the sword – if you cherry-pick the scientific record to state the climate is collapsing, it might be thought you have some explaining to do when the trend reverts to the norm. Just ask coral alarmists about two years of record growth on the Great Barrier Reef. Sadly, explanations there are none, just a deafening, stunned silence.
Arctic sea ice has long been a poster scare for climate Armageddon. But science tells us that it is cyclical and is heavily influenced by ocean currents and atmospheric heat exchanges. It would appear that these chaotic changes are beyond the ability of any computer to process, although a large, well-funded model industry begs to differ. The recovery in Arctic sea ice has been steady if slow and this has enabled the alarums to hang on in the mainstream headlines. Of course it could go into reverse, nobody really knows, least of all Sir David Attenborough who told BBC viewers in 2022 that the summer ice could all be gone by 2035. He relied, needless to say, on a computer model.
Most mainstream climate journalists just print what they are told without looking too closely at the source of the information. The U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) is a source of interpretation for trends in polar ice, but care needs to be taken when reading its often gloomy monthly summaries. According to the NSIDC, January sea ice growth was “lower than average” throughout most of the month. It headlined its report: ‘Nothing swift about January sea ice.’ Other interpretations are available. Consider the graph below tracking the ice extent for January over the satellite record.
Statisticians can argue over when the sea ice started to recover but there has not been much decline going back to around 2007. In this case January shows a similar trend to that seen in September, the month with the lowest sea ice extent. A moving average line from around the middle of the last decade would show an obvious increase. But the NSIDC reproduces this graph for every individual month and year with a downward linear trend from 1979, a noted high point for recent sea ice. The graph is widely used on social media to counter any suggestion that the ice is recovering.
Note also that the NSIDC claims the January growth extent was “below average”. Well it depends on what average you are using. The NSIDC uses a comparative average from 1981-2010, despite a more recent decade of data being available. It is not hard to see why it prefers 1981-2010 since it includes the higher levels of the 1980s and excludes the lower levels of the 2010s. Taking a 1991-2020 average would likely lead to many more ‘above average’ observations. Data before 1979 is not as accurate, but levels going back to the 1950s suggest much lower sea ice extents. Perish the thought that comparisons should be made with these data or observations made about an obvious cyclical trend seen here and in the historical record going back to the early 1800s.
The NSIDC can spin its figures as much as it likes knowing that in the era of ‘settled’ climate science it is unlikely to be widely challenged. On a more serious note, this unwillingness to question perceived authority and engage in the scientific process gave us Michael E. Mann’s infamous 1998 ‘hockey stick’ graph. This purported to show declining temperatures for 1,000 years followed by a sharp recent uptick caused by human-caused burning of hydrocarbons. The unquestioning acceptance in mainstream media, science and politics can be said to have removed the concept of natural climate variability for a generation and put many Western countries on the road to Net Zero insanity. Now the hockey stick is centre stage in a Washington D.C. libel trial brought by Mann complaining that the journalist Mark Steyn branded his work a fraud. By some accounts, the hockey stick does not seem to be having a great time in the dock.
Professor Abraham Wyner is a distinguished statistician at Mann’s own University of Pennsylvania. Asked on the court stand whether Mann’s hockey stick used manipulative techniques, he replied “yes”. He suggested it was possible that if you knew where you wanted to get to, you can lead yourself into a conclusion different from someone who walked down a different set of paths.
In earlier court documents, Mann claimed wrongly that he was a Nobel laureate, a fact noted during the trial. His hockey stick abolished the Medieval Warming Period, while subsequent leaked Climategate emails referred to “Mike Nature Trick”. This was a practice of using the most convenient proxy or temperature measurements to fit the desired narrative.
In the course of his testimony, Dr. Wyner made comments that strike at the heart of so much that is wrong with the ‘settled’ science pronouncements that seemingly cannot be disputed or even discussed.
And so what happens is, and what is happening today in statistical analysis… we’re in a crisis. A crisis of trust and replication because so many results that were thought to be true turned out not to be true and correct have now gone back and looked at or attempted to be replicated and they didn’t work. Lots of things we thought were true turned out not to be true. It’s a crisis. A problem [my colleague] has identified is due to really bad statistical sets of methods that allow you to get away with choices that would produce a very different result if you did it differently.
What the last two decades or so have shown us is that activists will use any weather outlier or natural disaster to claim the climate is collapsing, or the Earth is “boiling” in the odd universe occupied by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Statistics are bent to fit the desired narrative whether it be natural waxing and waning of ice levels or typhoon jets landing near a measuring device showing a 60-second 40.3°C temperature blip ‘record’ at RAF Coningsby. Net Zero is starting to unravel thread by thread, and it is time the spotlight was amped up to maximum to shine a light on all the dodgy science used to promote this horrendous reset of human society.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
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