Tag: Rand Simberg

The Hockey Stick Trial: Science Dies in a DC Courtroom

“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.”

From The RealClearEnergy

By Rupert Darwall

“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.

Jury finds in favor of Michael Mann in defamation lawsuit against Mark Steyn, Rand Simberg

The jury deliberated for close to a full day before reaching its decision.

The Trial of George Jacobs, 5th August 1692, 1855 (oil on canvas)

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://tnc.news/2024/02/08/mann-defamation-lawsuit-steyn-simberg2


By Andrew Lawton

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.

Mann vs. Steyn: A Disgrace to the Profession – Climate Change Roundtable #97

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.

Nothing Can Save ‘Climate Science’, Not Now

Mark Steyn to pay punitive damages of US $1,000,000.  The wicked have won.

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

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.

  1. 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..

  1. 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.

Climate Change on Trial. My Reflections, My Part 4

Most importantly there is opportunity to call it out now, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

I’ve received a text message from Ann McElhinney, Unreported Story Society, it reads:

Hello Old Friend, we’re here in [Washington] DC, you’ve been mentioned fondly by Mark [Steyn] in the court and I was remembering your kindness to us …

Ann is in DC, with her partner Phelim McAleer, covering Michael Mann’s defamation trial against Mark Steyn; because Mark called the unfortunate hockey stick chart, that has become the cross of climate change delusion, a fraud.    Yes. A fraud.

While it may have been difficult for Conservative politicians, and others, to call it out as such (as fraud) at the time this nonsense historical temperature reconstruction was first published – in the journal Nature back in 1998.  There was an opportunity to do exactly this after the publication of emails between leading climate scientists as part of the Climategate saga.  Most importantly there is opportunity to call it out now, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.

FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the ‘whistle blower’ likes to calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009.

In an email sometime later he explained:

The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.

By circus he is referring to a get together of governments from around the world, under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  He wanted to let it be known that leading climate scientists at that very meeting, knew that key supporting evidence was unreliable; that the famous hockey stick chart had been created by using Mike’s trick.

Indeed, by providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded (with your taxes) global warming industry.

An interpretation of the chart, and what this data looks like before and after Michael Mann’s trick is applied, was shown in court, in Washington DC last week.   As part of the defence of Mark Steyn’s co-accused, Rand Simberg.

It stars Prof. Richard Muller from UC Berkely explaining to his students why Michael Mann used the ‘apple and banana’ combination and how deceitful it is to boot.  You can watch the YouTube here:

Muller does not show or refer to apples and bananas.  But Mark Steyn does quote me in his 2015 book using this analogy with reference to the hockey stick chart.

Ann and Phelim are in DC to support Mark, specifically they have started a new podcast series, it is entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’ – all about this trial, which is very much focused on the hockey stick of climate science and its veracity, or lack of.

Their podcast is working its way up the charts in the science category, at #2 in the UK.

Ann and I both consider this rather an achievement, especially given it questions so much that the English King believes so hard in, that it suggests he would do well to be less ‘certain’ about the veracity of the hockey stick.

I’m paraphrasing the first witness for the defence, Abraham Wyner, a statistician who spent some time explaining the concept of ‘uncertainty’ along with ‘p hacking’.

As Ann says in their most recent episode, they do more than feed us popcorn, at this circus, we even get to learn something about statistics.

So, given most of my readers are interested in politics and science, consider clicking across, subscribe, and leave a review, after you have listened to some episodes.  They are all good, and different.

I always like the last episode that I listened to best, which is Episode 11, Mann & [Judith] Curry.  And I look forward to the next one, including to hear the banter between Ann and Phelim.

There is lot of nastiness in each episode not between my friends, but from the climate scientists and I’m finding it cathartic.

The extent to which mainstream climate scientists block the work of those they disagree with, and then ridicule them.   That is something that needs to be publicly acknowledged, least this sad situation continues forever, or more likely until everyone shuts up and bows down to the authority of Michael Mann and the IPCC or those who only marginally disagree with them, including Judith Curry.  Yes.  Curry.  While a witness for Simberg, and a good one at that, in the end Curry is part of the problem, she and her electric car.

We know from the Climategate emails that there was terrible abuse of process through the 1990s.  I have firsthand experience of it still happening twenty years later.

Getting the dozen or so papers published on our new technique for better rainfall forecasts using artificial intelligence (AI) to mine historical data for climate cycles and patterns was not easy.  But John Abbot and I persisted, and now this research is part of the official record in so much as it has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed journals in climate science.

Every time we tried to publish on temperatures, it was an ordeal.  We got two minor publications through, and I will eventually triumph with Rutherglen, Darwin, and Mildura.  The unpublished Mildura manuscripts include lots and lots of temperature data that the Bureau, well they now claim none of this data exists.

Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers.  This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward.  This is a key point that mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike are so far mostly ignoring.  It has not been mentioned in this trial.   I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series, entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’.

You will perhaps be more sympathetic to what I have had to endure, after you hear the extent of the shenanigan by way of the evidence in the Mark Steyn versus Michael Mann trial.   When I eventually get the Mildura data published, and when I eventually get to tell my story, you might believe me because it is all just an extension of the continuing malfeasance within mainstream climate science, as unbelievable as it will all seem.  Indeed, sometimes fact is more unbelievable than fiction.

After John Abbot and I did get our second research paper concerning temperatures and artificial intelligence (AI) – demonstrating how AI can be used to distinguish natural versus human-caused climate change – published by the Elsevier journal, GeoResJ back in 2017 (vol 14), Gavin Schmidt (a mate of Michael Mann’s) launched an attack including to get this paper retracted.

Schmidt worked hard, including at Twitter. Alas, these few years later and our paper is still standing, so to speak, which is more than what Mark Steyn can do at the moment, and the journal that published us has since been closed down.   I am sorry that Mark Steyn has had three heart attacks this last year and is now defending himself and from a wheel chair.  I am sorry that the journal GeoResJ no longer publishes real science, because it can no longer publish anything.

There should be much more acknowledgment of the toll all of this can take on individuals, on the foot soldiers in this war against what Mr FOIA referred to as the ‘hole digging and filling in’.

I have explained the significance of our very technical research as published in volume 14 of GeoResJ in an article for The Spectator online. The late Christian Kerr told me at the time it was their most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.

You can still read the piece at The Spectator online, entitled ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here’.   The Spectator still exists as a publication, that is something I am also grateful for.   Thank you Rowan Dean for all your efforts.

A longer defence of our GeoResJ paper, that Schmidt attempted to have destroyed, is at Climatelab.com, the website for my company ClimateLab Pty Ltd..

With this new podcast series produced by Ann and Phelim entitled ‘Climate change on trial’, as I listen along, I know that this is being broadcast publicly: that the ‘whole world’ is hearing how brazen and nasty mainstream climate scientists can be.  And I’m feeling a burden lifted, even if much of it is ugly.   Sharing the ugly can somehow make it less personal, any good therapist will affirm that as truth.

I have often been told, by those who could better support my work with John Abbot, that it is all very technical and difficult to understand.  Even that I am not a very good communicator, and so they promote the work of Judith Curry instead, even though she is just rehashing the problems we already known about with General Circulation Models. They just rehash what we already know to be hopeless, rather than attempting to understand the solution by way of a new tool, that John Abbot and I are offering.

It was in 2015 that Mark Steyn published ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ that sets out in very plain English – Mark is not a scientist but rather a radio and television presenter, and expert on the history of musical theatre – how absurd a centre piece of one of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports really is.  Of course, I’m back referring to the hockey stick now.

We need to abandon this absurd historical reconstruction, along with General Circulation Models, if are to ever understand climate change and move to better systems for forecasting droughts and floods.

Steyn quotes me on page 55 of his 2015 book, and a witness in the trial has made the very same observation.  Dr Abraham Wyner a statistician from the University of Pennsylvania explains that the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ is not of the same stuff as the handle of this infamous temperature reconstruction.

Mark Steyn thought my explanation very clear.  Quoting from my blog, he wrote back in 2015, she found Mann’s famous graph an ‘unlikely proposition’.  In 2013, I suggested it was analogous to ‘sticking an apple on the end of a banana’.

I began these scribbles with mention of a text I got from Ann, and the word kindness.

You can show your kindness in a very practical way by clicking across to their donation page.  Send them some money, as a show of appreciation for all their efforts so far.

Show your kindness to Mark Steyn and also Ann and Phelim by making a Donation, LINK HERE.

POSTSCRIPT

It was a long time ago, 2006, that I travelled with Ann and Phelim, helping to promote their first documentary film, ‘Mine Your Own Business’.  That was after I raised a good amount of money to bring them to Australia, and successfully booked their film into theatres in Hobart, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.   I really wanted them to be well supported, that is the kindness Ann remembers.

And as Phelim McAleer explained during that tour:

The film [Mine Your Own Business], in its essence, is not really at all a story about mining, but rather, it is a story about human rights. The human right to a job, the human right to have your children educated, the human right to see your child reach their first birthday.

It is my very favourite film of all times – about the human experience, and totally politically incorrect.   In that regard, it is much like this Mark Steyn defamation trial.

At the time I was covering a trial in Indonesia, that I wrote about for the IPA Review, it was about Richard Ness.

Against the odds, Ness won in what was the longest running criminal trial in Indonesia.   Here’s hoping that Mark Steyn wins.  It could be all over very soon.

Richard Ness won his trial in an Indonesia Court. And then did something very brave, flanked by his two sons he walked out the front of the court house and down a street lined by angry protesters. I shall always remember his determination, and also the bravery of his two sons. Not to forget that the Indonesian Judges hearing the trial made their decisions based on the available evidence, defying the politics.

Mann vs. Steyn: Climate Trial of the Century Week 3 – Guest: Ann McElhinney

On episode 96 of Climate Change Roundtable, special guest Ann McElhinney joins The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely to break down the latest bombshell moments of the trial. We are sure to mention the devastating testimony on Thursday of renowned statistician Abraham Wyner who exposed Mann’s hockey stick to be the fraud Steyn and Simberg (and many others) say it is.

In the third week of the defamation trial in which climate “hockey stick” inventor Michael Mann is suing Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, Mann rested his case. And now the defense has begun to make its devastating case against the nasty serial litigator in the Climate Trial of the Century. The hockey stick itself is being broken into pieces in public.

On episode 96 of Climate Change Roundtable, special guest Ann McElhinney joins The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely to break down the latest bombshell moments of the trial. We are sure to mention the devastating testimony on Thursday of renowned statistician Abraham Wyner who exposed Mann’s hockey stick to be the fraud Steyn and Simberg (and many others) say it is.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) to get caught up on the trial and join the chat to ask questions of your own.

Our panel delves into the claim by the COP28 President, who said there is ‘no science’ behind demands for the phase-out of fossil fuels and that doing so would take the world “back into caves.”

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Some Notes On The Trial Of Mann v. Steyn

Way back in October 2012, climate alarmist and activist Michael Mann brought a libel suit against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg for allegedly defamatory blog posts that the two had written a few months previously.

From MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

Way back in October 2012, climate alarmist and activist Michael Mann brought a libel suit against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg for allegedly defamatory blog posts that the two had written a few months previously. The case has gone through an incredible history of procedural twists and turns since then, a few of which I have covered in prior blog posts, for example here on March 20, 2014, and here on March 26, 2021. The trial finally started on January 16.

Probably most readers here are familiar with the case to at least some degree, and many may even be following the trial. (The court has a live feed available to the public. Follow this link at WattsUpWithThat if you want to tune in during the coming week.). I have watched some substantial chunks of the trial during its first two weeks.

Mann is best known as the creator of the famous “Hockey Stick” graph, purporting to be a world temperature reconstruction of the past thousand or so years, with essentially level temperatures until the 20th century, and then sharply rising temperatures in the 20th century era of human use of fossil fuels. Mann published versions of the figure in Nature magazine, originally in 1998; and the UN’s IPCC quickly (in 2001) seized on the Hockey Stick as its iconic demonstration that human use of fossil fuels was causing global warming. In the blog posts that are the subject of the case, Steyn and Simberg called Mann’s graph false and deceptive. (Steyn referred to Mann’s figure as “the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey stick’ graph” while Simberg called out “[Mann’s] and others’ hockey stick deceptions.”) (Note: in multiple prior blog posts, I have also called Mann’s Hockey Stick graph fraudulent, for example here in August 2019.)

Truth is an absolute defense in a libel case, and Steyn has vowed to prove that his blog post was true. That would then mean that the Hockey Stick graph was indeed fraudulent. Many are therefore referring to this spectacle as “the Hockey Stick on trial.” And the Hockey Stick very much is on trial, at least as one of the issues in the case. However, if you have watched some of the proceedings — seven days’ worth so far — you are likely getting quite frustrated with how little the actual truth or falsity of the graph itself figures into the matter.

During most of the second week of trial, Michael Mann himself has been on the witness stand. He began by giving unenlightening and largely conclusory testimony that his Hockey Stick graph was not fraudulent. Then on Wednesday and Thursday he was under cross-examination, initially by a lawyer for Rand Simberg (Victoria Weatherford of Baker Hostetler). Steyn (who is doing his own cross-examination of witnesses) only got to start his cross after lunch on Thursday, and he was just reaching the issues of the Hockey Stick graph when 4:30 came and the trial adjourned for the weekend.

So what have they been talking about all that time without ever getting to the Hockey Stick? The answer is that there are plenty of other issues in a trial. One thing that is always an issue is the credibility of the plaintiff. And another issue that has taken up a good deal of time has been whether Mann has suffered any damages from the alleged defamation. On the issue of damages, Mann as plaintiff bears the burden of proof.

Let’s start with Mann’s credibility. It seems that when Mann commenced the case back in 2012, he put in his Complaint that he was a recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, specifically for his work documenting the 20th century “rise in surface temperatures,” i.e., the Hockey Stick. Tony Heller at his Real Climate Science site has screenshots of portions of Mann’s original October 22, 2012 Complaint. The following is the text of paragraph 2 of the Complaint (emphasis added):

2. Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. Along with other researchers, he was one of the first to document the steady rise in surface temperatures during the 20th Century and the steep increase in measured temperatures since the 1950s. As a result of this research, Dr. Mann and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Prior to the Complaint, Mann had also posted on his website a picture of what appeared to be a certificate from the Nobel Institute documenting Mann’s receipt of the Peace Prize. Heller has a screenshot of the document from Mann’s website, although I cannot find it there today. Apologies if the picture quality is not very good:

It turns out that the upper part of that picture is the actual Nobel Institute certificate; but the lower portion, including the text reading “Presented to Michael E. Mann for contributing to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize” was not part of anything generated by the Nobel Institute. Rather, it was generated by the IPCC.

Immediately after Mann filed his Complaint, a guy named Thomas Richard of [the Washington Examiner] Examiner.com communicated with Geir Lundestad, Director of the Nobel Institute, pointing out that Mann was claiming to have received a Nobel Prize, and asking if that was accurate. Richard promptly (October 26, 2012) received a communication back from Lundestad as follows:

1) Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

2) He did not receive any personal certificate. He has taken the diploma awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and to Al Gore) and made his own text underneath this authentic-looking diploma.

3) The text underneath the diploma is entirely his own. We issued only the diploma to the IPCC as such. No individuals on the IPCC side received anything in 2007.

You can imagine how Steyn and the lawyers for Simberg are having a field day with this. In his testimony, Mann has attempted to spin this as an honest mistake — although somehow none of the other contributors to the IPCC made the same mistake of claiming that Nobel Prize was awarded personally to them. Mann has long since amended his Complaint to delete the claim that he is a Nobel Prize winner; but the original document remains in the court file of the case and cannot be made to disappear.

Then there is the issue of Mann’s many written acknowledgements thanking one Graham Spanier. Steyn spent most of Thursday afternoon confronting Mann on this issue.

If you don’t recognize Spanier’s name, here is some background. Graham Spanier became President of Penn State University in 1995, and was the President there when Mann was hired in 2005. In late 2009 there was a leak from the University of East Anglia in England of a large trove of emails in which Mann was a principal participant. The emails showed a close-knit group of prominent climate scientists engaging in what would appear from the face of the emails to be prima facie scientific misconduct — working to suppress all dissent from climate orthodoxy, controlling the peer review process in the main journals, and even discussing alterations of data in the context of the Hockey Stick graph itself. This collection of leaked emails came to be known as the “ClimateGate emails.”

Penn State’s administration, under Spanier, sprang into action to attempt to clear Mann. By February 2010, Penn State had stated that it found no evidence to support accusations against Mann; and on July 1, 2010 a special committee working under Spanier issued at report purporting to exonerate Mann of all wrongdoing.

Unfortunately for Mann, his scandal at Penn State took place contemporaneously with another scandal, also during the presidency of Spanier — that of long-time assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The Sandusky scandal became public in November 2011, upon Sandusky being indicted on 52 counts of child molestation that had occurred from 1994 to 2009. Sandusky, you will probably recall, had been an assistant football coach to long-time Penn State icon and hero Joe Paterno. Senior administrators at Penn State, including Spanier, had long known about accusations against Sandusky, and had been active participants in covering them up. After the November 2011 indictment, ex-FBI director Louis Freeh was brought in to do a full investigation of what had happened at Penn State, and he issued a scathing Report in July 2012, by which time Spanier had been forced to resign. Freeh’s Report was indeed the immediate impetus for the Simberg and Steyn blog posts that are the subject of the Mann v. Steyn lawsuit. From Steyn’s post:

[W]hen the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to “investigate” Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing.

Over the years since 2012, things have gotten steadily worse for Spanier. First he was forced to resign as President. Then he himself was indicted for obstruction of justice and other charges. Then he was facing trial. Then he was tried and convicted. And then he served a 60-day prison sentence.

Through all this, Michael Mann has written about one book about every 2 to 3 years. And each of them has thanked Graham Spanier in the acknowledgements. That may have been excusable back in 2012, when Spanier had just been accused of misconduct, but not yet indicted or convicted himself. But Steyn showed that Mann had continued to acknowledge Spanier through each stage of the process, including most recently in a book published in 2023.

Meanwhile, Ms. Weatherford devoted most of her cross to issues of damages. You might think that this would be rather dry stuff, and it is, but Mann never ceases to astonish with his audacity. Most notably, Mann’s principal theory of damages today appears to be that as a result of the claimed defamation, and the harm to his reputation, he has lost out on various government grants that he otherwise would have received. But it turns out that during the discovery process in the case Simberg’s lawyers demanded from Mann a list of all grants that he claimed he lost as a result of the defamation. Mann responded by objecting, saying that the information requested was “irrelevant to any issue in the case,” and not listing a single grant allegedly lost. Ms. Weatherford confronted Mann with his answers and made him acknowledge his signature under oath at the end of the document. Mann’s excuse for this answer was that his lawyers had advised him to give this response. How Mann can claim damages from lost grants after giving this answer, I have no idea.

So as I said earlier, when the trial adjourned at 4:30 on Thursday, Steyn had just begun his cross-examination on the subject of the Hockey Stick chart itself. That will now start up at 9:30 on Monday morning, and promises to be quite entertaining. For a preview of what might get covered, here is my blog post on the case from March 29, 2021, on the occasion of one of the many substantive motions briefed in the case. Mark Steyn had submitted a brief on March 3, outlining some of the evidence he had accumulated, much from the ClimateGate emails, as to the fraudulence of the Hockey Stick. Here, via my post, is an excerpt from that brief:

The [Hockey Stick graph as published in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, in a portion written by lead author Mann] omitted tree ring proxy data collected by climate scientist Keith Briffa that showed a decline in temperatures after 1960, a message inconsistent with the prized hockey stick shape. . . . The IPCC TAR did not disclose the deletion of this data. . . . As lead author, Mann decided to omit the Briffa data without the input of his other lead authors.. . . Mann’s own collaborators cautioned him against the deletion. IPCC TAR Coordinating Lead Author Chris Folland wrote to Mann that Briffa’s data “contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly.”. . . Briffa himself urged Mann not to succumb to “pressure to present a nice tidy story” by “ignor[ing]” his post-1960 results. . . . Mann agreed with them on the merits but bemoaned the data’s political impact: “[I]f we show Keith’s series . . . skeptics [will] have a field day.” . . . To prevent a “skeptics’ field day,” he chose to delete the data.

So we await the continuation of Steyn’s cross on Monday morning.

UPDATES/CORRECTIONS, January 29, 2024:

(1) Several commenters point out that the prison term to which Graham Spanier was sentenced was only 60 days. I have checked, and that is correct. So it was incorrect to say that Spanier got a “long” prison sentence, or to imply that he is still there.

(2) I have a friend who has served on one of the IPCC working groups. (Yes, I know that’s crazy.) He informs me that the IPCC presented him with a document thanking him for his contribution to the IPCC’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the document being much in the format of the one pictured above as to Mann. So it appears that the IPCC, rather than Mann, is the entity that created this document. However, it remains false for Mann to claim that he won the Nobel Prize.

I have corrected these matters above in my post.