Note: Reproduction of demonstratives and evidence exhibits are prohibited by the Court. So please accept our apologies in advance.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for agreeing to serve for this trial. It is likely to be long. But for my part, I shall try to make it no longer than necessary.
I'm Mark Steyn, S-T-E-Y-N, Mr. Simberg's codefendant. I apologize for being foreign, and I apologize for not standing up. I'm a Canadian on his last legs, so I have difficulty standing, but I have no difficulty standing on the truth, the truth of what I wrote, the truth about what happened at a famous American institution, and the truth about this man, the plaintiff.
To modify a famous line from an American courtroom drama, I can handle the truth.
In my world, I can write something, Mr. Simberg can write something, and Mr. Mann can write something. And you're free to read all or none and decide what weight to attach to all or none.
But in Mr. Mann's world, there's his take and everyone else has to be Hockey Sticked into submission and silence.
I'd be inclined to suggest that's a little un-American, but as I said, I'm a foreigner so it probably isn't for me to say what is or isn't American.
I would like to clarify something that Mr. Williams says, because he can play a bit fast and loose sometimes. I am not a host on Fox News. I've never had any contractual relationship with Fox News. I fell out with Rupert Murdoch about 15 years ago, so he doesn't like me. His delightful sister and his late mother like me enormously, but they're in Australia, so they're a long way away from this case. And I have not appeared on Fox News in some three years now.
The last time I was invited on [Fox], it was to discuss Andrew Cuomo not wanting to keep his dog after leaving the governor's mansion. And I thought life is too short to waste even three minutes on a cable news hit in talking about complete codswallop like that. So, with respect to my learned friend, Mr. Williams, I thought I would clear that up.
As I said, I'm in favor of a wide degree of public discourse, and you are free to choose what you respect and what you want to read and what you don't want to read. However, certain aspects – certain things are spelled out in black and white.
We heard Mr. Williams here swooning deliriously over how eminently eminent his client is. And as Ms. Weatherford was saying, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academy has, like most such bodies, a code of conduct. The code of conduct, as you can see, begins with the preamble, "The National Academy."
The National Academy of Sciences was founded by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War as an independent, nonprofit self-perpetuating honorary society as it says there. Let's zero in, if we can, on section 4 of that code of conduct. And it says that NAS members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with respect, including supervisors, colleagues, other NAS members, students, so forth, and interested members of the public. NAS members must refrain from all forms of discrimination, harassment, and bullying in their professional encounters.
The National Academy of Sciences has just described what Michael Mann does all day every day on social media, discriminating against, harassing and bullying anyone who disagrees with him: Colleagues, other NAS members, interested members of the public, as you will hear from the defense witnesses. He is one of the most vicious blowhards on Twitter, which is pretty much vicious blowhard central, and tweeting is what he does so relentlessly it doesn't appear to leave much room for any science, which may be why he hasn't applied for many grants in recent years.
Now, you have heard, as part of Mr. Williams' three worst emails [Mann] was apparently sent in by the people motivated to send him emails. And the third was, "You are like Paterno, a true loser." Joe Paterno was star football coach at Penn State University. In fact, they still love him there. They want to put his statue back up. They took it down after the Sandusky thing.
"You are like Paterno, a true loser."
That is the best they have got for how people have responded to Michael E. Mann. And Mr. Williams wants you, ladies and gentlemen, to believe that somehow getting an email saying you're a true loser is a cause of action in a lawsuit in America.
Mr. Mann says far worse things every moment of the day. He doesn't stop for public holidays. So, here's how he spent the Martin Luther King Day weekend, tweeting about one of the defense witnesses in this case, my fellow Canadian, my fellow Torontonian, Stephen McIntyre, whom you will be hearing from in a few days.
[Mann] says, "In the Hockey Stick and the climate wars, I show how Steve McIntyre played hide the Hockey Stick. There's a disturbing connection with the bad stats used to support early theories of white supremacy."
So according to Michael E. Mann, thinking his Hockey Stick is wrong makes you a white supremacist. Now, Mr. McIntyre, as you will see in the coming days, is a perfectly respectable fellow. He's been published in the same peer-reviewed journal as Mr. Mann, Geophysical Research Letters. So, at the very least, Mann is failing in his duty to the National Academy of Sciences to treat a fellow individual in the scientific enterprise, "collegially and with respect."
By the way, to assert in public, on the eve of trial, that an opposing witness is a white supremacist would, in Steve McIntyre's country, which happens to be my country, the dominion of Canada, be regarded as witness tampering and what we call, in Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, would be called perverting the cause of justice.
I have no idea – D.C. law is a great mystery to me in many ways, so I have no idea whether you have such a thing down here. But if you do, Mr. Mann would now be looking at a spell behind bars for that tweet. He's doing that all day long. He's essentially an activist, a tweeter, a blogger, for whom a couple of scientific papers from the end of the last century provide cover for his activism.
But in the crazy world of Michael E. Mann, a highly technical disagreement about Mann's use of principal components analysis is the equivalent of burning a cross on your lawn. This isn't a scientific argument. This is just viciously stupid name calling. And more to the point, this is how Mr. Mann carries on day in, day out, as anyone who follows his Twitter feed knows.
It's the statements at issue in this trial, all well-argued by Mr. Simberg – and Ms. Weatherford was quite right to say that, as she put it, Rand is right. Rand was right about what he wrote. But if those statements are defamatory of Michael Mann, why is Michael Mann's statement not defamatory of Stephen McIntyre?
Mr. Mann wants a world where no one can criticize him, but he can damn anyone he cares to as a white supremacist, a racist, a homophobe, whatever. This is extremely weird behavior from a scientist, as even his coauthors on the famous Hockey Stick paper, such as Dr. Bradley, have conceded over the years, which is why so many scientists around the world want nothing to do with him. He's a classic example of the guy who can dish it out but can't take it.
This is an email to Mann from one of his fellow climate chaps, D.R. Tucker. And Tucker writes to Mann, "when will this bastard go away?" That's a reference to me. In this case I'm the designated bastard. Mr. Mann is the plaintiff. I'm the bastard and Mr. Simberg is my co-bastard.
Now, if you notice, Mann doesn't really give a direct answer to that question. He just responds, "One fringe benefit of the lawsuit will be to ruin this odious excuse for a human being." That's me.
"One fringe benefit of this lawsuit will be to ruin this odious excuse for a human being," which is rather mild for a Michael Mann conversational pleasantry as the evidence will show.
But he could have told the truth. He's the plaintiff. He's suing me. I'm the defendant. And we've been here for 12 years. And so, the only reason the bastard is around at all is because the plaintiff Mann has dragged said bastard into court. His friend, Mr. Tucker, wanted me to go away in the first weeks of this case, November 2012. And speaking as the bastard in question, I would have quite liked to have gone away back then. But the going away of the designated bastard is entirely in the hands of the designated driver of this case, the plaintiff, Mr. Mann.
Mr. Williams said I wouldn't be willing to defend my words. I do. I stand on the truth of every word I wrote about Michael Mann, his fraudulent Hockey Stick and the corrupt investigative process at Penn State.
There it is. 270 words published on July 15th, 2012. And here we all are 11-1/2 years later. If you're wondering what else was happening on July the 15th, 2012, well, the Korean pop star Psy released his monster worldwide hit Gangnam Style. There he is, number 1 in over 30 countries around the world.
But a long time ago, as it will surely seem to the younger members of the jury; that takes you back to when you were in grade school. So after 12 years of delay, I still would rather be mired in Gangnam Style than Mike Mann style, which is what we're going to be in for the coming weeks.
Nevertheless, even in a case that's 12 years old, some basic judicial norms remain. Mr. Mann is the plaintiff. Mr. Simberg and I are the defendants. Therefore, it is for Mann to prosecute his case. He has the burden of proof. He has to prove, as Ms. Weatherford explained, that he has been defamed and, furthermore, that he has damages. He can't do either, as we heard in Mr. Williams' opening statement.
In the eleven and a half years since the publications at issue, he has been lofted onward and upward through the stratosphere of the American establishment. Last year, for example, the American Humanist Association named him their humanist of the year. He joined Anthony Fauci, Gloria Steinem and a select few others in that illustrious pantheon. That's a society for the irreligious, for atheists and secularists, as you can tell from their slogan: The American Humanist Association: Good without a God.
Mr. Mann certainly feels himself to be good without a God because, judging from the evidence, he regards himself as the only God he or anybody else needs, which is why, as Ms. Weatherford showed, he spends all his days trying to get people blacklisted, trying to get them cancelled, trying to get their peer-reviewed journals boycotted. Humanist of the year, 2023, right there.
So, he has no damages, which presents my learned friend here with a few challenges in the days ahead. As I said, it is for the plaintiff, the designated driver of this case, to prosecute his case. And if he manages to come up with one, the defendants will certainly rebut it. But I didn't hear it in that opening.
Let me say just a couple of things at the start. First, Mr. Mann is a fraud, a terrible fraud. He has misrepresented himself to you and to millions of your fellow Americans and to tens of millions more around the planet. He has misrepresented himself to this court. This case is not about science. You saw some back and forth about that earlier. Mr. Mann does not represent science or even climate science. He may think he does, but he doesn't, as there has been cause to remind him in this case over the last 12 years. He and science are not synonymous.
Furthermore, whatever you feel about any particular scientific question, it is not for courts to adjudicate science and public policy arising therefrom. A scientific theorem that requires validation by a courtroom verdict is not science, not at all.
This case is about corruption, terrible, appalling corruption at the heart of a famous institution, Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Mann was the beneficiary of that corruption, as was Jerry Sandusky, as were others.
It's important, in a purportedly free society, to be able to talk honestly about corruption. Because if you don't, corruption seeps outward like a toxic pool and bad things happen, terrible things. On the one hand, little boys get raped. On the other, elderly scientists get hounded and bullied out of their careers. They are not the same degree of violation and violence, not at all. But they exist on exactly the same continuum. How does that happen? How did it happen for years on end, at Penn State?
As you know, Monday was Martin Luther King Day in America, honoring a famous civil rights leader. And the Reverend Dr. King once said, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. He's right. If you tolerate one small exceptional injustice, it's hard to keep it hemmed into its one little corner.
In this case, your highly valued football coach sexually assaulting, raping, sodomizing, as Mr. Williams said, middle schoolboys in the Penn State showers. Okay, you say, well, the football program brings in a lot of money, so we're just going to turn a blind eye to that. And don't worry, it will just be going on in the Penn State showers and it won't affect anything else. The injustice spreads. It breaks out of the little corner you've turned a blind eye to. The corruption metastasizes like cancer so that, eventually, as at Penn State, the cancer is everywhere: In the showers, in the science lab, at the police department, at the district attorneys.
So, in this trial, we will talk about corruption and we will hear evidence of what it did at Penn State and beyond.
Let me walk you through the words I am standing by. It's not long. And we'll start at the beginning:
"In the wake of Louis Freeh's report on Penn State's complicity in serial rape, Rand Simberg writes of Unhappy Valley's other scandal..."
Louis Freeh is the former director of the FBI. And after the arrest of Jerry Sandusky and the firing of Penn State's president, he was commissioned by the university's trustees to investigate the culture of corruption that had enabled Sandusky to do what he did year in, year out. The Freeh report is a damning indictment of this so-called university. We will introduce it in evidence and you can see for yourselves. But let me cite just one passage. This is from page 14:
"The most saddening finding by the special investigative counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior – by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Jerry Sandusky's child victims. Four of the most powerful people at Penn State, starting with President Graham B. Spanier" – you heard that name from Ms. Weatherford. Hold on to it because it's going to be important throughout this trial.
Graham Spanier.
Graham Spanier failed to protect against the child sexual predator harming children for over a decade. Over a decade. This wasn't an isolated incident. And, as Louis Freeh says, "they exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky's victims." And just one more line, "Further, they exposed this child to additional harm by alerting and – by alerting Sandusky, who was the only one who knew the child's identity, of what McQueary saw in the shower."
I'm sure we have some moms and dads in this room. Imagine if that was your child. It's not enough that he's been raped in the Penn State showers. It's not enough that corrupt authorities are going to do nothing about it. But just to make things worse, the president of the university lets the rapist know he's been seen raping you, so the rapist knows you're the problem and he might have to take care of the problem in his own way.
Appalling, disgusting, shameful, as FBI director Freeh recognized.
Let's go back to my entirely truthful publication. As I said, I stand by every word, especially the ones about, "Penn State's complicity in serial rape." But let me just add a word to that that I really should have put in when I wrote it: Penn State's complicity in serial child rape.
Now, at this point, you might be saying, wait a minute, Louis Freeh, Penn State, Jerry Sandusky, wasn't that all a long time ago, over a decade? Yeah, it was a long time ago. If this was a movie, there would now be a big dissolve and a montage of falling calendar leaves and monochrome newsreel footage of grainy historical figures taking us all the way back to the year 2012. That is a very long time ago now.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied." The concept is an ancient one, going all the way back to Roman times and earlier. Well, in this case, justice has been delayed for an awful long time, and that places an additional burden on you, the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, because you have to project yourself back to the times and the context in which my observation about Penn State's appalling corruption occurred. We are now over a third of the way through the third decade of this century. The events that concern us go back to the end of the first decade and the beginning of the second.
As you can see from this timeline – yeah, there we go – in 2008, a brave young teenager called Aaron Fisher went to the authorities and finally forced them, after a coverup at Penn State going back another decade, to the last century, before some of the younger members of the jury were born – he finally forced them to start investigating Jerry Sandusky for his industrial-scale rape and sexual assault of little boys. That's 2008.
The following year, 2009, the so-called ClimateGate emails were leaked from the University of East Anglia in England. It wasn't a hack, by the way. That's another thing Mr. Williams is fond of misstating. It was a leak by a courageous whistleblower whose name is generally known on the inside who wanted to expose the shenanigans, to put it mildly, around certain aspects of top-level climate science, including the various forms of the so-called Hockey Stick.
So in these years, the Penn State administration is juggling two scandals involving two of the university's biggest stars: The star in the football program, Jerry Sandusky; and the star in the science department, Michael E. Mann.
As I said, we're in a movie flashback here. It's the summer of 2012, close to 12 years ago. In June that year, Jerry Sandusky is finally convicted for his years of child rape and assault, convicted on 45 charges of sexual abuse of young boys. That's late June 2012. It's big news because 45 convictions is a whole lot of child rape. On July the 12th, FBI director Louis Freeh publishes his report on the culture of corruption at Penn State. And three days later, 72 hours later, July 15th, 2012, I write my entirely truthful Internet post. It's called, "Football and Hockey," because it's about the scandal in the football department and scandal of the Hockey Stick in the science department.
Now, just to get back to the end of that first sentence, I say, "Rand Simberg writes of Unhappy Valley's other scandal." Happy Valley is the region in Pennsylvania where Mr. Mann's corrupt university is located. And Mr. Simberg calls it Unhappy Valley because, certainly, if you're one of those middle schoolboys in the Penn State showers, it was not a happy place, not at all. And then I quote a fairish chunk from Rand Simberg's writing. Mr. Simberg will speak to that passage, and I think you'll find him persuasive. As Ms. Weatherford said before lunch, Rand was right. And I then say, "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." He does. And it's a simple one that has the additional benefit of being true, the plain truth.
As the evidence will show, Penn State reacted to both scandals in Unhappy Valley in the same way: By prioritizing brand protection, the protection of its stars over truth and decency. Under its corrupt and evil president, this filthy, rotten institution had a standard operating procedure. Whatever the scandal, cover it up. You saw the points of comparison that Ms. Weatherford had on her chart. Now, Mr. Williams told you that the plaintiff was grossly offended to be compared to Jerry Sandusky.
That's not actually what Mr. Simberg did. He compared Penn State's treatment of Sandusky to Penn State's treatment of Mann, as counselor Williams well knows. But be that as it may, I'm sure Mr. Williams would be grossly offended to be compared to Jerry Sandusky. I'm sure the judge would be. Mr. Mann didn't like Mr. Simberg calling him the Jerry Sandusky of climate science any more than anyone in this room would like being called the "Jerry Sandusky of accountants," or the "Jerry Sandusky of short order cooks," or the "Jerry Sandusky of dog sledders," or the "Jerry Sandusky of tap dancers."
But there is a difference, a key difference. We're not – this isn't a case about someone being randomly compared to a pedophile. Mr. Mann was a colleague of Jerry Sandusky's. He describes himself as a big fan of American football. They were both members of the Penn State faculty. Sandusky had his own office, his own key to the showers at Penn State until the day he was arrested in November 2011.
As you will hear, 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.
Apparently, they have yellow jumpsuits in Pennsylvania, not the more familiar orange ones. I have no idea what they have in the District of Columbia and I hope I don't get to find out. I'm a little bit old school on that. I prefer the old black and white stripes for jailbirds myself.
But back to the words at issue here, from Football and Hockey: "Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate change Hockey Stick graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus."
As you will hear, the same scoundrel who [protected] Sandusky also protected Michael Mann.
Let's set aside the tree-ring circus. We'll come back to that as the trial proceeds. You'll see that I refer to, "the fraudulent climate change Hockey Stick graph." Keep an eye on that formulation. I have maintained that Mr. Mann's Hockey Stick is fraudulent ever since it was published, for almost a quarter century now, since before it became known as the Hockey Stick. We will introduce evidence to show that I've said it was fraudulent in the United Kingdom's biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper, the Telegraph. I've said it was fraudulent in Canada's national newspaper, the National Post. I've said it was fraudulent in Australia's national newspaper, the Australian. I've said it was fraudulent in Hawkes Bay Today, which is not a national newspaper, but covers the beautiful Hawkes Bay region of the east coast of the north New Zealand. Well worth a trip.
So, I've maintained a consistent and sincere position. Can we put up what I believe is marked as Plaintiff's Exhibit 0005?
"When rising hot air hits cold hard facts" – and this was published on the 1st of April 2001 in the Sunday Telegraph in London. That's 24 years ago – 23 years ago. That's a long time. Throughout those years – these decades – I have consistently maintained the position that Mann's graph is complete rubbish.
Now, I'm not a scientist. And as you just heard from Mr. Williams, the plaintiff's argument is an appeal to authority, which is always, ALWAYS legally dubious. And actually, I would renew my objection that it's a little bit un-American, too, because this was a country founded on rejecting the idea of an appeal to authority. That would be his late majesty, King George III. And as you heard, Mr. Williams accused me of not knowing what the different American agencies beginning with N [are] for national, were, and [I'm] finding it hard to keep the NSF and the NAS and the NRC straight in my head. There's absolutely no... I'm a Canadian. There's no reason why I should be expected to know – and I understand many of you work for – or several of you, because a lot of people in this town do work for agencies beginning with N. But I'm sorry, there's no reason why a Canadian should be expected to keep them straight any more than one would expect Messrs. Mann and Williams to recognize the Royal Society of Canada by its acronym.
As Ms. Weatherford has just explained with regard to Mr. Simberg, Mr. Mann has to prove under the law in this jurisdiction that we defendants entertained serious doubts about the truth of what we were saying. Well, I have never entertained any doubts whatsoever about the truth of what I said in the UK papers, in the Canadian papers, in the Australian papers, in the New Zealand papers.
In case you're keeping score, those are all countries that, unlike you rebel colonists, elected to remain in the British Empire. They are all regarded as more favorable jurisdictions for a defamation plaintiff because none of them has your First Amendment. And yet Mr. Mann has never sued me in London, in Belfast, in Toronto, Sydney, Wellington, Port Moresby, [the] capital city of Papua New Guinea.
So, the upshot of his victory 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.
For the first decade or so of my rubbishing the Hockey Stick, I never mentioned Michael Mann's name. For the first few years, I'm not sure I even knew his name, or those of his co-authors Raymond Bradley or Malcolm Hughes. And it wasn't necessary, really, to mention him, because I was writing about the end product, what I call the fraudulent Hockey Stick. So I'm not like Mr. Mann who spends his days on Twitter doing what aficionados of other sports, such as association football – soccer – call playing the man, not the ball.
People make very specific criticisms about the Hockey Stick. For example, I don't know how many of you know the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in eastern Canada, but Mr. Mann's Hockey Stick relies, for its estimate of the global temperature of the early 15th century, on just one tree from the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. The evidence will show that that tree from the Gaspe can't tell you the correct weather for Quebec today. But according to the Hockey Stick graph, it can tell you what the weather is like in Paris and Berlin and Kyiv and Saint Petersburg.
Now, this tree ring here, I would say I know a little bit about my part of the world. And this is like a lot – it's actually smaller than the trees you find in the Gaspe. It's more like the kind of trees – I don't know how many of you know northern New England, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, but it's more like the trees you find there. They're small, young trees. And those trees grew up when sheep farming died in northern New England. And so everybody – sheep farming moved west and people went and got jobs in the southern mill towns in New England. And eventually, where there used to be sheep farms, the trees reclaimed the land. And so you have these young, scrubby, not particularly attractive trees everywhere. And this tree here, this – so we're talking about the trees growing back after the Second World War. They're 70, 60, 50 years old, these trees. They can't tell you the correct temperatures. This tree can't tell you the correct temperature for its entire existence. This tree is no good at telling you the temperature in 1957, 1968, 1973, 1988. But the thesis of Mr. Mann's Hockey Stick, as we will hear from our various witnesses, is that although it can't tell you the temperature for your entire human lifetimes, it's absolutely brilliant at telling you the temperature in the year 1432. That is his theory. And if you criticize that, he doesn't engage with you. He does what he always does, which – he goes on Twitter and says, you're funded by the Koch brothers and you're a white supremacist and most likely a homophobe and an Islamaphobe and a transphobe to boot.
Eleanor Roosevelt, your late first lady, had an interesting line. She said, Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. And [Mann] discusses people. He plays the man, not the ball. Oh, Koch-funded climate [sic] denier homophobe. I have no idea why an argument about tree rings should make one a racist or a homophobe. And if Mr. Williams is willing to put his client in the witness box, maybe we'll ask him. But as I say, I play the ball, not the man.
So, I wrote about the work, the graph, not its co-author until 2009, when, as we saw on the timeline, the ClimateGate emails were released to the world and the plaintiff's character swung into focus. Three years later, he sued me, and I got to know even more about him, and I got to know a little about what other scientists thought about him too. And in a free society, those scientists should be able to say what they say about him, and I should be able to quote them saying that. It's not about science; it's about corruption. It's not about climate change; it's about corruption.
But corruption and climate change meet in this man's Hockey Stick. And we will – and we will talk about that in the days ahead. But to stick with the words I actually wrote, the fraudulent climate change Hockey Stick graph – that's all I said; the graph is fraudulent. But in the eleven and a half years this case has been chugging along in the District of Columbia courts, I have learned something about the graph's creator, too, Mr. Mann here. Eleven and a half years ago, in counselor Williams' statement of claim on behalf of his client, his legal complaint laid in this very courthouse, Messrs. Mann and Williams charged me and Mr. Simberg with "defamation of a Nobel prize recipient," a crime I was not hitherto aware existed in the District of Columbia or, indeed, anywhere else. Defamation of a Nobel prize recipient. Here is Mr. Mann's original complaint as filed over a decade ago, October 22, 2012:
INSERT DEMONSTRATIVE #10: Mann's original Statement of Claim, 2012 page one
"It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient." That's one of three paragraphs in Mr. Mann's original complaint in which he claims to be a Nobel prize winner. "The professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient."
As I said, I had no idea that was a crime, either in the District of Columbia or anywhere else, but that's what Mann and Williams initially charged me with.
There is one problem with it. This man is not a Nobel prize recipient, not at all.
Yet he has passed himself off as one for years on end. There are very few of those, a few dozen around the planet at any one time. So, purporting to be a Nobel laureate is the equivalent of what some of you may have heard of stolen valor, those contemptible men one runs into from time to time who claim to have been in the thick of it at Omaha Beach on D-Day or in Vietnam or the Sunni Triangle in Iraq or wherever when, in reality, they were back home in the La-Z-Boy recliner watching Dancing With the Stars.
As you will hear in the coming days, Michael E. Mann is the only scientist on the planet for whom the director of the Nobel Institute has had to issue a statement explaining that he has not and never has been a, Nobel prize recipient: "Nobel committee rebukes Michael Mann for falsely claiming he was 'awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.'" Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
INSERT DEMONSTRATIVE #12: "Nobel Committee Rebukes Michael Mann for falsely claiming he was 'awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'" (Canada Free Press)
That's a direct quote from then director of the Nobel Institute in Norway, Geir Lundestad. I would have called Dr. Lundestad as a witness, but he's dead. That's one of the drawbacks of adjudicating a case whose relevant events happened 12 years ago. But those are his words.
So I wrote, starting in 2001, that his Hockey Stick was a fraud. But I came to learn very quickly, was that Michael Mann himself is a terrible fraud. [sic] Certainly, it is always prudent for the client to read the legal filing, and he surely knew that the claim to be a Nobel laureate was a lie. And even after his lawyers here were forced to withdraw that first fraudulent statement of claim in 2012, Mr. Mann continues to lie about being a, quote, "Nobel prize winner."
This is from the Michael Mann page at Penn State University this very week:
He's not a Nobel prize recipient. He never has been and he never will be, any more than I will be, because he doesn't do any science at anywhere near the level that would put him in contention for a Nobel prize. Yet, a decade after he was told to cut it out by the actual winner of the Nobel prize, he continues to promote one of the most brazen of scientific frauds, that he is of the same rank as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, or my fellow Canadian, Sir Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin and its use in treating diabetes. How big a fraud do you have to be to keep putting yourself up there with Einstein and Sir Frederick and Madame Curie when the Nobel Institute itself has told you you're not and you are to cut it out?
Going back to my original and truthful publication:
"And when 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."
I apologise for the word "cove" there; that's Britannic English, not American. By "cove", I don't mean that Graham Spanier is a sheltered body of water: it's a word meaning chap, fellow, bloke. Circa mid-sixteenth century, I believe. But "cove" is not American lingo, so I throw myself on the mercy of the court: if you want to give me to three-to-five years for that, you'd be perfectly within your rights. But this is the important bit:
"And as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing. If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won't it cover up?"
That's actually a pretty good question: If Graham Spanier is prepared to cover up child rape week in, week out, year in, year out, why would he be the least bit squeamish about covering up a bit of hanky-panky with tree rings and ice cores?
Corruption doesn't stand still. It spreads, as you will hear in the days ahead. And I reprise again that shrewd line of Dr. Martin Luther King: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
The final sentence of the alleged defamatory but actually entirely truthful publication: "Whether or not he's the Jerry Sandusky of climate change, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his investigation by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke."
I'm sure many of you remember hearing about the Sandusky scandal. But it wasn't just about Sandusky. It was also about the culture of corruption that rotted the heart of Penn State and then spread to the local police department and the district attorney's office. It wasn't only Sandusky who went to jail. Could we have the Penn State jailbirds' slide, please?
Look at those guys. These very senior figures from a famous American university all wound up behind bars. As Ms. Weatherford mentioned in her presentation, the plaintiff sued my friend and fellow Canadian, the late Tim Ball, for saying that Michael Mann belongs not at Penn State but in the state pen. It's an old Pennsylvania joke. If you had gone to a vaudeville show in Philadelphia circa 1911, you would have heard it many times. But it's no laughing matter to Mr. Mann, so he sued Dr. Ball for reprising that ancient gag. Whether or not Michael Mann belongs in the state penitentiary, an extraordinary number of his senior colleagues did wind up not at Penn State but in the state pen.
The joke is now real.
There's Sandusky, bottom left. Just above him are Tim Curley, the athletic director, Gary Schultz, the university vice president in charge of finance, the big bucks. And just below him is the Penn State president Graham Spanier, a convicted criminal who went to prison for child endangerment. That's actually quite unusual, even by the standards of American higher education, for a university president to be carted off to jail. In fact, at the time of his conviction, that distinction was unique to President Spanier. We're told by counselor Williams all that business with the NSF, NAS, whatever the hell acronym it was – we're told by counselor Williams that Mr. Mann has been, quote-unquote, exonerated.
At Penn State, as we'll show, he was exonerated by a phony-baloney investigation controlled by the same fellow who controlled the phony-baloney investigation into Sandusky: Graham Spanier.
That's to say Michael Mann has been exonerated by a convicted criminal. He has been exonerated by the pedophile's enabler. I have no idea why he would want to put that on his CV. I certainly wouldn't, and I doubt you would either.
The fish rots from the head down, and so does Penn State. Dr. King again: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It seeps. It leaks. It spreads. And that's what happened at Penn State. A corrupt culture, no integrity, and an institution whose first instinct is always to do what's necessary to protect its stars: In football, in fencing, in meteorology. So Graham Spanier protected Sandusky and he protected Mann.
Here is President Spanier out of his jailbird's jumpsuit. A Pennsylvania jury did not find him a persuasive witness, but take a look for yourself.
That is Graham Spanier. Did you hear what the plaintiff said in that email? This is the time - and supposedly rigorous investigation of Mr. Mann with which Mr. Spanier was not supposed to interfere. But Mr. Mann says, I got a very nice call from our president, Graham Spanier, a couple of weeks ago that was quite reassuring.
Indeed. Mr. Spanier was quite reassuring, quote-unquote, to Michael Mann, as he had been, quote-unquote, quite reassuring to Jerry Sandusky.
Because, as you will hear, that's how they do business at Penn State. Mr. Simberg and I are not the only people, as Ms. Weatherford mentioned, to draw comparisons between Penn State's protection of Sandusky and Penn State's protection of Michael Mann. Far more respectable persons than some odious excuse for – whatever it was he said about me – and my codefendant have done so. So don't take my word for it. Let's just put up what Ms. Weatherford showed you earlier, the Chronicle of Higher Education: "A Culture of Evasion."
INSERT DEMONSTRATIVE #14 - The Chronicle of Higher Education (print edition)
What they mean by that headline is evasion of the truth about Sandusky and evasion of the truth about Mann. And how did the plaintiff react to this story in the boringly respectable Chronicle of Higher Education? Let's take a look at Exhibit 535:
He did what he usually did; he did the Eleanor Roosevelt thing where he didn't discuss ideas; he discussed people. He denounced it as, "a coordinated right-wing smear." So, the Chronicle of Higher Education is now apparently just another fringe, ultra-right, wing nut, whack job, Qanon operation; they're probably white supremacists, just like he's called our witness Steve McIntyre. And then Mr. Mann muttered dark threats about its editor, "She will need to answer for this." Uh-huh. "She will need to answer for this?" She will need to answer to HIM. We'll ask the plaintiff what he means by that if he winds up in the witness box. Because the story of Michael Mann's career is dark threats about anyone who crosses him, as multiple witnesses will testify in the days ahead.
Counselor Williams says that it was putting his client with Sandusky that drove him to sue. I have no idea why. As we've just seen in that tweet, in one of Michael Mann's recent tweets, any critics of his must be racists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes. Xenophobe means a fear of foreigners. I AM a foreigner, but in Michael Mann's world, disagreeing with Michael Mann makes me a foreigner who has a fear of foreigners. So according to Mann, anyone who disagrees with him is a racist and a homophobe, but it's totally unacceptable to mention Mann in connection with a pedophile, setting aside the fact Mann is connected to Sandusky. They work on the same campus. They're in the same pension plan. Their paychecks are drawn on the same bank. They're protected by the same guy, the convicted criminal, the pedophile enabler, Spanier.
But putting aside all that, what counselor Williams said about me and Simberg uniquely associating Mann and Sandusky is not true. Not true at all. Insofar as I can determine, the very first media piece to connect the Sandusky corruption with the Mann corruption came seven months before Simberg and me, and just a few weeks after Sandusky's arrest. It was in the Daily Telegraph of London, December 6th, 2011, and headlined, "Jerry Sandusky and Michael Mann: Much in Common?"
In fact, I see the delightful and perceptive Irish lady who wrote it is here in court today. Presumably, to Michael Mann, this Irish foreigner is just another xenophobe riddled with fear of foreigners. Now, at that time, the Telegraph was the United Kingdom's biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper, in fact, the biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper in Europe. It sold two-thirds of a million copies every day. For purposes of comparison, that's close to five times as many as the Washington Post sells. And Mr. Mann was well aware of this story, "Jerry Sandusky and Michael Mann: Much in Common?" because it was emailed around a climate group he belonged to. This is Exhibit 520:
And as you can see, Miles Grant, a climate blogger, emails Mann, "This may be the saddest plea for attention I've seen..." And Michael E. Mann replies, "Sickening."
Yet even though England is one of the most favorable libel jurisdictions for a plaintiff anywhere on the planet, Mr. Mann, who claims to have been sickened to find himself linked to Sandusky in one of the biggest media outlets in the world, a newspaper that at that time employed more foreign correspondents in more countries than any other paper on the planet, Mr. Mann, nevertheless, chose not to sue. Why is that? We'll get into it in the days ahead. But, again, don't take my word for it. I'm just a xenophobic foreigner. Don't take the word of my fellow xenophobic foreigner, our Irish friend here. Don't take the Chronicle of Higher Education's word for it. Mann has threatened to make that whippersnapper of an editor, "answer to him." Instead, let's go to one of the most illustrious publications in America for almost two centuries now, the Atlantic Monthly. I used to be a columnist for the Atlantic, and it's a great honor, especially for a foreigner, to appear in same pages that published Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and, indeed, the aforementioned Martin Luther King.
The analogy drawn by Mr. Simberg is not difficult, as we shall show. It says that Mr. Mann is a beneficiary of the same corrupt regime of which Sandusky was a beneficiary. It does not say that Mr. Mann is a pedophile. But as we will show you, he is pals with the pedophile's enabler even after Spanier was jailed for child endangerment.
Here are some of Michael Mann's many books. All of them thank Graham Spanier in the acknowledgments: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines. This was published in 2012, a few months before Graham Spanier was indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice, failure to report child abuse, and few months before the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh found that Spanier exhibited a striking lack of sympathy for Sandusky's victims. Indeed. But perhaps Michael Mann's fulsome gratitude to the pedophile's enabler was just bad timing; The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016), again, Mr. Mann thanks Graham Spanier in the acknowledgments even though Spanier is now headed to trial – okay, iInnocent until proven guilty and all of that; and in 2021, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. So Graham Spanier in 2021 is now a convicted criminal. But that's not enough for Mann to cease thanking him in his books. Our Fragile Moment, from just last year. Graham Spanier has been jailed for child endangerment. He's in his yellow jail suit, and this man is still putting him in his books.
So, Michael Mann is embarrassed to be associated with Jerry Sandusky, a sexual predator, as Mr. Williams put it. So, he's kept us in court for 12 years. He's embarrassed to be associated with Jerry Sandusky, but not embarrassed to be associated with Jerry Sandusky's criminal enabler, a man sent to prison for endangering children.
Does anybody in this room, other than the plaintiff, have friends who were jailed for endangering children? Would any of you thank the child endangerer, the pedo enabler, in their books? Even after he has been convicted. Even after he has been imprisoned. That's the way our horribly corrupt society works.
To go back to that email that Ms. Weatherford showed you, Graham Spanier covers Michael Mann's ass, and Michael Mann covers Michael Spanier's ass. And if you cover Graham Spanier's ass as fulsomely as Mr. Mann does in his books, even after he has been indicted, even after he has been prosecuted, even after he has been convicted, even after he was jailed, then standing on your dignity about, oh, people stare at me because you associated me with Jerry Sandusky – no. Mr. Mann associated himself with Jerry Sandusky and Jerry Sandusky's enabler.
We make our choices in life and we live with the consequences. And Michael Mann made his choice, as we shall prove in the days ahead.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
