UPDATE: When I wrote this, the Mann vs Steyn suit was about to enter its sixth year; it's now about to enter its eighth year. The DC court system is where justice goes to die.
In a couple of months, Michael E Mann's defamation suit against me will enter its sixth year in the constipated bowels of DC justice. Given the proceduralist swamp in which the case is now mired, it is not unreasonable to assume that its ultimate disposition will consume most of my remaining time on earth: as I've remarked before, in medieval England trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal; in 21st-century America it's the other way round.
So, just in time for Michael E Mann's Congressional testimony this week, Watts Up With That posted a guest essay by Rick Wallace reflecting on my book "A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists - in Their Own Words - on Michael E Mann, His Hockey Stick and Their Damage to Science - Volume One. Mr Wallace writes:
Mark Steyn's A Disgrace to the Profession is a compilation of scientific commentary on Michael Mann and his work and is a valuable antidote to the idea that questioning or criticizing this particular researcher is an overt admission of ignorance, let alone an "attack on science". What I will argue in this essay is that Steyn has done serious students of the AGW hysteria an even greater service. In fact, this work reveals some features of the hysteria that are, I think, critical for understanding it in depth. The present essay, which will elaborate on this point, is intended as a contribution to the study of what one of those quoted in Steyn's book called "pathological science".
For those who aren't familiar with the work, Steyn's book is a collection of highly critical comments by scientists of varying degrees of eminence concerning Michael Mann and his (in)famous "hockey stick" temperature graph. The book emanated from a still-ongoing lawsuit that Mann filed against Steyn for writing in a National Review Online article that the hockey stick was fraudulent. Steyn was struck by the fact that, when it came time to file third-party amicus briefs, no one filed a brief in Mann's defense. So he began combing the Web and other resources, and found a plethora of critical comments that he collected into one volume. In fact, by now almost everyone, skeptic or warmist, has backed away from this very flawed piece of evidence.
That's true. Mann's whole hockey shtick is to present himself as the very embodiment of science - or, in his more modest moments, climate science: le climat, c'est moi. On the whole, science is disinclined to play along - which is the point of my book. One of Rick Wallace's footnotes underlines the point:
4 See, for example, "35 scientific papers: Global sea levels were 1-2 meters higher than now for most of the last 7,000 years" (6 February, 2017); "17 new (2017) scientific papers affirm today's warming was not global, unprecedented, or remarkable" (26 January, 2017); "The hockey stick collapse: 60 new (2016) scientific papers affirm today's warming isn't global, unprecedented, or remarkable" (22 December, 2016).
Actually, while we're footnoting (and Wallace's are very good), here's the next one:
5 A curious feature of these lawsuits is that it almost seems as if Mann stumbles into them, since he seems completely unprepared to handle the ensuing court cases. Instead, he acts as if he expected that the larger world would simply acquiesce to his claims. And when it doesn't, he is left high and dry. There is an insularity in all of this that is quite wonderful.
That's one of the themes of Rick Wallace's essay - just why it is that a man of science is so insular he expects "the larger world" to "simply acquiesce" to what he and a shrinking coterie noisily assert. Mr Wallace continues:
When they are read together, the quotations and commentary in Steyn's book also shed more light on the Michael Mann phenomenon. For one thing, they show that his behavior over time has been quite consistent. There is, for example, the tendency to play fast and loose with methodology. This is shown most clearly in the methods that gave rise to the original hockey stick. Over time and thanks to the perseverance of a few, the puzzle of how it was derived is now pretty well understood. Steyn touches on all of the major points, each one a little story in itself.
Mr Wallace runs through these "little stories" - problematic proxies, dubious weighting, errors of basic geography, upside-down data - and then turns to Mann's attitude to anybody who points these flaws out:
This vehement defensiveness has been accompanied by continual attacks on opponents and even colleagues who question any of his methods; such people, including prominent people who are actually warmists of a sort such as Judith Curry and Craig Loehle, have earned epithets like "#AntiScience" and of course the dread word "denier". There have also been concerted attempts (along with members of the UK Climate Research Unit) to discredit the editors of journals who published skeptical articles or who publically questioned the hockey stick. In one case this actually led to the resignation of the editor of the journal Climate Research...
Along with this is the constant self-aggrandizement. This was on display in the Steyn case, where the original complaint said that Mann was suing Steyn and others for "defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient" (Steyn, p. iii, quoting from the legal statement). Later this claim had to be withdrawn. And of course there is his self-assumed role of "defender of science"...
One problem in getting a proper perspective on this case is that Mann seems to fit the role of the villain all too well. Because in all of this it is essential to remember that people do not have to have malevolent intentions to wreak tremendous havoc on the world.
I'm not so sanguine about Mann's "malevolence" - not with respect to, say, fellow scientists such as Lennart Bengtsson or Judith Curry or Roger Pielke Jr. Nonetheless, Mr Wallace is granting a point in order to explore his larger thesis - the "tremendous havoc" wreaked by the hockey stick in the wider world:
Given all these problems as well as the extreme behavior of the protagonist, it is astonishing how rarely questions have been raised about the hockey stick, especially in the public arena. In fact, many people seem to have blinded themselves to the facts on display – and this is part of the larger phenomenon that we are dealing with.
At a certain level, it's conscious blindness. The Wallace essay is particularly strong in its examination of the supposed critical "demolitions" of my book - by people who haven't read it, and indeed seem oddly scared of reading it. So instead it's a chain of ever more banal Chinese whispers - a précis of a simplification of a dismissal of a distortion by a handful of hardcore Mann-boys:
Another post appeared around this time on a blog called Hot Whopper:21 This is a brief cut-and-past account of the scientific evidence followed by a lengthier polemic against "deniers". Strangely enough, the author later added an "addendum about the contents of the book" ...followed by what is essentially an admission that the author still hadn't read it: "I can't imagine there is anything in it that would damage Michael Mann, but I do expect it will have a lot of material that will damage Mark Steyn."
"I can't imagine"? But you don't have to "imagine"; it exists, and you can read it - which would be not just a normal courtesy but a necessary pre-condition for any critical demolition:
Why did they assume they could write an adequate commentary on the basis of promo quotations (which are likely to be abbreviated, and are necessarily taken out of context)? And why couldn't they wait to make their critical (and in some cases derisive) comments? Why did they come off the blocks almost as soon as the title was announced? What does this imply about these people?
It is also telling that none of these articles mentions the situation that inspired the book. Instead, it is treated as another malevolent "denier" attack, which must be discredited at once...
At this point let us recall some context surrounding the lawsuit and the book. If the hockey stick were valid and Mann had been vindicated, then there should have been dozens of amicus briefs filed in his defense at the trial (including, one would have thought, briefs from Messrs. Tet and Zorita). Moreover, as some of the quotes in Steyn's book make clear, the hockey stick flies in the face of a body of evidence supporting the occurrence and world-wide scope of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, both of which were more or less obliterated by the flat handle of the hockey stick. In addition, despite some of Mann's (amazing) protestations, the stick itself is an enjambment of proxy-based temperature derivations (the handle) and direct surface temperature records (the stick). One reason that this was done was that proxy data for the 20th century did not match the actual temperature record.
The important point is that none of this is reflected in any of this commentary. It is as if all these problematic facts, all these warning signals, have simply glanced off the minds of these people, as the saying goes, like water running off a duck's back.
Not once do these writers speak to the actual arguments of McIntyre and others. Not once. Instead, they put together parallel arguments, much like someone plastering up a new billboard sign to cover the one underneath. In short, they never connect. Instead, what is achieved is a kind of cognitive closure (using the latter term in the sense given to it by Gestalt psychologists). One could also call it dissonance reduction. Or more simply, evasion.
In his estimable footnotes, Rick Wallace adds that "if you want to experience reality-distortion to the point of vertigo" read the actual book, and then one of the above mentioned blog posts.
Like much of the work at Watts Up With That, this is a fine essay, well worth your time. We struggle on, and, assuming I live long long enough, we will prevail.
~I have another little project I'm working on at the moment - about the highly lucrative American "student-loan industry", and especially so-called PLUS loans marketed direct to parents. If you've any interesting observations to share, do shoot me an email. Confidentiality will be respected.
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When Mann's hockey stick notion first appeared it was a prediction that global average tempratures were going to start rising rapidly, so that a graph of temperature vs. time would look like an almost flat handle followed by a rapidly rising blade.
Lots of time has past since that prediction was first publicized and we can see how it compares with experiences since then.
Well, there has been a slight indication of hockey stick like behavior, but unfortunately for Mann it has been an upside down and blade first hockey stick. That is to say that indications of a slow rise in the 19th century and into the 20th have been followed by what look like a leveling off. If this is caused by much greater emissions of carbon dioxide in recent years it could mean that such emissions may slow down temperature increases, but the evidence for this is not strong enough to rely on.
In breaking news... the Justice Department tweeted that Duke University has agreed to pay $112.5 million under the False Claims to settle False Claims Act allegations regarding Scientific Misconduct... they allegedly knowingly submitted or caused to be submitted false data on 30 funding applications. Just one university ... hmm! Are there more cases nationwide being investigated in which a university was complicit in pushing falsified data?
Anytime we hear, "The Science is Settled" should be an indication that misdirection is taking place. I didn't even finish high school and smell this this thing.
Will from Garner, NC
I am re-reading Heather Pringle's "The Master Plan" and am stunned by the parallels between The Ahnenerbe ( the real life Nazi science bureaucracy that inspired Indiana Jones stories and Ernst Blofeld the James Bond enemy) and scientists flocking to Climate Change Politics - and their political counterparts in the "Ideals trump Facts" camp e.g. Ms. Occasional Cortex. The irresistible lure of funding and prestige drew German academia in the Ahnenerbe ( then quietly out the back door after 1945 and back into their old jobs), What else? Here is a quote from the President of the Ahnenerbe" [He] was happy to yoke his research to the driving ambition of Nazi Science [which] he believed served a higher master than objectivity or truth". He stated " The time is now past when science believed its task was to search for the truth. Now its task is to proceed with its prophecy to awaken." Reading "Awaken", so close to "Woke" is chilling. So now, when you call out someone as a Climate Nazi, you can cite precedent. Another 'factoid' is the SS ( via Ahenenerbe) are the template for "Invest in X, Patent X (ruthlessly quashing related patents),Have Government Make Buying X compulsory, Pocket Profits, Repeat. Case Zero was the SS patenting safety reflectors embedded in bicycle pedals, then having (the Nazi) government make this mandatory. Who knew?
On that theme, add reading the history of the Soviet agro-thug Lysenko who leveraged his low level biology education into creating a new political pseudoscience of Lysenko-ism. Note the toxic merger of politics and science. Totally flattering the Soviet political vision carried into food production, Lysenko rocketed to the top, crushing any actual agronomist, destroying actual agriculture and agronomy experts - executions, banishment to the gulags, firing and silencing the terrified rest. He reigned supreme over Soviet agriculture for decades, his ideas were implemented in communist China. History has noted those two nations agriculture sectors were completely devastated (result: famines and mass loss of lives) by Lysenko's government-enforced official policies based on his crack-pot and wrong concepts of how plants grow. The 1970s Soviet agriculture collapse had its roots in Lysenko's long iron-fist tenure of destructive political influence over the sector. Like to call what we're seeing now as Neo-Lysenkoism.
Your remark about trial by ordeal reminds of something one of Terry Pratchett's characters said about the mythical country of Uberwald, with its vampires and werewolves: "It wasn't until ten years ago that they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier".
If Charles Dickens were writing "Bleak House" today he might well have chosen this farcical lawsuit rather than create "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" to expose the cruelties, waste and procedural sloth of the legal system.
Mark, after all this wickedness that the evil Mann has perpetrated on you, I desire (and I am NOT vindictive, however) to see him destroyed financially and academically. He truly is evil. Because no one can be quite that stupid. Also, it appears his arrogant dissimulation knows no bounds.
I am generally a very forgiving guy, but this fellow ...
Even if Mann was right on all points of climate change, Mann's suit is an attack on free speech. If Mann has a problem with what Steyn's speech, his recourse is more speech, not suppression of speech.
I have to ask - In the course of this wretched six-year ordeal has Mann responded in any way to the defense requests for Discovery under the Rules of Evidence? Has the plaintiff responded to defense demands for interogatories, requests for depositions and the other requirements of the Discovery process? If they havent then why hasn't this suit been dismissed?
Glad to see that sanity is starting to return in Canada. Dr. Tim Ball has won or is winning climate fanatics' lawsuits launched against him. Mann failed to produce any evidence supporting this hockey stick theory, and the others are of the same ilk, bullies who thought everyone would fall in line once their greatness merely showed up in court.
Bodes well for the never ending suit in the 'States.
The answer may have already been posted, but where is Mr. Mann getting the money to fund his legal team? Yes, the process is the punishment, but in order to inflict it you've got to have the capital to pay the legal beagles (the hounds of hell) ? Who or what is funding Michael Mann's "high sticking" racket of suing everyone who disagrees with him? I can't imagine all of those lawyers doing it on a contingency basis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOQJ50PwHNY
Also... the snows of Kilimanjaro. The glacier is supposed to be 'melting' there. Coincidentally, the two furthest-most points visible to each other on the planet are Mt. Kilimanjaro on the south side of the equator and Mt. Kenya on the north side of the equator. Though shaped differently, both are almost identical in height. Both have a glacier at the top. Funny how Mt. Kenya is never mentioned. It has the same weather conditions and same attitude-sensitive flora and fauna zones (tropical savanna to alpine) . Unlike mountains in other parts of the world that experience seasonal day sunlight hours changes summer winter, being equatorial, they have the same seasonal conditions - pretty much one steady-state season and day 365 days a year - 12 hour daylight and 12 hour night. Both low altitude bases are hot tropical, both peaks due to their high, thin air altitudes (19,000 ft) are perpetually no higher than - 3 F, so in F about 35 degrees below freezing, day in day out. Thus, not possible to 'melt'. The ice loss on Kilimanjaro is sublimation into the hyper-dry cold air. Unlike the Mt. Kenya glacier which has a typical descending flow shape, the Kilimanjaro glacier is a big tall block sitting on dark lava scree. Given its tall shape on level ground, it's very hard to add area to it, any snow sits on top of the block of ice. Snow landing on the black lava next to it can melt due to the black lava heated at the surface by the sun or it too just sublimates after a few days. So that lava ground area right next to the glacier block is dry. A localized drought has affected the snowfall. So, the sister peaks at Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya would have to rise in temperature at least 30 degrees to melt the glaciers. Not possible due to the reality of the extreme altitudes.
More for your files: DRUDGE had a link today to an article about the official poster islands of rising seas, the Tuvulu island chain, by satellite measurements, oddly gaining 2.9% land area "despite sea levels in the country rose 2X more than the global average."
What a ridiculous article. Happily nature isn't cooperating with the narrative, so it's going to have to be reworked - again. Plus, water as liquid seeks equilibrium. No way in the scientific laws known in physics can the 'seas' in the 'country' be rising 2X higher than worldwide, and that fact of liquid physics inconveniently includes every coastline around those islands.
I am so sorry Mr. Steyn, I couldn't read your entire article about the travesty of your legal fight with Mr Mann. It was making my stomach and head hurt too much. When a thinking man can have his patrimony and livelihood,and so his life, made vulnerable by such a obvious and foolish pretender and by the oxymoronic "DC Justice system" I become enraged and irrational in thought. I always believed I that I would not live to see the day that the civilized world I live in again returns to medieval levels of interpersonal violence. I always thought my children might not even. I am not so sure now.
Mark replies:
As I always say, the process is the punishment. That's true whether it's "the Russia investigation" or my own modest travails.
Are you aware of how many, many cases end up dying of old age?
Have you noticed how frikken cold it is?
It seems to me that YOU are the aggrieved party here. If you do not press your case for lost earnings, methinks the bad Mr. Mann will do what Lois Lerner did: Cop out to retirement.
But, of course, these people don't have any retirement boggles, do they? Like funding them?
Well, dispensing of the bad Dr. Mann is entirely besides the point at this pass, no? One must cross into the pale of some incredibly stupid institution to find a red hot warm-monger, no? But how to rid the World of his despicable shadow.....
Therein lies the rub...
But now we have Trump.
And I have HOPE.
And so do you.
God Bless.
Happy new year - same as the old year! Zundel redux!
"On January 3, (2018), Monika Schaefer was arrested at a court in Munich where she was attending the trial of lawyer Sylvia Stolz, who was being charged for comments she made in Switzerlaand — that's right, another country — several years ago. Monika was taken away in handcuffs and sent to a maximum security prison,
"Her brother Alfred reports: "Monika Schaefer was arrested on January 3 2018 while attending, as an observer, the bizarre inquisition hearings against the courageous Sylvia Stolz. This "trial" was for illegal words that Sylvia Stolz had spoken at the "Anti Censorship Coalition" (AZK) in Switzerland in 2012. About 45 minutes into the inquisition the "State Prosecutor" called for a surprise break, which was then used to arrest my courageous sister Monika. The only thing Monika did was watch quietly as the inquisition was dealing with Sylvia Stolz. These people had us under close observation and figured it was a good opportunity to demonstrate their "power", and intimidate us".
http://cafe.nfshost.com/?p=2153
My god - does anyone care that free speech is dead or that we are under the heel of the """elite"""?
Peter- thanks very much for posting this. I was glad to see a recent comment on the free speech issue, especially this particular story which I had seen on another blog. I have some good news to report and I shall do so in another comment. Cheers and Happy New Year.
All is not bleak on the free speech home front as we head into another wild and crazy New Year.
I don't know if Mark has ever written or spoken about the case of James Damore, the Google employee who had the temerity to actually question Google's biased employment practices, but his story is one of the most outrageous examples of corporate enforced political correctness that has come to light in recent years.
Mr. Damore in my estimation, is a nerdy tech genius who had a resume that places him in the top percentile of tech geniuses in the world, let alone a company like Google. There was only one insurmountable problem- James happens to be a white male genius of the more conservative political persuasion, something that is absolutely intolerable at Google, Inc. It was inevitable that after expressing some of his more "outrageous" views at various company functions, Damore was fired after enduring a gauntlet of threats and intimidation from management and fellow employees.
I think Mark and his readers will be glad to know that James Damore has now filed a class action lawsuit against Google alleging, among other things, discrimination on the basis of perceived conservative viewpoints, male gender and Caucasian race. The complaint by Harmeet Dhillon is excellent reading and I am including a link to the document below.
Speaking of Ms. Dhillon and her most excellent law firm, I would like to urge Mark to immediately fire whoever is representing him in the Mann vs. Steyn case and to hire Harmeet to represent him. I have worked in the legal profession for over 30 years and she is one of the best attorneys I've seen. Maybe Mark will feel the same after he reads this complaint.
https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs-Google-Class-Action-Lawsuit#download
Not good. Where's Amnesty Int'l when one needs them? If the Swiss get all sorts of humanitarian glow by funding Swiss-staffed Human rights lawyers teams to Africa to get all huffy (as in we can get your funds frozen) at how, say, Central African Republic is detaining people, demanding to see detained persons and make sure they aren't being abused and are supplied with advocates, then they can send the lawyer teams down the street. Do the Swiss need African governments suddenly noticing they seem to have a double standard?
I'm a science guy, Ph.D. in Physical/Theoretical Chem from a top-10 program. Even though "climate change" is not my area of study, it is rather easy to recognize the many signs of Fake Science embodied in it:
* "The subject is closed..." In REAL science, EVERYTHING is a theorem, and the subject is NEVER closed.
* "The numbers show..." But ONLY if the "researcher" is paid based upon having the "correct" data & interpretation.
* "Historical data show..." See above comment. (Why is "history" ignored before some convenient date?)
* "99% of scientists agree..." HAH! One can hardly get "99%" of scientists to agree on ANYTHING.
Perhaps I have an advantage over scientists and others who are interested in this field of research: I grew up in west Texas and I know horse dung when I see it.
Snake oil salesmen have always, and always will, sound and look (and smell) like snake oil salesmen. The brand of snake oil doesn't affect the color of the salesmen's stripes.
My wife grew up in West Texas and I lived there 3 years, Tech graduate. Horse dung, cow dung, or dung dung, it is all easy to spot on the high plains!
Dear Mark, as you fight the good fight in defense of free speech did I miss a post regarding The President's "trolling?" or "threat?" to the press about revoking licenses?
Flawed science; an understatement indeed.
Finally got through the book which reinforced my contention that this Al Gore-inspired hysteria, "supported" by Mr. Mann's "research" over Global Warming is claptrap. What is the big revelation - of course the Earth warms - and cools. Wow.
In the present day with three major hurricanes devastating so much and so many in the U.S. and Caribbean, the "see-I-told-you-so" bunch have their knickers in a knot once more in support of non-science.
Gotta run - need to do my part in suppressing that cow flatulence. Oh me - oh my.
Tom in Missouri
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Hey in ancient Mayan & Aztec culture they sacrificed people to their weather gods....so the crops would grow etc. the priests were not that different than today's alarmists. The only difference was that they were cutting out the hearts of the sacrificial people. I am sure that those charlatans were thought about as the educated elite/ experts in their day. Perhaps history will still repeat itself?Edit (in 4 minutes)
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Mr Steyn you have been a beacon of sense, incisive wit and an observable figure of determination to fight for free speech, the acknowledgement of the threat of the Islamification of Europe and the UK, and the utter nonsense of the climate change mafia. I am and remain a determined supporter. I am a Humberside Police employee and have witnessed the consequent horrors of immigration which I cannot post for obvious reasons. Sir, for those of us not allowed to speak, please, please keep speaking. A de Mowbray
Mark,
A while ago, I wrote in the comments that to increase the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere from .04% to .05%, it would require the burning of 1 Trillion metric tons of carbon and all plant life would have to cease photosynthesis. I erred in my calculation. To raise the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to .05%, it would require the burning of 144 Billion metric tons of carbon and all plant life would have to cease photosynthesis.
That's still a lot of carbon.
This is why I signed up for to become a year long Steyn member. Check out what happens when a conservative makes an argument about defamation:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/29/media/judge-dismisses-sarah-palin-lawsuit-new-york-times/index.html
Dismissed in a few months.
But when it's a leftist attacking, 6 years, and if I'm reading it right, it is to test out their law, and you have to pay for it.
Where is Mann getting his money? Seems very unfair.
I enjoyed your comments about the media not standing up as a group, putting Charlie Hebdo in the cross-hairs.
I'm doing my little bit. . .
You've reached the underlying question, Neal, follow the money. In standing up for the tree ring readers Mr Steyn isn't tackling a man, he is taking on the carbon tax & mitigation big money and banking industry - a new creation. Polluters being paid to stop polluting has led to an increase in polluters polluting more in order to be paid to stop. This tempest in a tea cup is something I hadn't really been aware of. I had seen a hockey stick cartoon or two but didn't now of the academic and political turmoil as I'm not really in direct communication with either group.
And while I own a copy of An Inconvenient Truth and likely read it, it would have been just one book out of a stack and doesn't stand out as the best in my recollection, on the risk of human impact on planetary and individual health. This book is older now but has retained its used book value, an excerpt from something I wrote elsewhere: by Joe Thornton, Pandora's Poison, Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy, (MIT, 2000) (pages 151-152) * Inuit children exposed to organochlorines in breast milk and had more ear infections and altered T-cell ratios, a sign of immunosuppression compared to formula fed infants. The formula fed infants had lower blood levels of organochlorines than the breast fed infants.
I like to get to know a topic in detail and have been reading the Kindle version of Mr. Steyn's book this morning. Its case is made in the introduciton and is dense reading for non-tree ring readers, however #28 makes a good legal case point - statistics can be used fraudulently. Setting up software to seek out hockey stick patterns is the art of manipulating data for some purpose such as politically selling a big money tax scheme. Goals to reduce pollution are vitally important and shouldn't involve a system that profits by taxing that goal - that's not quite accurate but the carbon tax system is flawed.
A free MOOC on coursera.org by The World Bank Group called From Climate Science to Action provides a good overview of the real risks that are already happening around the world and strategies that real communities are taking to try to cope with change and manage climate change to help reduce risk of natural disasters.
Maybe Mr. Steyn will get a Nobel Prize for his work presenting an organized voice for the 100 plus scientists who want real science to be properly represented in scientific and policy making discussions.
Looks like Dr. Tim Ball beats Mann's lawfare case in Canada: http://www.newscats.org/?p=10216
Hopefully, Mr. Steyn's travails with Mann in the cesspool of the D.C. judicial system will be equally successful.
Great news. I hope Mark Steyn gets a similar result.
Well, how about this: https://www.spartareport.com/2017/07/michael-mann-refuses-hand-data-judge-climate-change-trial/
How do we enforce court orders in civil matters? Dismissal with reimbursement to the Defendants for their expenses.
I have made an error in assuming the spartareport was about Mr. Steyn's U.S. District Court case. Even so, surely the original "hockeystick" data must equally figure in the American suit.This quote explains:
"Michael Mann, who chose to file what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six long years ago, has astonished legal experts by refusing to comply with the court direction to hand over all his disputed graph's data. Mann's iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN's IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of 'man-made global warming.'"
I just read the first page, no, the very first page, of "A Disgrace to the Profession," a page of ten quotations. I've stopped reading long enough to come here and say that I didn't know how bad Mann's reputation is.
Keep reading. The book is a masterpiece. Can't wait for Vol 2.
And who knows?...Perhaps volumes 3, 4, 5, 6,.....Depends on how long the Climate Change scam keeps going. Professional criminals keep out of jail advice is, "Never give up the scam." Global Cooling back in the day. Liberal solution: Give us some of your property and give up some of your liberty and we'll save you. Global Warming. Liberal solution the same. Climate Change. Liberal solution: ditto. Do we see a pattern here?
Mark,
The phenomenon that Wallace describes seems very like that which occurred when Professor Michael Bellesiles wrote his book "Arming America" wherein he pretended to show that personal arms were not common amongst colonists and what arms did exist were often poorly maintained. He hoped to change the discourse on the history of personal arms (and I'm sure the current discourse on the second amendment) in early colonial America by cherry picking certain historic information while ignoring exculpatory information, often from the same texts from which he quoted. In addition to that he was caught replacing words in the texts to completely change their meaning and better support his thesis.
In Bellesiles case he was smoked out by individuals like Clayton Cramer and others who showed that Bellesiles was "adjusting" the historical record to support his viewpoint. The difference here is that Bellesiles suffered the loss of his job at Emory University and his Bancroft Prize for historical non-fiction. However he did not need to beg for a new teaching position as both Central Conn. State University and Trinity College hired him. Happiness is having liberal support to provide a warm soft landing when one falls from grace. I have little doubt that even if Michael Mann were to finally be called to account for his shenanigans, he would find a comfortable sinecure somewhere in academia to keep the bills paid.
Wallace draws the analogy between what is going on amongst the climatistas and Lysenko. It's no wonder to me that there would be a common thread there. No doubt you are familiar with the former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the west and settled in Canada, . He states in interviews that the KGB's "active measures" against the west had as a principal component the destruction of the west's self confidence
by way of introducing false information about western achievements and a gradual denigration of traditional morality. He said it was a long, slow process taking 15 to 20 years to reach fruition because that was the time frame for a new generation of citizens to be inculcated and to reach maturity. He also said that even "Comrades Brezhnev and Andropov would be amazed" at how successful these programs were. He went on to say that there was no longer any necessity to continue these active measures on the part of the KGB because professors, journalists and politicians in the west were continuing the effort either consciously or unconsciously.
If Bezmenov's time frame to change society is correct, and I think is, it will take 15 to 20 years of teaching real history and morality to a new generation to turn the tide. How likely is that?
You and others like you are doing yeoman's work in that effort. Thanks for everything you do.
Rick
I told my son's that we are running out of oxygen because of all this combustion. Of course they know that is absurd. Plants give off oxygen. But that CO2 is increasing sounds true to them since there has been such a campaign, even though the levels rely on the same equilibrium principles. Science versus brainwashing. Which will win?
Whilst under siege, one must enjoy humor, hopefully at its best. The Jury, Season 1, Episode 12 of "Early Edition" (1997 CBS before the network collapsed) shows justice at its American (Chicago) best. If memory serves me, there is a hockey stick involved in this one.
Dilbert takes on Michael Mann...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-05-14