By Chris Horner, ATI
Michael Mann made his way back to the Commonwealth of Virginia yesterday to watch his U.S. lawyer reprise the dark conspiracy theories previously weaved throughout his Canadian lawsuit against Tim Ball for repeating the old joke about “belong[ing] in the State Pen, not Penn State”.
The forum was a hearing in the American Tradition Institute’s Freedom of Information Act (VA) case against the University of Virginia (UVa) for certain records sent to or from Mann accounts while he was at UVa. That period is when the chatter about deleting records to circumvent FOI laws and other wagon-circling took place among the self-appointed “Hockey Team”.
That sort of paranoia sounded even worse in the spoken word that it reads in a brief. The judge gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head when my colleague David Schnare wondered aloud, when his turn came, about responding to all of the ad hominem. Enough already, this gesture seemed to say.
The Court allowed Mann to enter as an intervenor in this dispute, from the bench and without explanation. So there’s little we can offer there except that, when all is considered, this does provide the Court with the path of fewest problems (though hardly none, if Mann’s record in pleadings and argument is any basis to judge by; possibly some allies will try and delay matters yet again when we next proceed).
Given Mann’s argument was almost entirely limited to a vast right-wing conspiracy if one involving some names I’d never even heard of and in an apparently studious avoidance of the applicable law, we can only surmise the rationale for this move was grounded in equities found elsewhere than that curious display.
ATI opposed Mann’s motion to intervene simply because he offered no principled basis to intervene. We will appeal therefore with an eye toward settling the question as to what rights, or other considerations, justify a faculty member’s intervention in a FOIA case. For now we welcome Mann to this case to defend the content of his emails in a public forum. Presumably, just more conspiracy theorizing won’t suffice anymore.
We then proceeded to UVa’s effort to reopen the Protective Order, seeking to substitute themselves for us as the party reviewing and selecting exemplar emails from the cache they now admit to possessing. That it would be reopened was pro forma after Mann was deemed to have interests at stake, if what these interests are was left unstated.
The Court noted the distrust between the parties, particularly ours of UVa after all of what they have done, and so did not allow UVA to assume that role. This was despite that in advance they and Mann had agreed to jointly stipulate to this (his lawyer’s rather odd, earlier argument notwithstanding, see below).
But, as we argued, UVa’s utterly terrible record on this matter does not inspire confidence that a fair review and representative sample is to be had from them. Their ill-fit for the newly adopted pose of independent arbiter is somewhat betrayed by their legal bills fighting the AG’s Civil Investigative Demand now heading toward a million dollars. Then there is the enormous pressure from their faculty and pressure groups — which they finally copped to, after arguing previously in pleadings that this was all in our heads. Speaking of its track record.
And, finally, UVa has essentially the same interest as Mann at stake and is no more a suitable arbiter than Mann himself (per Mann, that’s “embarrassment”). To say UVa is aggressively focused on limiting the damage of what occurred in its program, with still not a finger toward self-policing lifted to date, is also something of an understatement.
So we have until a scheduled December 20 hearing to agree to a third party reviewer, cost and methodology. If we cannot agree the court will impose a process.
Toward that end, Mann’s attorney informed the Court that, well, Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received, thereby not only raising questions about his correspondents but making his future objections as to reviewers something less than entirely relevant or credible.
Cost is to be split at worst three ways, one presumes. Mann is surely going to be raising money for this. So, we won’t be shy, either. We can’t match the cool million the University of Virginia is pouring into their effort to make the embarrassment the revelations in ClimateGate emails to and from Mann’s UVa accounts has caused them go away. But every little bit helps.
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Oh, don’t worry Peter, I’m making a list and checking it twice!
davidmhoffer says:
“David Ball quips that Mann should be in the State Penn in stead of Penn State and Mann sues him. That’s a sense of humor?”
Well, l found it amusing. The biter bit and all that.
caerbannog666 (@caerbannog666) says:
November 5, 2011 at 12:35 pm
And not one shred of evidence that it has anything to do with Co2 or mankind. Everyone here has always maintained that the we are warming. The cause is the point of contention. Please try to keep up with the group.
You guys are very entertaining. Like watching Micheál Flatley dancing as fast as you can. It ain’t gonna help. The public are onto you and we are watching too.
@David Ball
caerbannog666’s analysis shows that the warming is real rather than an artifact of how someone else might have processed the data. That is all. It does not attempt to attribute the warming. You are wrong, however, to say that everyone here has always maintained we are warming. But perhaps what you are getting at is that there is no evidence that the “GW is predominantly A”. Well, there are mountains of evidence. Basic physics says CO2 is a GHG, hockey sticks (lots of them) show unprecedented warming relative to at least the last millennium, examination of natural factors show that they can’t explain the warming, etc., etc. The evidence is all around. The only way to not see it is to take the attitude, “I don’t want there to be AGW, so I will focus on any crumb of uncertainty or doubt while ignoring the huge mass of evidence I don’t like. Oh, and I’ll repeat some lies, too.”
David Ball said:
Everyone here has always maintained that the we are warming.
So the surface temperature record is good enough to conclude that the observed warming is real, but the cause is in dispute. Is that your take on this issue?
Don’t act like an idiot troll. We live in an interglacial period during one of the coldest and longest ice ages of the Earth’s past two billion years. If the Earth’s climate had not warmed during the last 10,000 years and longer, the Earth would have been trending closely towards becoming a frozen over iceball of a world. Since this post-glacial period warming is overwhelmingly obvious from every kind of anecdotal and other evidence in the millenia before the invention of the thermometer made it possible for any kind of an instrumental temperature record to exist, your strawman argument is idiotic and inappropriate in the extreme. Since the Earth’s climate has warmed precipitously every time there has ben an integlacial period without the presence of a human civilization, it must be expected that this most recent warming of the past 400 years is part of the ongoing interglacial period, otherwise another glacial period of the current ice age would be resuming ice age conditions. The Earth’s past natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dioxide levels are far larger than anything experienced since humans existed. Demonstrating that humans are capable of and have made any knid of significant contribution to the already existing and naturally occuring post-glacial interglacial period warming the Earth always experiences under such circumstances in the absence of human civilizations is the true issue in contention.
D. Patterson says:
November 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Don’t act like an idiot troll. We live in an interglacial period during one of the coldest and longest ice ages of the Earth’s past two billion years. If the Earth’s climate had not warmed during the last 10,000 years and longer, the Earth would have been trending closely towards becoming a frozen over iceball of a world. Since this post-glacial period warming is overwhelmingly obvious from every kind of anecdotal and other evidence in the millenia before the invention of the thermometer made it possible for any kind of an instrumental temperature record to exist, your strawman argument is idiotic and inappropriate in the extreme. Since the Earth’s climate has warmed precipitously every time there has ben an integlacial period without the presence of a human civilization, it must be expected that this most recent warming of the past 400 years is part of the ongoing interglacial period, otherwise another glacial period of the current ice age would be resuming ice age conditions. The Earth’s past natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dioxide levels are far larger than anything experienced since humans existed. Demonstrating that humans are capable of and have made any knid of significant contribution to the already existing and naturally occuring post-glacial interglacial period warming the Earth always experiences under such circumstances in the absence of human civilizations is the true issue in contention.
——————–
Dear D, It’s a question of timescales. In the geological past, “precipitous” may mean a change that takes a thousand years. The recent warming (which we all agree on, yes?) is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change – that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.
I will state it once again. You do not get to control the discussion. There is no evidence for attribution. I know what the data says.
John B says:
“The recent warming (which we all agree on, yes?) is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change…”
Wrong.
“…that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.”
Wrong again. The point of the hockey sticks is to generate grant money by alarming the public.
Quips about Penn State and the state pen are well founded.
It appears there are no bounds to what they will do to cover up the misdeeds of their employees..
Breaking news:
Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley, 57, and Gary C. Schultz, 62, senior vice president for finance and business at Penn State, are charged with perjury, a felony, and a summary offense of failure to report, a violation of the Child Protective Services Law.
Read more: http://www.centredaily.com/2011/11/05/2975648/attorney-general-indicted-penn.html#ixzz1cyfrZzNA
That is false nonsense. Even the warmist research papers have reported very abrupt climate changes of 7K in one to ten years on about a dozen occasions in just the Late Pleistocene to Holocene alone. As further research is conducted with some of these relatively recent and new developments in research capabilities, more and more evidence of abrupt climate and temperature swings are being discovered. Abrupt in these examples means climactic changes between glacial and interglacial conditions occurring in as little as a year to decades, rather than millenia.
Current changes are not in the least unprecedented, not even within the recent memory of the current generations. Even more rapid increases in temperature occurred on or about 1934 and perhaps about 1905, long before anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere became significant relative to current emissions. Members of our family remember very well how they had to supplement their water supplies from the rainfall in the cisterns, because the prolonged heat and drought had badly depleted the normally reliable well water supplies. My great grandparents and great-uncle, who was a U.S. Army surgeon with the AEF in France during World War I, described for me how the rapid warming of the climate affected their farm crops and the public health in the decades before the First World War.
The hockey sticks you mention are faulty fantasy models based upon false assumptions about incomplete and inaccurate data. They are incapable of accurately predicting natural or unnatural changes in climate in any centennial or less time frame.
“is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change – that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.” – This is a specious claim. Not even close to the truth and you know it. Monumental fail.
When I look at the Vostok graph, I see a long series of hockey sticks going in both directions. I don’t see anything different with our current blip.
@Al Gored: Timescales! Vostok will not tell you what happened over a few decades.
@D. Patterson: 1934??? Puh-lease! The only place 1934 was significant is the USA, and the USA is not world. I’m sure your family has aecdotes, but anecdotes are invariably local. The proxy record may be incomplete and uncertain, but when all the proxy studies largely agree, I’ll take that over your family’s, or anyone else’s, anecdotes.
No one claimed the Vostok ice cores would be used for such purposes in the last few decades. You’re being misrepresentative to avoid the obvious conclusion the data contradicts what you claimed.
There you go again trying to be clever and misrepresenting the comments again. 1905 and 1934 are within the coverage of the instrumental measurement period. 1934 was the warmest year in the instrumental period for the United States, so long as you reject recent attempts by Hansen and others to adjust the original temperature measurements to make them appear cooler than originally reported. In any event, the U.S. in the early 20th Century experienced slightly warmer or similarly warm temperatures as the end of the century and the beginning of the 21st Century, despite the alleged increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The anecdotes were juust that, illustrating what the instrumental record already reported to us.
The proxy studies indicate the Earth went from glacial to interglacial conditions and interglacial conditions to glacial conditions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene time and again in only one to ten years, which is very very abrupt. The temperature changes of the 20th and 21st Centuries are certainly not unprecedented in the least, whether looking at the most recent one million year time scale or the last one hunded year time scale.
PhilJourdan says:
November 4, 2011 at 4:47 am
Sorry bill, but you are just plain wrong. Perhaps it is because I have had Internet email since 1990, but I long ago learned that what you email on company time (or the tax payer dime) is not yours. I have no problem allowing any and all to see every email I have received and sent using company/state owned email servers. While I am sure they are not as exciting as the fiction in yours or Mann’s in and out box, mine have nothing to hide.
I suspect you mean “no one who has anything to hide wants all their emails to be released”. I figure most of mine have been viewed by people who they were not intended for, and I stand by everyone.
You mean like McKittrick who hides behind Canadian exceptions to their FOI law to keep his emails secret and has bragged about in blogs!
So, now you choosee to argue that e-mail which is lawfully entitiled to be held private must instead be released to the public, while e-mail which is lawfully required to be released to the public who funded their production must instead be kept private in the hands of public employees who conspired to unlawfully convert the e-mails to their own private use.
Somehow, I cannot say that I am surprised by your oxymoron thinking.
Phil – Sorry, did you get waylaid on the way to the post? I thought this blog was about Mann. Perhaps you need to take that right at Albuquerque? You know, the one where you try to divert the topic at hand?
I said my company email. I am not familiar with McKittrick’s email account since that subject is not part of this discussion. Perhaps you can ask Anthony if you can host a guest column where you can then create the topic of your choice. Until then, my statements stand, unmodified, and 100% accurate.
“Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.”
izen said:
Not sure why you would want to mess around with data and code over a decade out of date to ‘verify’ the results of a paper that has not only been confirmed but significantly improved upon by more recent work, but “try this link for the code and data” –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/codes/WA_original.tar
Thanks for a “teachable moment” that perfectly illustrates the controversy surrounding Mann and his colleagues. This does not link to Mann’s code or data, but instead to Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann’s “reproduction of Mann’s MBH 98 algorithm” (paraphrased from their paper’s introduction). Rather than release his data and methods for independent verification, Mann had his buddies “verify his results” and “interpret” his work for the rest of the scientific community. But this is “Pal Review” on steroids, not independent verification. It is however, part of what Phil Jones meant when he said he and Kevin Trenberth would “redefine the peer review process.”
Wahl and Ammann’s paper, (like MBH 98 and others that want to convince us that natural variation plays no significant role in temperature fluctuations in the last half of the 20th century), embodies the phrase “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/Wahl_ClimChange2007.pdf
I recommend reading it, but be warned: it’s clear as mud, filled with mind numbing obfuscation, and its utter lack of clarity makes it painful to read.
The point is that over a decade later, Mann continues to refuse to turn over taxpayer funded work. And from the sidelines, his supporters continue to try to confound, confuse, and misdirect us away from the point. Mann’s e-mails may show he committed financial fraud, they may show he committed scientific fraud, or they may show he did nothing wrong at all. In the end, his legacy won’t be his climate research, it will be his steadfast refusal to follow the scientific method. At this point, only complete disclosure of his data, methods, and e-mails can salvage his reputation.
D. Patterson says:
November 8, 2011 at 1:33 am
time scale or the last one hunded year time scale.
Phil. says:
November 7, 2011 at 4:55 pm
[….]
“You mean like McKittrick who hides behind Canadian exceptions to their FOI law to keep his emails secret and has bragged about in blogs!”
So, now you choosee to argue that e-mail which is lawfully entitiled to be held private must instead be released to the public, while e-mail which is lawfully required to be released to the public who funded their production must instead be kept private in the hands of public employees who conspired to unlawfully convert the e-mails to their own private use.
That is the argument being used by most here, UVA has released the emails which it is lawfully required to and is submitting those which it believes are entitled to be held private to adjudication by the court.