Mann-made climate change turns up the heat on Steyn
Michael Mann, the professor who created the climate-change “hockey stick”, announced over the weekend his intention to sue National Review over Mark’s Corner post “Football and Hockey“.
You can see the letter from Professor Mann’s lawyer here.
You can see various reactions here, here, here, here and here.
UPDATE: Rand Simberg responds here, as do Discover Magazine, David Appell, Instapundit, the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, the Lesbian Conservative, the Pundette, and the excitable lads at Daily Kos. Kathy Shaidle is looking forward to it.
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Rand Simberg says what we all know here at WUWT:
But does he really want to litigate the hockey stick in a court of law? Does he in fact want to dig into any of his unscientific behavior in a venue in which he will be under oath, and he won’t have sympathetic colleagues covering for him? Does he really want those emails to be read aloud in court? And has he talked to the University of Virginia? Even if they continue to fight the FOIA, how will they fight a subpoena for the missing emails in a civil lawsuit?
If this goes forward, discovery will be very interesting, and very entertaining. I suspect that Peter Sinclair will end up choking on his popcorn.
As predicted, now the Streisand effect is kicking in. I think the message being sent from Steyn and Simberg to Mann is: bring it.
Andrew Montford points out this hilarious Twitter exchange:
[In related news, this Twitter exchange between Mann and Ryan Radia of CEI was interesting
RyanRadia .@MichaelEMann Why did you delete my comment on your FB page re: defamation of public figures and the actual malice standard?
@MichaelEMann You are with *CEI*, front group dedicated to dishonest smears & promotion of disinformation. That’s why. Take it elsewhere.
RyanRadia .@MichaelEMann By your logic re: CEI, wouldn’t I be justified in ignoring anything from Penn State academics because of the Freeh Report?]
Bazinga! It looks like Dr. Mann is already in over his head when it comes to logical arguments. I predict he’ll back down from this and start stonewalling much like he has reportedly already done related to his lawsuit with Tim Ball, which was asking for certain documents in discovery that Mann doesn’t want to give up. It seems Dr. Mann just doesn’t want those UVa emails to come to light.
Dr. Scott Mandia, aka “Supermandia”, leader of Mann’s legal offense defense fund, may have to wade into this morass and rescue Dr. Mann from himself.
From Scott Mandia’s blog he captions this photo: The Caped Climate Crusader: Battling the evil forces of global warming deniers. “Faster than global T rise, more powerful than a stranded polar bear, able to leap over rising seas in a single bound.”
If he can leap over rising seas, why the hip waders? Must be for wading through something deep, but what could it be?
Best advice I’ve seen so far: Don’t tug on Superman’s cape
If the affair is not finally silenced, and if it ends up in court, and if it is a civil dispute ( I take it in penal cases it is different), the winner will probably be the side who has more money. Because they will go on, and on, until the poorer side is ruined, and has to abandon the fight.
And the Mann side has much much more money than the side which questions the truth of their asserts, and of their published data.
So ; would it be possible to send money to help , with the proviso that once the case definitely won, and the costs compensated, one would get one’s money back ? Of course, in case of not winning, the donations would be gone forever.
But the case should be won, if allowed to go to the end.
There seems to be little loyalty to Penn, even amongst its star athletes. I wonder what the reaction would be if Mann got ‘defrocked’.
wow does that excitement mean they all want to transfer?
I thought maybe the excitement was for an announcement that Michael Mann had been fired (jkof course, few students know or care who he is).
I
I know that what Mann did with “hiding the decline” was ethically wrong, but is it right to call him the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science”? That’s just the same as AGW alarmists labeling skeptics as holocaust “deniers”. We need to move away from this kind of ridiculous ad hominem attacks and focus on the science.
I like this one:
James Delingpole laments: ‘Damn you, @MarkSteynOnline … Damn you, @MarkSteynOnline . How come you get to be sued by Michael ‘hide the decline’ Mann and not me?’
from http://climatedepot.com
Meanwhile foundation dollars expended to support these non-green voices have grown dramatically as well.
http://www.rbf.org/sites/default/files/SustainableDevelopmentProgramReview.pdf
Funding “non-green” voices? What would these voices be, skeptics and people who don’t believe in climate change? Sounds as if they are buying them off…
Anybody here been offered a check from Rockefeller?…
@Boris Gimbarzevsky , July 24, 2012 at 10:34 pm
Boris, you put the case better than me.
Michael D Smith, July 25, 2012 at 4:29 am
“I like this one: James Delingpole laments: ‘Damn you, @MarkSteynOnline … Damn you, @MarkSteynOnline . How come you get to be sued by Michael ‘hide the decline’ Mann and not me?’
James Delingpole has some form on this topic, in an article in the Daily Telegraph he once described Professor Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the climategate affair, as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting and scientific-method abusing”. Furthermore he also described scientists at the University of East Anglia as “mendacious” and said that they were “untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions”.
The University of East Anglia duly complained to the Press Complaints Commission. But Delingpole had chosen his words carefully and was able to point to specific climategate emails which supported his case. The Commission found in favour of James Delingpole. You can see their judgement here
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100083071/uea-the-sweet-smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning/
It makes pleasant reading.
Dr Mann will have to do a number of things to win this suit. First, he will have to convince the judge and jury that he is an innocent victim of the raging Climate Wars. He will argue that all he wants to do is serve Mankind by his research into Climate Change; he is an innocent scientist who only cares about the Truth. NRO and Steyn’s vicscious libel, therefore has stained Mann’s sterling reputation. Secondly, he will have to prove that his MBH9x studies were not at all controversial. Only Right Wing political operators (funded by Big Oil) made them so. The Right Wing media hit men such as NRO and Steyn are all in cahoots with Big whatever.
This is where the fun begins. All it would take to shatter Mann’s contention is to find various on-line or public events where Mann called fellow scientists or sceptics “Deniers”. And NRO and Steyn will most certainly contend that Dr Mann may be a scientists, but he is also as rapid a partisan as anyone. His twitter, FB, and other online posts, not to mention the Climategate emails will bear this out. I seriously doubt any decent lawyer retained by Mann would allow this case to go forward. Besides the costs, there will be a flood of supeonas and depositions that will more than likely uncover things Mann certainly doesn’t want uncovered. And like others have already said, does he really want to litigate the Hockey Stick? Does he really want to litigate again the Climategate emails? How will Trenbeth, Schmidt, Steig and Jones or Biffra react to federal supeonas?
This suit will wither on the vine before it is quietly pulled. Which is too bad. It would certainly be entertaining, as well as devastating to the Team.
I think Mann has a case… Especially if the offending article could have just as easily used words like “sloppy science reporting” instead of “fraud”.
The ‘fraud’ is the pretense to science—i.e., we’re talking about a very clear example of scientific fraud.
“I wonder what the reaction would be if Mann got ‘defrocked’.”
…all 659 of his approved non-troll Facebook friends will be shocked and outraged.
So it has finally comes to this. Left wing AGW armegeddonist Mann vs. right wing islamists-your-soup armegeddonist Mark Steyn. Steyn’s prophecies of an overwhelmingy islamic western world have no more scientific (or political, for that matter) basis than Mann’s prophecies of an overheated climate disrupted world.
But yeah. I pretty much agree with everyone here. Steyn will likely eat Mann and his Big Tobacco-Lobby lawyers alive.
Any magazine will measure the exchange rate of legal action (regardless of whether or not they are bringing suit or defending against one). At a certain level, the exchange rate changes from “pay for pay” to “sh** for pay”. This letter threatens an action that I think will be considered by the magazine as being within the latter exchange rate and will offer a retraction, apology, and rewording of the article in question. Nothing posted here in comments has changed my mind on this one.
To be sure, I think Mann leaps over many inconventient facets of his research and comes to unsupportable over-reaching conclusions. In other words, sloppy research. I wouldn’t let him research the difference between light and regular beer, let alone climate. In my view, sloppy peer-reviewed research is by far the greater sin thus has the potential to wreck far greater damage.
It’s all about one word: ‘fraudulent’.
Okay, Mann’s done bad work, but was there an intent to defraud?
Still, Mann’s in the proverbial glass house on this one. Expose some of the rot in Mann’s work early so that his would-be advocates like Trenberth suddenly find themselves occupied elsewhere when asked to testify, lest they look like fools themselves.
Climate Crusader Daft Wader?
Okay, Mann’s done bad work, but was there an intent to defraud?
In science abandonment of devotion to honesty demonstrates intent
Mike’s fanzine club is really working itself up to a near orgasmic ecstasy at the propect of a “Denier” being taken to court.
I, for one, really hope that the National Review sticks to its guns and Mann follows through with his threat.
The look on the fanzine’s faces when “discovery” clicks in will be priceless.
PS I see no mention of the Wegman report in the lawyer’s letter.
Cherry-picking again?
I guess we had better sue for being called deniers, aye? Waahhh! I’m not denying anything!!
Mann’s response to scientific criticism of his stick is contemptuous and unscientific, thus fraudulant. A scientist who disallows conflicting viewpoints is a a fraud. A scientist who hides his data is likely a fraud. Work that is passed by political means and doesn’t follow rigorous scientific criticism is scientific fraud.
@JEM,
“It’s all about one word: ‘fraudulent’.
Okay, Mann’s done bad work, but was there an intent to defraud?”
But Steyn is entitled to his opinion. And being a journalist/writer, Steyn can argue that from his point of view MBH9x is a fraud. Mann will have a difficult time even getting a court date this decade if that’s all he has to complain about. The paparazzi use all types of inflamatory language all the time, and there isn’t an appeals court in the nation that won’t defend their right to do so. Besides, Dr Mann has used similar language himself (one can argue that Climate “Denier” is just as defamatory as “fraudulent”.
Steyn comments on the threatened lawsuit here:
http://www.steynonline.com/5084/hockey-sticking-it-to-the-mann
It’s a hoot. And he praises and links WUWT.
We have the Pildown Man Hoax that was a fraud, right? So, we have the Mann Hoax and it isn’t a fraud? The only real difference is that it took 50 years to bust the Piltdown Man Hoax and another 50 years to know who all was involved in the hoax.
This suit ain’t going to happen, because if it did Steyn will be mopping the floor with Mann for a year straight and Mann will never recover.
Steyn is a top-shelf humorist, every article is tounge in cheek. The Corner is Nat. Review’s quick blip story; it does not go into detail, ever. Steyn will come back with more on Mann’s crooked work, mark my words! Get ready, here it comes. The stick is straight: it’s Mann who’s crooked.
“Media war of words erupts in anticipation of another global warming courtroom battle. We take time to see how latest events connected to Climategate’s controversial scientist Michael Mann stack up alongside Mann’s legal shoot out versus Dr. Tim Ball.”
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=9999
I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry. It ended badly for Wilde, as I recall.
I’ll bet Mann’s friends, unlike Wilde’s, are egging him on.
“Kevin R. says: July 25, 2012 at 12:00 pm I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry. It ended badly for Wilde, as I recall.”
This isn’t the British legal system over here. Our libel laws are different. Just search the comments to see.
“Poems of Our Climate says: July 25, 2012 at 11:41 am The stick is straight: it’s Mann who’s crooked.”
That gets my Best Comment of the Day Award.
@JP – Oh, I don’t think Mann’s got a leg to stand on, he is a public figure and seems to have no trouble with that when he’s the one doing the defaming.
Further, there’s any number of little gotchas with the hockey stick – whether it’s the cherry-picked data (“Dr Mann, is it correct to say that removing six trees from your proxy data makes the ‘hockey stick’ curvature go away? Yes, or no, sir.”) or the pathetic R-squared and Mann’s attempt to hide it – that’d leave all his work badly tainted if brought to the fore in a court of law.
For all of you questioning Mann’s intent to commit fraud, ask yourselves why he ordered Wahl to delete emails related to the East Anglia Climate Gate fraud. The Mann is knee deep in fraud. He bathes in it. The stink of it isn’t going to wash off.