Readers may recall Dr. Mann’s emotional hullabaloo over an NRO published Mark Steyn editorial here. NRO responded to Dr. Mann’s legal threat today, and the headline is priceless.
NRO’s headline is succinct and to the point, I like it. Here’s the response from NRO editor Rich Lowry:
And this is where you come in. If Mann goes through with it, we’re probably going to call on you to help fund our legal fight and our investigation of Mann through discovery. If it gets that far, we may eventually even want to hire a dedicated reporter to comb through the materials and regularly post stories on Mann.
My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else. If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country.
He’s going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world. In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn’t stopped him before.
Heh, how well can Mike pound sand? Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: The response from NRO’s attorney to Dr. Mann’s attorney is here (PDF)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Don’t you people ever get tired of declaring victories that never materialize?
REPLY: Ah, the “you people” label, always a dead giveaway. Well, it is the best Mann headline evah, and I think you’ll like the next post coming up, in about an hour. – Anthony
Mark Steyn explains further in: Stick it where the global warming dont shine with links to numerous posts.
Dr. Mann: BRING. IT. ON.
Mark Steyn was hauled before the kangaroo kourt known as the human rights tribunal here in Canada. He prevailed against those anti-democratic bozos and will do the same if Mann has the walnuts to follow through.
In Mann’s mind he just KNOWS he can’t be wrong. And that sums up the entire AGW argument…
One of the many questions I have about this whole business is: how long will people be able to defend a curve that shows a breathtaking acceleration in temperature – and that ends in 1999? Or do they not notice the values on the x-axis? Or is the curve somehow transmogrified in their eyes so that the righthand side is forever at the present?
Richard Courtney @2.17am
That is a very good piece you have penned, thank you.
@stephenparrish
“Google mark steyn, big city lib and shagged sheep. Long but worth it.”
I really appreciated the link – absolutely classic example of the stark difference between schooling and education, between being an academic and a scholar. Mark is a well educated scholar who needed no brick and mortar achieve both. That means by a process of elimination, you can discover who is the academic with some schooling.
Those who underestimate the capabilities of the educated scholar and overestimate the skills and depth of a schooled academic will be backing Team Arrogant®.
As a founding member, one of Mann’s repeated acts is the underestimation of the capabilities of otherwise ordinary people who spot errors and home in on the root cause, in his case, deliberate misrepresentation of the facts in a printed article which after exposure, remains uncorrected.
We should not understate the complicity of Nature in this. By every possible interpretation, their silence means consent. They don’t seem to be even slightly perturbed that they have been ‘tricked’. If these gatekeepers to legitimacy are serially complicit in the misrepresentation they should share as much attention by investigators.
I just couldn’t let this go by. http://i47.tinypic.com/2i7mfex.jpg
Not Mark Steyn’s brightest choice of words ever, but he is no stranger to law suits. (“molested data” is silly use of words after mentioning a child molester – actually hurts acceptance of points in the article IMO, and poor writing (“molested” is a bad choice of word for “data”, “corrupted” might be better. – can Steyn actually write?).
Note there are two alleged defamatory statements, with somewhat different factors. One is false technical claims, the other is drawing a parallel to a particular criminal act that people abhor far more than financial fraud.
Note that the NRO’s lawyer’s response letter addresses makes points at length with citations of legal precedents and legalese. It seems to include these points:
– it is a public debate, which should not be censored as it is free speech
– Mann has thrust himself into that debate, publishing extensively and using strong wording himself (“McCarthyist tactics”).
– the parallel to Sandusky is a “highly rhetorical comparison” that no “reasonable individual” would take to mean that Mann did anything like what Sandusky did.
– threatens Mann with vigorous examination for discovery
It is not a “get lost” letter (that’s the publisher’s headline), but is firmly dismissive.
I have no sympathy for Mann, who has said things like “beetle larvae” about commenters on his Facebook blog, though I have not seen the comments that bothered him, and appears to have referred to Stephen McIntyre as a fraud (email of 30 Dec 2004 to Phil Jones). (There is much trash on Facebook and the Internet in general, such as “johnjohn”’s profanity in comments on Simberg’s article. sometimes worse (the Facebook entries I saw include a suggestion that Mann received threats of violence.)
I’ll cover the earlier Mann lawsuits in a later post.
No one ever put it better:
“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.”
-Richard Feynman
Great Feynman quote. For anyone with 10 or 15 minutes to spare, the speech that came from can be read here: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf
It cites other examples of scientific integrity (or lack thereof), many of which have direct or inverse correlation to Mann’s Hockey Stick. An enjoyable read at any rate.
Trying to summarize the lawsuit scene:
TIM BALL:
Andrew Weaver sued Ball in early 2011 over something published on the Canada Free Press website, here’s something on that: http://www.desmogblog.com/canadafreepress-apology-weaver (the web site caved).
Michael Mann sued Ball for statements in an interview of him published on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy website, which publishes on climate, agriculture, tribal matters, and rights for the prairie provinces of Canada. That’s the “State Pen, not Penn State” remark. An Andrew A. Skolnick has made two affidavits to the court regarding qualifications of someone named John O’Sullivan who apparently co-authored a book with Ball and does some legal work though he may not be a full lawyer. Skolnick appears to have investigated O’Sullivan’s educational qualifications and licensing, and Internet activities of he and other names he believes O’Sullivan uses. (Skolnick’s affidavits are to help the plaintiff.) The “John Doe” in this lawsuit is somehow connected to FCPP, judging by Mann’s claim, so probably is not O’Sullivan – but I don’t understand how O’Sullivan is so relevance to this lawsuit that Skolnick made affidavits.
Ball sued a Dan Johnson and others over Johnson’s response to an article Ball had published in the Calgary Herald in 2006.
(Ball says Johnson attacked his credentials rather than try to address the issues raised by Balls’ article. There seems to be much confusion over Ball’s credentials, if you believe desmogblog claims but give Ball the benefit of doubt you’ll think that Ball or editors have been sloppy in describing them. Ball was probably studying climate before Weaver knew the word, starting with researching HBC post weather records, back then it was a specialty in “Geography”, which alarmists like to claim is not climatology. (Not the only subject in which they’ve tried to narrow definitions to claim they are the only experts. Weaver tried that in a letter to the JanFeb2010 issue issue of the professional engineer’s magazine Innovation (www.apeg.bc.ca, “consensus” is a regular attempt. Neo-Marxists, post-modernists and their ilk do like to think that words define reality, they reject concepts.)
continuing my attempt to summarize the law suits…
NATIONAL POST:
Weaver sued the National Post and some of its columnists, in April 2010, the concept of poisoning the Internet was thrown about in that case.
The suit names Financial Post Editor Terence Corcoran, columnist Peter Foster, reporter Kevin Libin and National Post publisher Gordon Fisher, as well as several still-unidentified editors and copy editors. It seeks general, aggravated damages, special and exemplary damages and legal costs in relation to articles by Foster on December 9, 2009 (“Weaver’s Web”), Corcoran on December 10, 2009 (“Weaver’s Web II”) and January 27, 2010 (“Climate Agency going up in flames”), and Libin on February 2, 2010 (“So much for pure science”).
The NP is probably no stranger to lawsuits. Terrance Corcoran and Peter Foster seem to do their research before writing something, and have much better thinking ability than other NP/FP writers (who aren’t bad by MSM standards, just not of the calibre of those two). I don’t know of the other defendants, sounds like Weaver named many NP staff including copy editors (probably as John Does). Corcoran dug extensively into the leaked CRU emails.
I doubt either Ball or the NP used the language of Mark Steyn, though they were blunt, but laws may differ between the two countries.
(Jeremy Poynton says Mann has two lawsuits in progress already, but they are stalled due Mann’s refusal to produce documents. Seems to me people should support the defence in those two to ensure the first to proceed gets rebuffed, noting that Mann against Ball seems to be the same subject as the fraud part of Mann against Steyn.)
Am I missing any?