Yay! Mike Mann took the bait, intends to file lawsuit against Steyn and NRO

In the US, political pressure groups can use these kinds of things as fund raising vectors. They’ll fund a high profile lawsuit and then use the lawsuit to energize their membership resulting in more contributions coming in. In the non-profit world its known as the “Al Sharpton model”, after its most skilled practitioner.
There’s are lawyers who, when they see an “Al Sharpton” approach forming, line up to be part of it. The reason is obvious: the lawyers can make a lot of money regardless of the outcome. Winning is not the objective; the only objective is to keep the game going and to generate lots of headlines. The interests of the political pressure group and the lawyer are aligned — the lawyers win by generating more billable hours and the political pressure groups win by keeping the fund raising effort going for a long time. Since we have no ‘loser pays’ concepts in the US, there’s no downside risk.
So everyone wins. Oh, except for the plaintiff. The plaintiff winds up draining a lot of time and emotional energy and often comes away with a destroyed reputation. Generally speaking, the plaintiff has to be a convenient idiot because these cases are often un-winnable. So its essential to have a client who possesses a rare combination of stupidity, pride and notoriety.
Time will tell if this is one such case.

omanuel says:
August 24, 2012 at 8:02 am
You are exactly right:“All humans are susceptible to self-deception and double standards.”

I want to market a T-Shirt:
“The experiment will continue until results meet expectations.”
Alternatively:
“The funding will continue so long as conclusions feed politicians.”

sharper00 says:
August 24, 2012 at 6:50 am
“These fantasies of getting to rifle through Mann’s emails are simply that and none of you would entertain the idea in any other context.”
Can’t imagine why anyone would think e-mails would reveal anything, anyway.
Oh, wait…
Phil Clarke says:
August 24, 2012 at 4:25 am
“Which would be quite a feat as the Yamal chronology was not published until 3 years after the hockey stick.”
Only, they’re not talking about the original “hockey stick”, as the lead-in paragraphs clearly state:

Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the “trick” of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline (in global temperatures),” the email read… Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

Please answer me this, because I’d really like to know: why do you, why does anyone, support this kind of deception in science? Are you hoping the short term advantage gained will allow you to wipe out the opposition, and you will never have to pay the price of tainting your brand? That’s the only logical, though highly risky, motivation I can imagine.

A reminder of more Mannian bullying:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/02/thanks-to-michael-manns-response-a-newspaper-censors-a-letter-to-the-editor/
Here is the exchange of Letters to Editor:
Global warming is no hoax
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20110912/EDITS/110919978&parentprofile=search
Sky is not falling
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20110916/LETTER/110919906&parentprofile=search
Fools deny global warming
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20110926/EDITS/110929906&parentprofile=search
Researcher disputes evidence for global warming (was originally: “More hot air than science in global-warming theory”:
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20110930/EDITS/111009984&parentprofile=search
Mann’s laughable response:
Global warming denier’s claims are falsehoods
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20111001/EDITS/110939988&parentprofile=search
The orig letter (before it was edited by the paper – note the bolded part – which was removed by the paper after Mann’s whining:

Vail Valley Voices: More hot air than science in global-warming theory
Martin Hertzberg
Vail, CO, Colorado
“Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the handmaiden of truth” — Robert Weston.
Since I am a long-time denier of human-caused global warming and have been described as an “inaccurate” and “irresponsible” “fool” by Scott Glasser’s commentary in Monday’s Vail Daily, I feel compelled to respond.
I am a research scientist who also served as a meteorologist for the U.S. Navy. I am also a lifelong progressive Democrat.
For the 25 years that I have been studying the theory that human emission of carbon dioxide is causing global warming and climate change, it has never ceased to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people, including our president, have been taken in by that scam.
There is a simple way to tell the difference between scientists and propagandists. If scientists have a theory, they search diligently for data that might actually contradict their theory so that they test it rigorously or refine it. If propagandists have a theory, they carefully select only the data that might agree with their theory and dutifully ignore any data that might contradict it.
The anecdotal drivel cited in the Glasser article regarding atmospheric carbon dioxide, average global temperatures, ice area coverage and rate of sea-level rise was carefully cherry picked or is totally false.
For the totality of the available data for the past several decades, go to http://www.climate4you.com. The data show nothing remarkable — just the normal variability in all those weather-related parameters.
Knowledgeable scientists, including the more than 30,000 such as myself who have signed the Oregon Petition, know that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide do not correlate with human emission of carbon dioxide, that human emission is a trivial fraction of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, that the oceans contain about 50 times more dissolved carbon dioxide than is present in the atmosphere, that recycling of carbon dioxide from the tropical oceans where it is emitted to the arctic oceans where it is absorbed is orders of magnitude more significant than human emissions, and that the carbonate-bicarbonate buffer in the oceans makes their acidity (actually their alkaline pH) virtually insensitive to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The data for the glacial coolings and interglacial warmings for the past 500,000 years always show that temperature changes precede atmospheric carbon-dioxide changes by about 1,000 years. That indicates that temperature changes are driving carbon-dioxide changes and not the reverse as the Gore-Hansen-IPCC clique claims. As oceans warm for whatever reason, they emit carbon dioxide, and as they cool they absorb carbon dioxide.
The carbon-dioxide “greenhouse effect” argument on which the fearmongering hysteria is based is actually devoid of physical reality. The notion that the colder atmosphere above can reradiate its absorbed infrared energy to heat the warmer earth below violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For details, see “Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory,” co-authored by myself and several other scientists, which was published earlier this year by Stairway Press.
In any case, if one compares the effect of water in all of its forms (polar ice, snow cover, oceans, clouds, water vapor in the atmosphere) with that of human emission of carbon dioxide, the carbon-dioxide emission is about as significant as a few farts in a hurricane.
Glasser, who calls me a fool, really tips his hand by defending the notoriously fraudulent “hockey stick” curve of Professor Mann. That curve has the shape of a hockey stick, flat for the past 1,000 years with a sharp rise during the past few decades. It was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.
Every knowledgeable climatologist knows that tree rings are unreliable proxies for temperature because they are also sensitive to moisture, sunlight, pests, competition from adjacent trees, etc. Furthermore, when those same tree-ring data actually showed a decline in temperature for the past several decades, Mann and his co-authors simply “hid the decline” by grafting direct measurements (inadequately corrected for the urban heat island and other effects) to his flat tree-ring line.
Knowledgeable climatologists knew that the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings settled Greenland and grapes grew in northern England, was much warmer than today and that its presence in all regions of the world was overwhelming. Similarly for the Roman Warm Period that preceded it and for a whole series of natural warmings and coolings until one gets back to the big one: the interglacial cooling of about 20,000 years ago.
And that all happened without any significant human emission of carbon dioxide.
The conclusions being promulgated by the scientifically illiterate diplomats who control the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are fraudulent concoctions that have already been denounced by many of its scientific members.
Those diplomats, like the bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency, have huge egos and a lust for power. That is far more important to them than the triviality of scientific truth. Once committed to one side of such an issue,
they will rarely admit that they have made a mistake. Once having invested their political capital and our economic resources to start the huge, massive inertia wheel turning, it takes too much courage, energy and loss of face to stop it.
That was the case with the war in Vietnam and currently with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The conclusions of the IPCC need to be repudiated lest they continue to discredit the United Nations’ legitimate functions: its programs to improve the standard of living of the underdeveloped nations, its programs to combat hunger and poverty, its support of the conventions against genocide and torture, and its support of the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of war criminals.
Dr. Martin Hertzberg writes from Copper Mountain.

And Mann’s response:

Vail Valley Voices: Global warming denier’s claims are falsehoods
Michael E. Mann
Vail, CO, Colorado
Saturday, October 1, 2011
An individual named Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues in his recent commentary in your paper.
It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary. Mr. Hertzberg uses libelous language in characterizing the so-called “hockey stick” — work of my own published more than a decade ago showing that recent warming is unusual over at least the past 1,000 years — as “fraudulent,” and claiming that it “it was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.”
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
The highest scientific body in the nation, the National Academy of Sciences affirmed my research findings in an exhaustive independent review published in June 2006 (see e.g. “Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate,” New York Times, June 22, 2006, among many others).
Dozens of independent groups of scientists have independently reproduced and confirmed our findings, and more recent work by several groups shows that recent warmth is unusual over an even longer time frame.
Mr. Hertzberg then continues the smear by lying again about my work, claiming that “when those same tree-ring data actually showed a decline in temperature for the past several decades, Mann and his co-authors simply ‘hid the decline’ by grafting direct measurements (inadequately corrected for the urban heat island and other effects) to his flat tree-ring line.”
That is, once again, a string of lies tied together. This statement falsely equates my work, which was not based on tree rings but rather a diverse network of different types of “proxy” climate data, with tree-ring work by an entirely different scientist, Keith Briffa of the University of East Anglia.
And it is is a highly dishonest characterization of his Briffa’s work, as well, since the “decline” was a well-known problem with those particular data that Briffa was the first to describe and attempt to deal with, in the scientific literature.
Mr. Hertzberg’s lies are pernicious. Their intent appears to be to do convince you that there is no harm in our continued unfettered release of carbon into the atmosphere.
It is not only us, but our children and grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of devastating changes in our environment in the years and decades to come if we listen to charlatans like Mr. Hertzberg.
Readers interested in the truth behind the science, rather than the falsehoods and smears perpetuated by people like Mr. Hertzberg, should consult the scientist-run website http://www.realclimate.org and http://www.skepticalscience.com, or scientifically-based books on the topic like my “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.”
Michael E. Mann is a professor in the Department of Meterology at Penn State University and director of Penn State Earth System Science Center.

It is quite interesting that the paper removed the quotes Mann found offensive from the original letter, but allowed his rant to stand – including the same claims.
I think – the record is extremely clear – Mann IS a fraud, and his work perpetrates that fraud. His repeated attacks on those who question his work, and ongoing attempts to prevent release of documents that would shed light on the veracity of his claims, only serve to strengthen the claims against him.
That Mann’s work is likely financed largely, or almost entirely, by public monies, when coupled with Mann’s proven deceit, makes the statement by Tim Ball a simple truth – Mann likely does belong in the State Pen vs at Penn State.
So Mr. Mann – please add me to your list of litigants. I agree with the others – I believe the facts show it is well proven you are an arrogant bully, but also a fraud – as is much of your work.

What one physicist points out of Michael Mann’s neat little tricks ….
http://i47.tinypic.com/wv1itx.gif
(Smokey, please file my first overlaid gif away, you seem to actually keep track of such and make such good use of it!)☺

Smokey says:
August 24, 2012 at 1:31 pm
I’m a n Englishman pseudoscientist living in Northern Ireland.
There. Fixed! ☺
—————-
I know when I’m outclassed. I bow to your superior expertise as a scientist.

Brandon Schollenbergers review of Mann’s book here at WUWT is relevant as well:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/07/a-detailed-review-of-manns-book-the-hockey-stick-and-the-climate-wars-as-it-relates-to-the-wegman-report-to-congress/
Excerpt:

The book contains many mistakes, contradictions, fabrications, nonsensical statements and even a libelous claim based on an obvious misrepresentation.
… the Wegman Report, was highly critical of Mann’s work. In turn, it was criticized by defenders of Mann. One such criticism involves how much “collaboration” there was between McIntyre, Wegman and Wegman’s co-authors. The claim is basically that the Wegman Report repeats McIntyre’s work and conclusions without due consideration. Mann doesn’t spend much time on this criticism in his book, but what he says is very important:

“Not only had their apparently been substantial undisclosed collaboration between the WR authors and Stephen McIntyre, as hinted at earlier–something Wegman had denied in his testimony under oath in Congress…”

Mann claims Wegman denied something, under oath, that was true. That is, he accuses Wegman of perjury. In what is almost a passing comment, Mann accuses Wegman of committing a felony that could land him in jail for years. Not only is this a serious accusation, but if untrue, it is libel. With that in mind, it’s important to read Mann’s note #66:

66. See http://ftp.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/109h/31362.txt, specifically the following exchange between Rep. Stupak and Wegman:
Mr. Stupak: Did you or your co-authors contact Mr. McIntyre and get his
help in replicating his work?
Dr. Wegman. Actually, no…

This seems to give clear support to Mann’s claim. However, given the seriousness of the accusation, the ellipsis at the end should be investigated. Mann’s link leads to the transcript of the testimony where Wegman’s full answer is found

DR. WEGMAN. Actually, no. What I did do was I called
Mr. McIntyre and said that when we downloaded his code we
could not get it to work either, and it was unfortunate that
he was criticizing Dr. Mann when in fact he was in exactly
the same situation. Subsequently, he reposted his code to
make it more user friendly and we did download it
subsequently and verified that it would work.

Clearly, the quote Mann offers is deceptive. By only quoting two words from Wegman, Mann gives the impression Wegman answered no. Had he included only ten more words, anyone reading his book would have seen Wegman was not guilty of a felony. Instead, Mann removed almost all of a lengthy and detailed answer, giving readers the impression Wegman committed perjury.

Much more at the link.