Story submitted by Rob Ricket
Mann plays the victim in article from “The Scientist”
Opinion: Life as a Target
Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.
By Michael E. Mann| March 27, 2013
As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I be fired from my job because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of human-caused climate change. I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations by congressman in the pay of the fossil fuel industry and was the target of what The Washington Post referred to as a “witch hunt” by Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. I have even received a number of anonymous death threats.
My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate scientists are regularly the subject of such attacks.
This cynicism is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by fossil fuel companies, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort to discredit the science linking the burning of fossil fuels with potentially dangerous climate change.
My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of a series of articles estimating past temperature trends. Using information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores, my two coauthors and I had pieced together variations in the Earth’s temperature over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, is an unprecedented aberration in this period of documented temperature changes, and recent work published in the journal Science suggests that the recent warming trend has no counterpart for at least the past 11,000 years, and likely longer. In a graph featured in our manuscript, the last century sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.
Source:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34853/title/Opinion–Life-as-a-Target/
========================================================
This header from Dr. Mann has some important legal value:
Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.
A public figure has a higher burden of proof in defamation cases, such as the one where Dr. Mann is suing Dr. Tim Ball and Mark Steyn at The National Review. For example:
According to the public figure doctrine, prominent public persons must prove actual malice on the part of the news media in order to prevail in a libel lawsuit. Actual malice is the knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of whether a statement is true or false. The public figure doctrine makes it possible for publishers to provide information on public issues to the debating public, undeterred by the threat of liability.
Source: http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/public-figure-doctrine/
Further, Dr. Mann is going to have to prove that the statements by Tim Ball and NRO weren’t parody or satire:
Whether parodies should be potentially actionable as defamation depends on whether the statement is deemed factual and thus potentially actionable, or is a matter of protected opinion and not actionable.
Although plagued by confusion and lack of consensus, under the prevailing trends of constitutional law and/or state substantive defamation law principles, four core bases have emerged for classifying a statement as protected opinion:
(a) it did “not contain a provably false factual connotation;”
(b) it “cannot ‘reasonably [be] interpreted as stating actual facts;’”
(c) it consists merely of “rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet,” or “imaginative expression;”
(d) it does not state or imply undisclosed, unassumed, or unknown defamatory facts.
Source: http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr/article/viewFile/74/66
I think with his public figure admission, combined with the recognized first amendment right to satire and parody of public figures, he just took his two legal cases out back and shot them dead.
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Ah-hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
“Wow, my foot looks really big through these sights!”
🙂
Brought down by the Mann!!!
“I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations by congressman in the pay of the fossil fuel industry…”
I hear/read this sort of thing all the time. Doesn’t that sort of dubious repetition without affidavit lose its bite? It’s not even “crying wolf.” It’s just plain juvenile, and I don’t mean that as ad hominem. It’s simply a nonworking statement absent any reference or proof. It’s hot air. Please, Mr. Mann, enough with the hot air. Or do you not care about climate change? That is CO2 leaking from your bellows, don’t you know?
A delusional egotist.
“I think with his public figure admission, combined with the recognized first amendment right to satire and parody of public figures, he just took his two legal cases out back and shot them dead.”
Mann says, “My work first appeared on the world stage ….”
Yes pompous egotists, tend to shoot themselves in the foot, given enough space and time to do so. One can see the beleaguered, but brave hero greatly relishes his public personagehood.
Of course the crybaby clown has made himself a public figure. His lawyers should have pointed that out to him before he brought his suits. Probably they did, but with all his taxpayer-backing he just wanted nuisance actions & more publicity to win more fame & funding.
Even the whiner must know that his most effective critics, those who have utterly destroyed his fake “science”, like MacI & McK, are not financed by Big Oil. Mann is however funded by Big Government, which gets the results for which it pays.
LOL – Poor Michael seems to not appreciate how little ‘scientist’ he brings to Climate Scientist. Maybe if he did not bugger up the stats so badly he wouldn’t be getting so much heat.
In order to not defame Mann, I put it this way. He seems to have a lot in common with others who have an over-sized ego, based on my experience of people with over-sized egos.
“What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, is an unprecedented aberration in this period of documented temperature changes …”
Multiple Misleading statements by the Mann.
1) Coincidence is not science. Coincidence is not cause. Coincidence happens.
2) Recent temperatures are not warming. Selective charting of data doesn’t count.
3) No evidence of unprecented aberration.
4) Documenting temperature changes by way of bias and lemon picking is creation, not finding.
Is that finally an admission from Mann that he has been undermining climate change? Sure reads like it to me. From the paragraph just above the article date.
Just went and read it – does he actually believe about himself what he wrote there? And this:
By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, where those gases are acting like a heat-trapping blanket around the planet. And storms like Superstorm Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the unprecedented heat, drought, and wild fires of last summer are the effects.
It’s written at moron level. What a twonk. Let’s hope he has shot down his cases…
Mr. Mann says:
And yet, none of the estimated 5,000 extra deaths in Great Britain alone caused each winter by implementation of policies that he supports are “anonymous” if he’d only bother to look at the obituaries.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/23/trend-to-colder-winters-continues-in-uk/
Mann whines about pushback against his fictitious claims based on false algorithms. This proves he has no conscience at all. He’s one of the leading players in the group I call Catastrophic Anthropogenic Genocidal Warmistas and he’s guilty of genocide.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Except for one huge difference–Mann is still alive while his victims are DEAD!
Cry us a river, Mr. Mann.
.
And here is another attack on Mann’s assertions about Global Warming.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2299037/Keep-em-Dave-Theyre-here.html
You will have to scroll down to where it says: “How the lies on global warming snowballed”.
As explanation for US readers, the Daily Mail is one of the largest circulation right of center** middle-class newspapers. While Richard Littlejohn is the chief joker and satirist in this paper – but one whose barbed comments always hit home. He’s a right wing Jon Stewart from the Daily Show.
** Slightly to the left of Ghengis Khan.
.
I, too, have written about Michael Mann today. “How We Know the ‘Climate Crisis’ Isn’t Real”
Those who believe there’s an urgent problem behave accordingly. Mann doesn’t act as if he fears for the future.
What’s really sad is that Mann is still trying to defend the Hockey Stick. Even his allies have given up trying to salvage that mess.
“My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate scientists are regularly the subject of such attacks.”
—
Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist
Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
‘Revolutionary’ policies needed to tackle crisis
The Guardian, Sunday 22 June 2008
James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange
Poor Mikey . . . such self inflicted wounds for such an honest, scrupulous, scientist who has the greatest integrity, has never consorted to stab other scientists in the back and is on the same plane as such wonderful people as Al Gore and David Suzuki.
This can’t be Karma because it never goes around to get around.
“Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure.”
The most honest thing that Mann has written to date.
His “plight is dramatic”? How about he overdramatizes things? When our think-tank in 2010 questioned why his office got $541,184 in the stimulus bill, and asked PSU to voluntarily return it in light of the then-ongoing investigations and Climategate, the incident turned up in his book (in a spelling-challenged way) described as “threatening my livelihood.” He further claimed we “led a campaign to have my NSF grants revoked” (no) and claimed our “perverse premise was that I was somehow pocketing millions of dollars of ‘Obama’ stimulus money'” (no). We said “It’s outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he’s under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal.” We also said, “It’s no wonder that Obama’s stimulus plan is failing to produce jobs. Taxpayer dollars aren’t being used in the ways most likely to spur job creation. The stimulus was not sold to the public as a way to reward a loyalist in the climate change debate. Nor was the stimulus sold as a way to promote the Obama Administration’s position on the global warming theory.”
Point is, he personalizes things ridiculously. He says above, “my plight is dramatic.” He has a university teaching job; these grants are extra. His office gets a grant sold to the public as being for “shovel-ready jobs” that he himself says he personally benefited from, by working, only at the tune of a month’s pay. Yet if a third party questions this tax-funded grant, they are “threatening his livelihood” and accusing him of “pocketing” money (with the false implication that we claimed or implied he stole some, which we never ever did).
Boo hoo. The guy loves being a victim. Never met him. It’s just my impression. But anybody who takes tax money has to know taxpayers might wonder why they deserve it. It is not personally about him any more than it was personally about the guy who was going to pour the cement for the Bridge to Nowhere. It’s our money, as taxpayers. His proper response to getting it should have just been “thanks.”
He really is juvenile. He persists and persists, in the face of overwhelming refutation. I almost hate to use that word ‘overwhelming’, because it is so often coupled with ‘consensus’. Regarding Mann, there is no consensus. He’s behaving like a blithering idiot. Soap Opera Climate.
Send this to Dr. Loo.
Mann is exhibiting conspiratorial ideation.
That’s a stretcher, because it insinuates that the warming before 1950, when CO2 increase was insignificant, had significant effects. 97% of climate scientists disbelieve that–but Mann throws it in for melodramatic effect. 10 pounds of sincerity in a 5-pound bag.
“Tree rings, ice cores and coral”
I feel the Most important Data was left out over the 1,000 year period.. Sun Spot Data!! Past sun spot data shows when mini ice ages happened. Was the sun spot data left out for a reason??
Why was it not part of Nature Data used? WHY?
NASA even stated that earth could be on edge of next ice age with very low sun plot cycles like in the past.
I tweeted to M. Mann today for fthere time….. Quiet sun is freezing you in your tracks and your hockey stick will be used as an ice pick one day..lOL
Seems he did not like my tweet and blocked me from viewing his twitter page while logged in.
He did Reply not as as a scientists to my tweet I feel. My tweet was not threatening but my feeling from the true sun spot data that is out there and not part of his data used.
https://mobile.twitter.com/NJSnowFan/status/316945906505224192/photos
Winning a Nobel Prize makes you a public figure.