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/
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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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His sorry story only points out the profound extent of his delusions and underlying pathology. He proves what an odd Mann he is and how unworthy of serious debate he remains. One can only wonder what twisted educational system could produce such a deficient product.
Please, Please, dear God, don’t let his case get thrown out before discovery.
Repeating what I’ve said previously here on WUWT, he is Michael Mann, LLC, pursuing his business interests as a Limited Liability Copiest.
He is a one-man cottage industry inside the climate change industrial complex, and his every pronouncement is calculated to further his brand name recognition.
There is no bad publicity as far as he is concerned, because his business model as a one-man cottage industry depends upon his ability to keep the Michael Mann brand name prominently displayed and distributed within the climate change pronouncement marketplace.
Michael Mann is simply a well-paid huckster for the paleoclimate studies market segment within the climate change industrial complex.
His behavior is perfectly rational given that there is no such thing as a truth-in-advertising law within the climate change marketplace.
He is merely doing whatever he needs to do to maintain his brand position inside his market segment; and so far, his promotional strategy is working quite successfully.
Michael Mann is a canny businessman and product marketeer serving a set of well-defined, well-funded customers inside a growing industry.
That’s all there is to him, nothing more, nothing less.
The NSF report says it all – page 3 – Analysis and conclusions
“Much of the current debate focuses on the viability of the statistical procedures he employed,the statistics used to confirm the accuracy of the results, and the degree to which one specific set of data impacts the statistical results. These concerns are all appropriate for scientific debate and to assist the research community in directing future research efforts to improve understanding in this field of research. Such scientific debate is ongoing but does not, in itself, constitute evidence of research misconduct.”
In summary, The NSF acknowledges what Mann was accused of – ie selecting certain data sets, omitting other data sets and overweighting data sets. The NSF then states that is not scientific fraud.