The Supreme Court of British Columbia recently dismissed a defamation lawsuit by celebrity climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann against global warming skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Mann must pay the full legal costs to the defendant. The ruling is explosive because it means that Ball’s claim that Mann was a scientific fraudster is now supported by the court. (ZERO HEDGE)
A guy named Fred Ricardo will hop on my Facebook Page for this site once in a while and post nonsense… none of it his own, he merely links to items others have written without defending any portion of it. This gives me an opportunity to update an issue (Fred keeps linking to as fact) discussed in the past. That is, the HOCKEY STICK.
The EPOCH TIMES had the best lead up to the decision… but here is a good reckoning by POWERLINE:
Some years ago, Dr. Tim Ball wrote that climate scientist Michael Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.” At issue was Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a sudden and unprecedented 20th century warming trend. The hockey stick featured prominently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), but has since been shown to be wrong. The question, in my view, is whether it was an innocent mistake or deliberate fraud on Mann’s part. (Mann, I believe, continues to assert the accuracy of his debunked graph.) Mann sued Ball for libel in 2011. Principia Scientific now reports that the court in British Columbia has dismissed Mann’s lawsuit with prejudice, and assessed costs against him.
What happened was that Dr. Ball asserted a truth defense. He argued that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud, something that could be proved if one had access to the data and calculations, in particular the R2 regression analysis, underlying it. Mann refused to produce these documents. He was ordered to produce them by the court and given a deadline. He still refused to produce them, so the court dismissed his case.
The rules of discovery provide that a litigant must make available to opposing parties documents that reasonably bear on the issues in the case. Here, it is absurd for Mann to sue Ball for libel, and then refuse to produce the documents that would have helped to show whether Ball’s statement about him–he belongs in the state pen–was true or false. The logical inference is that the R2 regression analysis and other materials, if produced, would have supported Ball’s claim that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud on Mann’s part.
Mann says that his lawyers are considering an appeal. He can appeal to his heart’s content, but there is not a court in North America that will allow a libel case to proceed where the plaintiff refuses to produce the documents that may show whether the statements made about him were true or false.
Mann responded to the dismissal of his lawsuit in typically mean-spirited and dishonest fashion: “The dismissal involved the alleged exercise of a discretion on [sic] the Court to dismiss a lawsuit for delay.” The dismissal was for failure to obey a court order, and the delay went on for eight years……
Other stories regarding this are here:
- WUWT: “UPDATE – Dr. Tim Ball wins @MichaelEMann lawsuit – Mann “hides the decline” AGAIN
- LIBERTARIAN HUB: Creator Of Global-Warming’S Infamous “Hockey Stick” Chart Loses ‘Climate-Science’ Lawsuit
- BREITBART: Michael ‘Hide the Decline’ Mann Loses Defamation Lawsuit
- AMERICAN THINKER: Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick,’ loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant’s costs
- CLIMATE DISPATCH: Breaking: Dr. Tim Ball Defeats Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann’s Climate Lawsuit
Yes, that graph has no evidence to support it. And, not only that, but NASA is being challenged legally to review and change their position on the 97% “consensus” often cited (by Fred as well). THE NEWS TALKERS notes the challenge:
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
On Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent NASA a formal complaint, asking the agency to withdraw the false claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming and climate change. The 2013 study purporting to demonstrate that number was fatally flawed and proved no such thing.
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
According to the CEI complaint , NASA’s decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA). Specifically, NASA claimed that “[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The claim appears on the NASA website on the page “Climate Change: How Do We Know?”
The claim traces back to a study led by John Cook entitled “ Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature ” and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013…….
I UPDATE MY POST ON CONSENSUS WITH SOME MORE INFO. But I just wanted to get the legal cowardness of Mann on record… because he has no evidence (scientific or historical) to back up his graph.
Here is CLIMATE DISPATCH’S post of AMERICAN THINKER’S post:
….Mann, who poses as a climatologist at Penn State, has had his court case against genuine climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball dismissed, with Mann ordered to pay court costs, for failure to produce supporting evidence to prove his claim that global temperatures took a sharp upward turn when the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel use began pouring CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
He didn’t because he can’t, and the fact is that the global warning he speaks of is Mann-made, a fantasy based on a career of perpetrating climate fraud, as indicated by NOAA’s report that there hasn’t been any U.S. warming for nearly a decade and a half and maybe even beyond that.
As noted by James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a piece for Real Clear Energy:
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings…
There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data.
The use of properly positioned temperature recording stations coupled with satellite data, a relatively recent innovation that covers the whole Earth, has given us a more realistic picture than computer models that can’t even predict the past and fraudulently manipulate raw data from dubious sources.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented the inaccuracy of old weather station data used by NASA on his SurfaceStations.org website.
Watts said that “90 percent of them don’t meet (the government’s) old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule” for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence.”
Many of the U.S. stations were in locations such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
In 2016, Mann testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee that actual data didn’t really matter because we could actually see climate change happening.
The Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious…
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that “the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious,” citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and “record heat” in Arizona.
Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.
A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mann has proven adept over his career at making controversial, no, fraudulent adjustments made to the raw data.
Mann might be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor’s Business Daily dubbed a “tree-ring circus” — the Climategate scandal.
As IBD noted at the time:
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.
It was that attempt to “hide the decline” through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.
The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts — in a pattern resembling a hockey stick — in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. 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.
As Investor’s Business Daily also noted:
The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU’s Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.
“Hiding the decline” and any actual evidence that global warming hype was nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion.
MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”
The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat…..