Controversial climate scientist Michael Mann, who helped raise global warming’s profile by representing temperatures as a rapidly escalating “hockey stick,” has filed a defamation lawsuit against skeptics at the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Mann said statements by the two organizations that compared him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky were offensive and defamatory, and called them the latest in a series of attacks he and other climate scientists have faced.[FOXNews.com]
Yes, the trick is to avoid getting the case thrown out too soon. But, the discovery would have already been provided in different cases and FOIA requests and will not be provided here.
Mann has chosen this as a public stage and the best we can hope for is that it gets enough attention so that Mann and his graph (yet again) are shown for what they are. And Mann starts out the gate by offically claiming to the court for a fact that he is a Nobel laureate when he is, in fact, not. But the IPCC gave him a certificate of participation. In his mind, that makes him a “laureate’s laureate.” And his very best legal line of attack against accusations that he was clearerd by the same people who cleared Sandusky? No matter how artfully he argues it, he’s still limited to arguing “I have grounds for punishing harsh criticism of my already highly criticised work and me because I was cleared of unspecified charges in a non-investigation by a totally ineffective rape panel.”
The trouble is that this guy is so cluelessly desperate to beclown himself that the beclowning will not get enough attention. Just another small tale in the life of a prancing prima donna of a preposterous prognosticator practicing prevarication.
Unfortunately, since the piece in question is “opinion,” the defendants will win on “summary judgement.” Otherwise, Mann will have to prove that he did NOT “molest the data.” He also opens all of his data and methodologies up to “discovery” by the defense. If he can’t (or won’t) produce his work, he’s going to lose (again, summarily, but possibly with a “contempt of court” thrown in for good measure).
It is possible that the defense will pursue discovery first (getting Mann’s work and data), and then ask for summary judgement since the piece is OPINION, which is immune from such lawsuits.
Briffa was a co-conspirator in this ugly scam. Out of over a hundred Siberian trees they cherry picked three – the only ones that supported the outlandish proposition of the hockey stick while entirely erasing the Roman Warm Period, the Middle Ages Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, etc. What a crock. Goood luck with that in court.
Mann’s hockey stick is a “tree ring circus”. There is another problem with his “study”, trees do not necessarily produce one ring each year as previously thought. Depending on weather cycles, they may produce more than one ring per year or none. “Tree Ring Dating and Changing climates”. Downes, G 2010 DVD
It’s fine for his side to compare skeptics to holocaust deniers, but the shoe on the other foot kinda cramps….
No doubt Mann will attempt to prove during the course of the trial that he merely fondled, stroked and (lurid prose deleted) the data with the best of intentions, and that his relationship with the data was purely Platonic.
What the defamatory statements say seems arguably true. The analogy with Sandosky is spelled out in a way which conforms to the actual events (namely that Mann “tortured” the data). In context there’s no claim about Mann’s sexual behavior at all. As far as Mann being vindicated by ‘his peers’ I for one would like a court record of that sham exoneration. Mann used tree ring data to demonstrate a warming trend but the trend turned down from about 1960, so instead of acknowledging that, he truncated the tree ring data after 1960 and appended another series of data (the thermometer data) from 1960 to present without telling anyone (apparently). Then he withheld his data for as long as possible which a suspicious person would say was to keep his bogus approach a secret. The Hockey Stick has been thoroughly discredited and indeed deleted from the IPPC AR4. As someone once said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”
Will the emails be introduced in court? What country is the case being held in?