After 12 years, the Mann v Steyn trial started in Washington DC law week.  The Steyn post in the Canadian National Review that launched the lawsuit.




Football and Hockey

By MARK STEYN
July 15, 2012 10:22 PM

In the wake of Louis Freeh’s report on Penn State’s complicity in serial rape, Rand Simberg writes of Unhappy Valley’s other scandal:


I’m referring to another cover up and whitewash that occurred there two years ago, before we learned how rotten and corrupt the culture at the university was. But now that we know how bad it was, perhaps it’s time that we revisit the Michael Mann affair, particularly given how much we’ve also learned about his and others’ hockey-stick deceptions since. Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.



Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus. And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to “investigate” Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing.

If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change”, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his “investigation” by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke. 
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/football-and-hockey-mark-steyn/



Pro-Steyn commentary https://www.steynonline.com/

Pro-Mann https://www.desmog.com/2024/01/19/michael-mann-mark-steyn-rand-simberg-climate-s...

Dr. Wyner is a professor, statistician, and, oh, chair of the undergraduate program in statistics and data science. His specialty is probability models. He has worked with ESPN (Money Ball anyone?) and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the very same NSF of which we've heard so much about the two last weeks.

Dr. Wyner knows numbers.

As a special project (because it intrigued him), Dr. Wyner reviewed the infamous "Hockey Stick" graph, and guess what? All is not what the Plaintiff claims. Shocker.

Here is a sample of just some of Dr. Wyner's testimony over the past two days (emphasis added):

Question: "Dr. Wyner, do you have an opinion as to whether the techniques used in Dr. Mann's Hockey Stick research are manipulative?"

Answer: "Yes."

Question: "What is your opinion?"

Answer: "It's my opinion that the techniques used by Dr. Mann in his earliest work (98/99), and to some degrees in his later works, are manipulative."

And a few minutes later:

Question: "How complex is [a] statistical problem reconstructing historical [sic] from proxy data over the last thousand years?"

Answer: "In my opinion, one of the reasons I was drawn to the problem is it's easily one of the most complex problems I've ever seen statistically. The data is multidimensional, very big, and the data is extremely interconnected... I was convinced there was a lot new to say here."

Question: "How does this complexity impact how a scientist must approach the data to avoid improperly manipulating it?"

Answer: "So this is really, I think, the essence of the story here. A data analysis, data that's complex like this, it just doesn't unfold easily. I have a colleague at Columbia... He describes a complicated statistical task like this one is like taking a walk... Every time you get to a fork, you have to make a decision. You go right, you go left. Then you make the decision and you head down and come to another fork. You go right or you go left. And the idea is that these small decisions, they seem irrelevant. But they can make all the difference. And that in particular, if you kind of see where you want to go with the answer, you can lead yourself into a conclusion that would be very different if someone made a different set of decisions and walked down a different set of paths.

"And so what happened is, and what happens today in statistical analysis as we move from calling it statistics to data science is... we're in a crisis. A crisis of trust and replication because so many results that were thought to be true and correct have now gone back [sic] and looked at or attempted to be replicated and they didn't work. Lots of things we thought were true turned out to be not true. It's a crisis. A problem [my colleague] has identified is due to really bad statistical sets of methods that allow you to get away with choices that would — would produce a very different result if you did it differently.

"And it requires a certain skill and an awareness and attention to affect all the details to get a solution, which is reliable. That's what you might call manipulation, the idea I will manipulate the set of paths I'm going through to get the result at the end of the day that is ultimately not reliable. In some cases, wrong or misleading."

Hmmm. Manipulation. Wrong. Misleading.

Before the day ended, Defense counsel called Dr. Judith Curry. Yep, the same Judith Curry of Michael Mann email fame. In real life (and not in Mann's inbox), Dr. Curry is a world-renowned climatologist who has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, and Penn State. She has worked with NASA and NOAA and built her own company to advise private enterprise on how to mitigate climate risk. In Dr. Curry's world (which is also our world), "there are real consequences." If you're wrong with your analysis and data, in, say, advising a utility company on the probability of long duration winds in a certain region, the entire company — and all those who depend upon it — are at risk. The real world has real consequences. Those who live their lives in the ivory towers of academia in our nation, as this case has demonstrated, don't have to contend with those same consequences.

The trial resumes Monday morning, pending the judge's ruling on a flurry of motions filed over the past two days. This includes Mark's motion that the Court exclude all evidence regarding the Plaintiff's decline in grant monies as that information, as demonstrated earlier this week, was false. Stay tuned!

Press Roundup

Power Line's John Hinderaker is in DC to support Mark — thank you John! If you aren't listening every morning to Phelim and Ann, you are missing out — Paul Bedard agrees. The Daily Sceptic has an excellent summary of the case here. And the Patriot Post has this ever-important moral takeaway from the case, "the right of the people to say what's on their minds, especially when it comes to public policy and political issues. Steyn, Simberg, and anyone else writing online has this right, even if they're conservative and the Big Tech censors work to silence them."
https://www.steynonline.com/14065/the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense

lee wrote on Feb 9^th, 2024 at 12:03pm:


A Washington, DC jury today found the Defendants (Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg) liable for defamatory speech and reckless disregard of provable facts. Putting aside the monetary damages, the real damage done by this case is to every American who still believes in the First Amendment.

The precedent set today, and as alluded to by Justice Alito when the case was petitioned before the U.S. Supreme Court, means that disagreement and/or criticism of a matter of public policy — the founding principle of this country — is now in doubt. And should you choose to give voice to any dissent, you can brought before a jury, held responsible, and fined.

Think this is just rhetoric? Consider, Mark Steyn is a member of the media. As such, he is supposedly afforded First Amendment protections. If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for every day citizens? And it doesn't matter if you are in DC or Montana — anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing.
https://www.steynonline.com/14085/a-bad-day-for-america

Apparently there is some breathing room. It appears that it has been deemed unconstitutional to award punitive damages of that amount.

"Courts have signaled that, in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages will satisfy due process."

Constitutional Limits of Punitive Damages Awards

https://www.thompsoncoe.com/resources/publications/constitutional-limits-of-puni...

$1 dollar compensatory and $1 million punitive far exceeds the single digit ratio.

JM just can't help himself -

Jovial Monk wrote on Feb 9^th, 2024 at 1:45pm:


So apparently, he agrees that he hid the decline.

Dendrochronology has many flaws. At least ONE is the use of some species of trees. Another is trees rely on temperature and water as well as CO2. Trees generally don't grow well in winter.

Now all  he has to do is point out the defamation.

Of course Mann can SEE climate change happening.

"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."

"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."

https://climatechangedispatch.com/michael-mann-tree-ring-circus/

And the reason he left Adelaide was AGW.

"Adelaide      -0.1      0.0      0.0      6.49      4.65"

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/02/urban-heat-island-studies-do-pristine-wea...

Urban Heat Island Studies.

More from JM

Jovial Monk wrote on Feb 9^th, 2024 at 2:22pm:


Dear oh Dear. Seasonal variation is indeed how tree rings are produced. Some species of trees are more reliable indicators than others. Something JM apparently doesn't want to countenance.

CO2 is irrelevant? Oh dear now he denies CO2 is plant food.

"The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262

Frank wrote on Feb 9^th, 2024 at 12:07pm:



Ai Washington, DC jury ordered him to pay $1 in compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in punitive damages to global warm-monger Michael E Mann. And that verdict certainly looms large in his mind.

The latter number will likely get overturned at the United States Supreme Court, which generally reckons that "in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process" - and that's when "the defamatory statements do not involve matters of public concern". A "single-digit ratio" means four-to-one, five-to-one punitive-to-compensatory. Steyn's jurors just set a record - a million-to-one ratio.

So, under the Supreme Court guidelines, the punitive damages of $1,000,000 could in theory be reduced to, er, four dollars. Mark may likewise be reduced, somewhat mortifyingly, to waving that US constitution around. Whether his health will hold out long enough to get him before Chief Justice John Roberts and the rest of the gang is a different question. Also: American justice has gotten a lot more capricious than it was when this case started twelve years ago.
Ibid.

....


While Mann prevailed at trial, the proceedings also unearthed some slimy conduct on his part, including his disparagement of scientists with whom he disagrees and behind-the-scenes efforts to suppress articles by scientists he does not like.

This long-running litigation may not be over. Steyn's camp has indicated they intend to challenge the punitive damages award (if not other aspects of the decision). Mann's attorney also told the NYT they still plan to appeal the prior decisions that had removed CEI and National Review from the case: "Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, John Williams said, 'They're next.'"
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/09/climate-scientist-michael-mann-wins-defamat
ion-suit-against-mark-steyn-and-rand-simberg/
....

Climate Science Gatekeeping
New Evidence Shows Michael Mann Seeking to Manipulate Peer Review


https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-science-gatekeeping