by PAUL COLLITS – I STILL have a cherished coffee mug commemorating the leaked climate-gate emails of around thirteen years ago that implicated “climate scientists” in all sorts of (privately admitted) academic trickery.
Like mis-using statistics, making methodological howlers, cancelling opponents, rigging peer reviewed journals – and the rest.
- Lawyers asked the jury to send a message to Right-wing “science deniers”.
- It’s simply not a rational world any more.
- Not only is the system rigged, but it punishes wrong thinking.
James Delingpole was heavily involved in breaking the story, which in a rational properly scientific world would have killed climate change BS once and for all. We aren’t and it didn’t.
Anyone following the recent defamation trial of Mark Steyn (and a less well-known co-defendant) brought by American climate “scientist” Michael Mann, with whom I share the distinction that both of us have worked for the University of NSW (aka Kenso Tech), will be both shocked on the one hand, and not in the least surprised, on the other, that a Washington DC jury found against Steyn.
MILLION
Bottom line: Mark Steyn owes Michael Mann a million big ones.
With Steyn’s legion of supporters, I don’t expect that his own bank balance will suffer too much. I hope not.
I can think of few people on God’s earth less deserving of a big pay day than Michael Mann. Michael Mann is to science as Ray Bright was to quality Australian spin bowling.
And Mann being the man (one n) he is, I expect he will now come after the rest of us.
About a millennium ago, it seems, Mann sued Steyn for saying that his “hockey stick” graph – made famous by Al Gore – was “fraudulent”.
The figurative hockey stick suggested a thousand years of stable temperatures followed by a sudden, “unprecedented” rise that coincided with man’s increased use of fossil fuels during and since the industrial revolution.
Chris Morrison at The Daily Sceptic provides a good overall summary of the case.
Queensland University’s Howard Dewhirst also sums up the case succinctly.
In particular, to the mainstream media’s almost total ignoring of the trial: “When a story is not in the mainstream press, you can bet the house that it tells against a fragile consensus, and it will be reported only if it changes to supporting that consensus.
“Such a trial was the long-postponed legal brawl between plaintiff Professor Michael Mann and two non-academic defendants, Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg. Mann’s suit was that the defendants set out to ruin his reputation and livelihood by publishing in 2012 a knowingly false and defamatory claim that he had fiddled the books to produce the climate change hockey stick graph, as it came to be called.”
He called the affair a “stitch up”.
A climate sceptic, or denialist, Trump-voting blogger, taking on an “esteemed” scholar in Washington DC, was always going to be a fool’s errand.
Steyn’s legal team made the error of assuming that argument, logic and evidence, all quaint, outdated notions in these post-modern times, would win the day.
EMBARRASSMENT
All the evidence during and since the trial suggests that Mann’s case was a legal embarrassment. A little like Joe Biden’s 2020 basement presidential campaign.
Steyn has accused the US legal system of being a “swamp” ever since the trial of his good friend Lord Conrad Black back in the day, which ended with Black in the slammer. Of course, Steyn was, and is, absolutely right.
Many critics have correctly lamented the death of free speech that the Mann verdict portends. A (real) climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr, a witness at the trial, concluded that there were two pivotal points that saved Mann.
One occurred when Mann was testifying and he explained that he felt that the bloggers were not just criticising him, but they were attacking all of climate science, and he could not let that stand.
As the world’s “most accomplished and famous climate scientist”, Mann intimated that he was simply the embodiment of all of climate science.
For the jury, this set up the notion that this trial was not really about Mann, but about attacks on all of climate science from climate deniers.
The second pivotal moment occurred when in closing arguments Mann’s lawyer asked the jury to send a message to Right-wing science deniers and Trump supporters with a large punitive damage award.
If Pielke is right, then God help us all. But it gets worse.
Shane Fudge and Kathy Gyngell at The Conservative Woman note: “The judge struck all but one of Mann’s expert witnesses from the trial on account of unclear and invalid methodologies; though Mann admitted that he had tried to cover his tracks by asking colleagues to delete emails during ‘Climategate’ in 2009.
WEAK
“Mann’s defence was extremely weak: he provided no evidence or witnesses supporting his claims of damage to reputation or career, he appeared to mislead, if not lie outright, on several key points of the trial.”
Bottom line. Mann didn’t have a case. Yet he won. The thing that stands out is the parallel with Biden, circa 2020.
Biden didn’t even show up to the presidential campaign that year. He didn’t need to. They had an ace card called COVID.
Biden ran the show – or, more correctly, his puppeteers did – from the basement. The whole of the legacy media were on board.
They also had the tech giants. The medical industrial complex. They had the global institutions. Above all, they had Xi Jinping and his little mate, Tony Fauci.
They all set up the presidential ballot to be a postal event. End of story. Trump never stood a chance.
The message was that all you need to do is put in the paperwork when the electorate is rigged. The system will do the rest.
It turned out okay for Joe. It may again, in 2024 (astonishingly), despite the recent finding of a Special Counsel looking into Biden’s files-in-the-garage that he is, basically, gaga. It’s simply not a rational world any more.
Dewhirst adds, grimly: “Mann’s claim of loss of reputation was so laughably untrue that the jury in Washington DC awarded him just US$1 compensation, and that should have been the end of it all. However, Mann’s counsel advised the jury that Steyn and Simberg were guilty of questioning the science behind the hockey stick graph and, to dissuade future claims being brought against the consensus position, Steyn should be ‘punished’.
“The prosecutor clearly wanted to prevent any future questioning of climate science by stifling what used to be called ‘freedom of speech’. The jury obliged by imposing a US$1million penalty on Steyn, but just US$1000 on Simberg.”
So, not only is the show rigged, laughably so, but the system has to “punish” the major wrongdoer. And God knows how many hundreds of millions Fat Al Gore has made out of “the stick”.
FRAUDULENT
Dewhirst again: “If Steyn’s assertion is correct that the graph is fraudulent, this will have a dramatic effect on the climate change debate beyond the court, as noted above. The free speech issue is of more general importance as it affects many areas where people who do not yield to the dictates of those who believe there is only one correct opinion have suffered cancelling, job loss, ostracism.”
It all portends serious ill.
Let us leave the final word to Roger Pielke: “I would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science or climate scientists. Such legal action may not be limited to climate — debate over COVID-19 also presents a target-rich environment to silent unwanted speech. Watch this space.”
Ah, the COVID dissidents and the “narratives”. With Western authoritarian governments and their globalist, supra-national paymasters building the architecture of tyranny, it won’t require little men like Michael Mann to do the lawfare dirty work. They will just put us all in prison.
Now, despite serious ill-health, possibly caused by the COVID jab and certainly not helped by twelve years of litigation and other threats, Mark Steyn is taking his crusade for free speech to the United Kingdom, where he is taking on Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, over his then GB News show’s statements about vaccine harms.
He will need all his strength, and our support, to sustain himself as the next battle looms. Will the British system display any greater regard for free speech than the Washington DC jurors? I assume nothing in the post-COVID era. His hoped-for success in Blighty probably faces very long odds.
The Steyn case reminds me, a little, of the threats against me (which came to nothing) some years back for alleged contempt of court over something I wrote about the Victorian judges who dismissed the Pell appeal.
I had my defence ready. I compiled a dossier of seven pages of quotes. Compared to my very mild approbation, the world’s legal scholars and commentators simply tore the Victorian judgements to shreds.
Well, Steyn compiled a whole book of people smashing Mann’s thesis to equally small pieces.
Not enough, in Steyn’s case. It counted for nothing, as I said, in this age of enforced ideology and a rigged legal system.PC
I still have my copy of the climate gate emails
” STILL have a cherished coffee mug commemorating the leaked climate-gate emails of around thirteen years ago that implicated “climate scientists” in all sorts of (privately admitted) academic trickery.”
And earlier the audit report presented by mathematician Christopher Monckton of the UK of IPCC climate warming hoax computer modelling, he exposed the creative accounting involved including data that does not match historic records data.
The UN IPCC was furious and pointed out that Monckton is not a scientist, but he never claimed to be. They said that “the science is settled”, but that is misleading. And they banned him from speaking at conferences and meetings.
The climate-gate emails in two batches supported Christopher Monckton’s audit report.