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Michael Mann Defamation Suit Against National Review Writer to Proceed
From Ars Technica comes this update in the defamation case filed by climate researcher Michael Mann against political commentator Mark Steyn of National Review magazine, who rhetorically compared Mann to Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky and accused him of publishing intentionally misleading research results.
"The defendants tried to get it dismissed under the District of Columbia's Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) statute, which attempts to keep people from being silenced by frivolous lawsuits. The judge hearing the case denied the attempt and then promptly retired; Mann next amended his complaint, leading an appeals court to send the whole thing back to a new trial judge. Now the new judge has denied the SLAPP attempt yet again. In a decision released late last week (and hosted by defendant Mark Steyn), the judge recognizes that the comparison to a child molester is part of the "opinions and rhetorical hyperbole" that are protected speech when used against public figures like Mann. However, the accompanying accusations of fraud are not exempt:"
Mann isn't a fraud, his observation an have been confirmed and refined, and you and Steyn are cowards incapable of facing the universe as it is. The only difference is at least Steyn is man enough to put his name to his libel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Because it's an official meme of the Heartland Institute that scientific concern about radical climate change constitutes a "religion."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"That should teach others to defile our religion"
Haha!
Well, religion or not, one thing it should do is reinforce the principle that you should be careful what you say about people, even online, and regardless of whether you are a journalist. In most cases the libel laws are no different for Joe Shmoe than they are or a syndicated columnist.
Generally, opinions are fine... as long as they're clearly opinion and not stated as fact. Because even "You're an asshole" is commonly accepted as an opinion, that's probably okay... especially if you make it clear that it's only opinion.
But "fraud", and other such claims? Usually over the line, unless you can show that it's true.
In other words you have a cognitive bias that leads you to reject one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research.
Good!
Fraud has a legal definition, and so does libel. Mann's research has been found to be scientifically accurate and no allegations of fraud have been found worthy of recognition in the academic community. Steyn's writing is purely political, and his assertions of fraud against Mann, being without merit, clearly show that the author's intent is to discredit Mann's presentation. Steyn clearly went beyond reason when he impuned Mann's character by comparing Mann's character to that of a sociopathic child abuser. My hope is that that Steyn and the National Review, it's editorial staff and publisher are all found guilty and whipped within an inch of their dubious credility using the pulpit of the court. They should be bludgeoned with its gavel for the failure to afford their readers a reasonable opinion or the benefit of moderating their overzealous attackdog, and they should be fined within the limits of the law so as to hold their action up in the light of its own outrageousness.
William F. Buckely went to his grave lamenting the current state of Conservatism and its discourse.
Actually, one of the most interesting effects of this trial is that Mann must comply with Steyn's discovery demands, to see whether indeed he "tortured" the data... Mann and others have still refused to disclose the details of their models, saying (astoundingly) that people just wanted to prove them wrong. Trying to prove a model wrong is the usual way of science... So whether you think this is "settled science" or not, you should welcome this open disclosure and wonder why it takes a court proceeding to achieve it.
As for the notion of "settled science", which presumably means you should stop questioning something - this is a very disturbing concept which in my opinion has no place at all on slashdot, of all one forums. slashdot is one place where people discuss new ways of looking at old ideas - experiments test Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, studies about whether cutting salt from your diet reduces hypertension, the value of dietary suppliements, and other bits of uncommon knowledge. Almost every interesting post here challenges some "settled" idea.
If Steyn's motive was scientific inquiry and he was conducting the discourse in refereed journals I would agree with you.
That's not it though. He has no science background and he's into politically motivated demagoguery, court actions and making a public circus of it. His attacks of the judge in the case got his defense team to quit.
That's generally NOT the path to truth.
Mann and others have still refused to disclose the details of their models
Complete nonsense! I found it with a two minute google search! http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holoc...
While I don't expect you to really be bothered by such things as facts, you might be surprised to learn that the University of Pennsylvania is different and distinct from Pennsylvania State University, the university where Jerry Sandusky committed his crimes.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data. You may recall that Principal Component Analysis was used on a limited and secretly-adjusted data set to come up with the alarming "hockey stick" chart.
I'm not sure about "alarming" - perhaps you've let your fear get the better of you. A good description would be "accurate" since the modelling accurately reflected what happened to the climate in the years succeeding.
It's pretty much indisputable that there was significant warming from like 1930-1996, but very little since then in spite of more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850.
And if we do not artificially split the period 1930-2013 into 2 chunks for no reason, we can see a clear interdecadal signal from CO2 induced warming - as predicted by Fourier, Arrhenius etc. If we artificially selected a region, say 1980-1996, we can see a significant warming trend somewhat above the long term trend predicted by GCM models, and then if we selected the period 1996-2013 we can see a definite warming trend, somewhat below the long term trend predict by GCM models. The data is so clear that the climate scientists were able to reduce the uncertainty (per AR5) of long term predictions of CO2 forced warming.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... [wattsupwiththat.com] - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched: ; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!' yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
Looks pretty innocuous. Perhaps you either (a) Posted the wrong section of the model (b) Misunderstood the meaning of the comment "Apply a very artificial correction for decline" per the quite embarrassing mistakes made by some conspiracy theorists with respect to the word "decline" used in the CRU emails.
It's hard to present contrary evidence if you can't get at and question the models or data.
Those who can't perform a simple Google search would be hard pressed to debate the science in any meaningful way (and should probably cease spewing BS to score political points). I found the code and data with a two minute search. - http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holoc...
Is it claimed that Dr. Mann won the Nobel Prize in that book?
You don't need to read a book to find that out. He did contribute to the winning of a Nobel peace prize. He received a certificate from the IPCC thanking him for his contributions. Various people, desperate people, thought this certificate was the Nobel peace prize, they never asked him, he never claimed it was. They made up a story about him faking the certificate - he didn't fake it, it was real. Much embarrassment was heaped upon Anthony Watts, and other worthies, including our favourite Lord-who-is-not-a-Lord Monkton, for these spurious and quickly debunked claims.
He never made any claim to have been a Nobel Laureate. He did win a Nobel peace prize, as one of many who shared the prize. He never claimed anything that was false, this was a rumour made up by a number of people who apparently can't read or otherwise lack basic comprehension skills.
whether this particular debate should be squelched:
On the one hand: That particular debate was the subject of a US senate inquisition lead by hostile senators from coal rich states. The national academies stepped in as arbitrator and reviewed the work, they agreed with Mann's methods but criticized some of his certainty levels, these minor criticisms were addressees in a subsequent "hockey stick" paper from Mann (circa 2005) that was published by the national academies in their own journal (Science).
On the other hand: Anthony Watts is a well known denier with strong links to the same anti-science lobby groups as Steyn, he has never published a single peer-reviewed article or paper. He simply ignores any and all contra-evidence to his claims because he knows that some people will believe him if he repeats the same bald assertions ad-nauseam.
more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850
I think you are using an unconventional definition of "liner", probably one invented by Watts. The facts are it took ~250yrs to pump 500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, on current consumption trends it will take less than 50yrs to double it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.