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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
We look forward to your publication of the flaws you have discovered in Dr. Mann's math. Ah, but you can't publish them, because you're just making this stuff up. Or is it because every single reviewer for every scientific journal is a member of a deep conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel industry because ... well if you have to ask you don't understand how these dark conspiracies work!
Here's Mann's new book on The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
"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.
He is debating Steyn in court about whether he is a fraud. If Steyn can just prove he is a fraud, he wins, if not, he is in a lot of trouble.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
So "You're like a child molestor" is ok, but "You are a fraud" is not?
Weasel words and politicing, and slander in both cases in my books.
The legal system is seriously fucked up if it considers such minor differences to be grounds for letting someone off on making baseless accusations, "freedom of the press" or no. If you can't prove what you're making accusations about, one should be required to legally STFU and have some damned integrity in their writing, not be free to spew whatever bile and vitriol they like and whine "it's just an allegory."
Here's an allegory for the guy who wrote the insults and slams: "You're very much like the slime from between the toes of the Himalayan Sloth."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Got any links to denier sites that read like scientific discussions? I'd love to see them. Or just one.
http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
Scientific concern about climate change isn't, of course, a religion. However, there are an awful lot of True Believers who act as though it were. And no, I'm not a member of the Heartland Institute, I'm just a skeptic who accepts the fact that the climate is changing (It's always changing, sometimes getting warmer, sometimes cooler.) but doubts that the main driving force at the presence is anthropogenic because I don't, personally, find the evidence sufficiently persuasive and prefer to think for myself.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
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.
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. The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
Isn't realclimate.org just his advocacy site? I've had people point to it before. It's reads like a marketing hype rather than as a scientific discussion.
Are you looking at the same link I am? Other than using the "Myth #1" style of summarization used by many people (including marketing) if I have a criticism of realclimate.org it's that they write too much like scientists. Their writing is full of caveats, asides, and long winded explainations because the subject is inherently messy. Frankly I think their writing is just too dry and analytical to reach a general audience. Just look at this excerpt from the link in question:
MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.
[...]
The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the “hockey stick” shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.
Realclimate.org isn't marketing, it's dry scientific writing directed to laypeople, what the AGW community needs is an advocacy site written by non-scientists which is less concerned about the science and more concerned about the debate. Realclimate.org fills an essential niche in the debate but it's not the kind of hand wavy tabloidish mass audience style of blog that's needed to counter Watts Up With That?.
I stole this Sig
This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.
For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.
So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.
Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
Straw man.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The "hockey stick" agrees closely with the average of IPCC models. Yet none of the models comes close to matching real measurements. Perhapsthe hockey stick only stands the test of time when compared against other models, not real data...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data.
The judge disagrees that there is a distinction. Since the dozens of temperature reconstructions using different methods and different proxies all come up with the same answer it will be difficult to understand how Mann's work could be considered wrong, let alone fraudulent.
you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not
Probably you cannot. Probably the most you can do is concoct conspiracy theories based on code comments. Leaving aside the fact that this code was authored by someone completely unrelated to the Mann temperature reconstructions (but why let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?), it may be worth noting that the code was used in a paper that calls tree rings proxies into question : Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?
So if you want to dismiss the results of the paper that used this code, then you are dismissing work critical of one of the proxies used in Mann's reconstruction.
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?
Even so, climate research gets a lot of scrutiny and the work of Mann, Hansen, and the other big names gets seen by a lot of eyeballs, most of them looking for flaws.
There's a lot at stake and anyone who can topple the pillars on which AGW stand is going to be very, very rich & famous.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Welcome to Slashdot, haruchai, where posting simple truths brings out the deniers, to silence you.
To mod your post flame bait? Come on.
It's sad, that many of those who deny AGW will complain vociferously about censorship of their view, but are quick to try to bury anything they disagree with.
And yes, Mann has been investigated many times, and found innocent. Wait to see what they do to my post.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
I'm sure there are "fair-minded thinkers" who don't believe in AGW - but Mark Steyn is NOT one of them.
I don't really give a damn whether he believes in global warming or not but he smeared a scientist purely out of political spite.
A "fair-minded thinker" would have stuck to a scientific critique. Steyn is a polemicist by nature, has been sued before and should be aware that he was straying into deep waters.
It's not a foregone conclusion that Steyn will lose, far from it, but it's telling that the National Review refuses to support him.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I'm not sure that's true. There are three factors. Of which I am aware, that is... IANAL. And of course I'm talking about U.S. Libel laws are different in UK.
[1] The statement must be of a defamatory nature (likely to cause others to have a lower opinion of the subject or otherwise damaging, as to professional reputation for example). [2] It must be untrue, and [3] the person stating it must know, or reasonably should know, that it is not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think intent per se is a requirement. For example, someone could write something damaging about someone else, genuinely believing it to be true, but if they reasonably should have known it was not true, then they can still be guilty of libel. So it's possible to run afoul of the law without intending to tell lies about somebody.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics. You can demonstrate, e.g., the greenhouse effect, and the spectral transmission characteristics of carbon dioxide, with simple equipment. You can check that burning carbohydrates releases H20 and C02. You can build simple toy-model radiative transfer models that show trapping more heat in a system (via greenhouse gas) increases the temperature. I doubt you did significantly more "conclusive" tests of gravity, particle physics, or quantum mechanics in high school or college --- you were just willing to trust that extending the same procedure that predicted the simple toy model results also works in the "damn, that's too hard to do in my garage" systems.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes? Yes, the finest details of global climate modeling are too messy for high school students to pin down; but the science does make sense on the crude level accessible to college-level experiment. Data sets and models are available and shared between qualified researchers --- but, just like raw data from the LHC, they're not always easy for an "outsider" without extensive subject-specific training to evaluate. So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
Nope. This isn't about whether there are better methods. Dozens of other papers get the same hockey stick with different methods and different proxies. They would all argue that their methods are better. That is science, not law. At issue here are the allegations of fraud. Here is what the most recent judge has said:
A reasonable reader, both within and outside the scientific community, would understand that a scientist who molests or tortures his data is acting far outside the bounds of any acceptable scientific method. In context, it would not be unreasonable for a reader to interpret the comment, and the republication in National Review, as an allegation that Dr. Mann had committed scientific fraud, which Penn State University then covered up, just as some had accused the University of covering up the Sandusky scandal. For many of the reasons discussed in Judge Combs Greene’s July 19 orders, to state as a fact that a scientist dishonestly molests or tortures data to serve a political agenda would have a strong likelihood of damaging his reputation within his profession, which is the very essence of defamation.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence? The "big revolutions" in science have always been about the tiny details. Einstein didn't radically overthrow Newton; his theory indicated only microscopically tiny deviations from classical physics that could barely be measured by the most sensitive apparatus (and they were, and the rest is history). Quantum mechanics didn't destroy classical physics; it only showed strange things happening at the most sensitive boundaries of technology. Fundamental shifts in understanding --- things that shift the foundational basis for entire fields --- occur at the extreme margins of experimental evidence; it's never "the old guys are 90% wrong," but rather "the old guys are 99.9% right, but we've just found that 0.1% discrepancy."
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
Really? You just stated that drastic changes in scientific understanding have occurred before. Who built renown and careers off those? The guys who stuck with the old, discredited theories? Being the revolutionary discoverer of new physics overthrowing old theory has always been the way to get maximal renown --- you just need to be able to back up your stuff with solid evidence. Anthropogenic climate change deniers aren't discredited because they oppose consensus views; they're marginalized because they have zero solid evidence and rely on sloppy, unscientific, long-ago-disproven rhetoric instead of intellectual rigor.
The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
That's why climate scientists report very broad confidence intervals. They can't tell you the weather five years from now in Minneapolis, or even precisely where between 1.1 degrees and 6.4 degrees average warming will be over the next century (depending hugely also on emissions levels). IPCC warming estimates fall in a large uncertainty band, estimated by best practices to cover the complexity in fine details of figuring out exactly how a strongly-coupled complex system is going to evolve. On the other hand, climate change denialism --- that there is no effect within the broad range of uncertainty cited by climate experts --- is based on nothing but anti-scientific corporate shill craziness. There is zero scientific evidence that a guess at where the climate is heading falls in the "no change produced by anthropogenic emissions" regime, though there is room for uncertainty in the band between moderate and extreme climate impacts.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture." Also, such errors are, a-priori, no less likely to over-predict anthropogenic impacts than to under-predict them, so the hard-line "there's nothing to worry about" stance is simply politically-motivated intentional ignorance (the antithesis of a scientific "skeptical" approach).
What fields have you applied for grants in? I'm not in climate science, but at least I particle physics, I can assure you that "everyone already knows this, and we're going to get the same results" is not a winning grant proposal or path to career success. If you want funding, you find an issue with lots of uncertainty (or one where you know you can do better than everyone else), and highlight how different your approach will be, with the possibility of finding new results. Trying to upset the consensus is the entire name of the game --- the only limit to doing so is demonstrating that you're competent to do so. Every scientist I know loves the principles of "underdog" experiments, using crazy new ideas that just might work to make new discoveries --- indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus." There is no shame in the scientific community (at least the portion I've seen) about challenging the consensus with boundary-pushing work (negative results on well-performed experiments contribute to career success) --- you just have to be competent, rather than a nutjob spouting ignorance (the typical state of climate-change-denying "experts").
Whoops.
He admits in the comments below after this is exposed that in fact the polar regions are expected to warm faster than the tropics (hard not to, since we've observed it) and thus, temperature rises in the polar regions will be higher then the projections of the models, but handwaves this away. No, Roy, this is what maths is for. Don't handwave.
No, I didn't agree with you: people don't wire grant proposals to confirm consensus, they write grant proposals to challenge or disprove it. If you assume consensus is unchallengeable and true, then you have nothing to write a grant proposal on. Only if you find something new --- that previous researchers overlooked, or got wrong, or didn't have the tools to measure --- are you going to get research funding. "Confirm" and "test or challenge" are not the same things. You're saying that people can only get funding to do experiments that look for and find the same answers everyone got before ("the consensus"), which is simply false. People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
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.
But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Much thinner than they were a decade ago, IMO most of those that are left are trolls and astro-turfers who like to get in quick on AGW stories.
Mann has been character assassinated by "for hire" lobbyists, he has had numerous death threats and has appeared before several political inquisitions. The coal industries effort to discredit Mann and ruin his life is lead in congress by US senator Inhofe. It's about time Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, and others, fought back against political persecution and those who created the army of useful idiots intent on doing them physical harm. They should not have ignored the threat this long, I wish them the best of luck.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
>the way that the AGW people have done everything they possibly could to deny that the Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age happened or that they were anything except "local phenomena."
And there you went and proved your opponents point about observation bias. In fact, the medieval warming period is well known in climate science circles - and was discovered BY them.
I was once in a debate about climate change where a denier tried to use the medieval period to prove that climate science is a fake and Michael Mann is a fraud - to prove his point he linked me to a scientific paper about the medieval warming period... and proved he hadn't actually READ the paper because if he had opened it he would have seen, right on the front page, that the lead author was Michael Mann - the very scientist he was trying to discredit by bringing it up wrote most of the research we have on it !
The medieval warming period doesn't discredit modern climate science - that we know about it at all is a PRODUCT of modern climate science !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *