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Climate Change Skeptic Group Must Pay Damages To UVA, Michael Mann
ideonexus (1257332) writes In January of 2014, the American Traditions Institute (ATI) sought climate scientist Micheal Mann's emails from his time at the University of Virginia, a request that was denied in the courts. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that ATI must pay damages for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully.
But it seems that the only way to get emails and not get sued is to, How shall we say, Hack in.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha. Yeah, good luck with that. As long as that pesky cabal of climatologists is out to get those poor little fellas in the coal and petrol industries, Climategate will continue rising from the grave.
Evidence against them only makes them stronger.
...I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for another 20-30 years and at that point I have faith that civilization will start to engineer its way out of the problem...
"We'll invent something to fix this when the time comes" is not a sound policy, or a policy at all. It's wishful thinking. What if we don't?
so...why have temperaturse not risen during last 15-17 years while C)2 went up?
did the Stefan-Boltzmann Law not work when CO2 much higher in the past, and temperatures were lower than today?
might be that is is more complicted than this one law?
Why not just release the emails and shut this group up? It seems like they are going to great lengths to hide something.
As far as I can tell, this lawsuit determined that the Freedom of Information Act can't be used to get access to some official email correspondence paid for by public funds. Even if you are really gung-ho on AGW, that's not a result to automatically crow about.
Michael Mann is not my favorite scientist, as he has a pattern of cargo cultist behavior that has annoyed his peers (provoking words like "vomit" and "crock of s**t"). The lawsuit to watch is the one where Mann is suing the National Review (a conservative magazine) and Mark Steyn, a conservative satirist and commentator. Whether or not his overall beliefs about AGW are justified, Professor Mann does have skeletons in his closet, and if the court does its job properly, he will be smacked down hard.
Ain't going to happen, sadly. As the temperate zone moves closer to the world's poles, and the regions we're currently growing cereal crops on become progressively more arid, there is simply less area of land (square miles or kilometres or however you want to measure it) on which crops can be grown - and that's ignoring the costs of clearing and draining that land, and all the effects of ecocide.
At the same time as this is happening, of course, all our critical infrastructure will become unusable unless we make huge new investments in flood walls. For example, I work for a major international bank, which, obviously, has its critical data infrastructure replicated in seven cities across the globe. Only one problem: in six of those seven cities, our data centres are within ten metres of current sea level. Most major financial centres are old port cities, and all old port cities are on the coast. So over the next fifty years we have to either all relocate our trading infrastructure, or else abandon it. What I expect will happen is that we'll delay and dawdle until it's too late, and then our whole civilisation will collapse under the combined pressures of hunger, refugees, and rising water levels.
We're already past the point where there's any hope of the planet being able to support even half its current population in 100 years time. The real policy question is how we now radically reduce the population without war, pestilence, famine and death.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Creationists blame Christopher Hitchens for "polarizing the Evolution debate"... and I do not accept their argument.
The Creationists are wrong about that because:
(1) Hitchens (like Gore) is not a scientist. You can not draw any conclusions about the validity of a scientific theory on the basis of the statements of non-scientists.
(2) It doesn't matter how Hitchens said what he said. We are all responsible for deciding what we believe. Responsible people ignore the polarization and examine the arguments logically. Idiots blame their dismissal of science on "the other guy" for not being nice.
If I wouldn't accept the "that guy polarized the debate" argument from Creationists; why would I accept it from you?
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I'm not sure what grounds there are for reciprocal discovery in this instance. A libel suit has never been an opportunity for the defendant to play detective and attempt to prove their accusations.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What on earth are you talking about? If you could cast credible doubt on AGW you'd not only have industry throwing money at you, but once you'd overturned the current consensus in climate science you'd have every major university fighting to get hold of the person who revolutionised the field.
Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.
You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?
Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
You need people's emails when you're digging for something (anything really) you can use to discredit someone personally (apart from any scientific merit). Besides which, some of those emails are personal.
The Virginia court ruled that filing a lawsuit just to get those emails constitutes harassment, which in turn is a frivolous use of the court's time. A sensible conclusion in my opinion.
And yes, there do seem to be consequences for filing frivolous lawsuits.