Archives par mot-clé : Michael Mann

better to know...?, climate-debate

Pay Up, Mr. Mann

by The Editors, Jan 10, 2005 in NationalReview

For more than eight years, the climate scientist Michael Mann harassed National Review through litigation over a blog post — until, eventually, the First Amendment brought an end to his attack. This week, a court in our nation’s capital ordered Mann to pay us $530,820.21 worth of attorney’s fees and costs, and to do so within 30 days. It is time for him to get out his checkbook, and sign on the dotted line.

This restitution is welcome, if incomplete. As was made clear during the discovery process, Mann’s explicitly stated intention was to use a “major lawsuit” as a vehicle with which to “ruin National Review.” Happily, Mann failed in this endeavor. But, while all’s well that ends well, his failure exacted costs nevertheless. Between 2012 and 2019 — with the courts inexplicably refusing to apply legal provisions ostensibly designed to prevent frivolous lawsuits such as Mann’s — we were forced to spend a considerable amount of time and money defending ourselves against his malicious, meritless suit. Between 2019 and now, we have been obliged to expend yet more effort trying to recoup at least some of our costs. This week’s award will not undo all of the damage that Mann has inflicted upon us, and upon journalism more broadly — we had asked for $1 million in fees and costs, and even that was a fraction of what we have spent — but it will, at least, go some way toward making us whole.

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climate-debate

The Hockey Stick Trial: How Science Died In A D.C. Courtroom

by R .Darwall, Feb 20, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected.”

The sub-title of Popper’s 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, in which he argued that science progresses through inspired conjectures checked by attempts to refute them through criticism, is “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.” [emphasis, links added]

Now, a six-person jury in Washington, DC has refuted Popper’s formulation of the uniqueness of science, finding in favor of climate scientist Michael Mann in the defamation suit he brought against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn dating back to 2012.

Central to Mann’s case was his attempt to reconstruct global temperature over the previous millennium – the iconic “hockey stick” graph.

The graph shows global temperatures purportedly falling for centuries and suddenly shooting upward with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Mann’s hockey stick representation was derived principally from selected tree-ring data based on the assumption that tree rings constitute accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by confounding factors such as rainfall, seasonal variability, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The results that Mann produced are also sensitive to decisions on and application of statistical techniques.

There can be little doubt of the hockey stick’s historical importance in developing and propagating what became the dominant scientific paradigm of climate change.

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climate-debate

Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes

by James Taylor, Oct 5, 2020 in WUWT

Prominent scientist and climate activist Michael Mann appealed to an asserted scientific consensus to chastise President Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes program last night. Ironically, Mann himself ignored clear scientific consensus in order to promote his own, out-of-the-mainstream climate change theories.

While interviewing Mann, CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “There have always been fires in the West. There have always been hurricanes in the East. How do we know that climate change is involved in this?” Pelley followed up with, “The president says about climate change, ‘Science doesn’t know.’”

Replied Mann, “The president doesn’t know, and he should know better. He should know that the world’s leading scientific organizations, our own U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and national academies of every major industrial nation, every scientific society in the United States that’s weighed in on the matter. This is a scientific consensus. There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”

Mann’s description of the conclusions of the “scientific consensus” however, is exactly the opposite of what scientific bodies report.

As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses “low confidence” in any connection between climate change and changes in hurricane activity.

Similarly, as documented in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, U.S. wildfires are much less frequent and severe than they were in the first half of the 20th century – 100 years of global warming ago. Moreover, the IPCC reports a decrease in drought conditions – which is the primary climate factor regarding wildfires – in the global region including the U.S. West. Moreover, the IPCC finds no evidence of an increase in drought globally, either.

Ultimately, data, evidence, and scientific facts are far more indicative of scientific truth than a real or imagined consensus of scientists. Yet, to the extent Michael Mann wishes to invoke consensus as a scientific argument, the clear consensus of scientists is that Mann is promoting extreme climate theories that have no basis in reality.