Global warming alarmist Presstitutes ignore the "hockey stick man" loss in a Federal Court
Roberto Rojas-Morales MBA, MA (Res. Hons), AFACHSM
Senior Health & Medical Executive & Strategic Consultant
Media Ignores Michael Mann’s Court Loss — It Doesn’t Fit The Warmist Agenda
MEDIA IGNORES MICHAEL MANN’S COURT LOSS — IT DOESN’T FIT THE WARMIST AGENDA
· Date: 30/08/19
Last week, a Canadian court tossed out a lawsuit in which Michael Mann, the researcher who published the idolized hockey stick temperature chart, had sued another researcher for libel. Did the mainstream media run with this story? Of course not. That would ruin the narrative.
Mann became famous for the chart, which showed temperatures running along in a horizontal fashion before spiking at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the “evidence” the global warming alarmists had been waiting for — “science” that showed human activity was overheating Earth. It was included in at least one United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Not all were convinced, however. There were questions about the data he used to create the stick, which he wouldn’t release. It has been called “100% fraudulent,” an “artifact of poor mathematics,” and a violation of “of scientific standards.”
Mann has been accused of engaging in “data manipulation,” and “academic and scientific misconduct.”
Some years after the stick was constructed, Canadian statisticians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick challenged Mann’s work. They argued the “recent paleoclimate reconstruction by Mann et al. does not provide reliable evidence about climate change over the past millennium, because their data are inconsistent and their confidence intervals are wrong.”
Climate researcher Tim Ball even went so deep as to say that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State,” where Mann conducts research. Ball found out that was the wrong thing to say. Mann sued him in Canada.
Ball, however, beat Mann in court. The case was dismissed Friday. Almost immediately, Ball wrote to Anthony Watts of the wattsupwiththat website, telling him “Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the (British Columbia) Supreme Court and they awarded me (court) costs.” According to John Hinderaker, an attorney and PowerLine blog contributor, the case was thrown out “with prejudice.”
What happened was that Dr. Ball asserted a truth defense. He argued that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud, something that could be proved if one had access to the data and calculations, in particular the R2 regression analysis, underlying it,” Hinderaker wrote. “Mann refused to produce these documents. He was ordered to produce them by the court and given a deadline. He still refused to produce them, so the court dismissed his case.”
John O’Sullivan at Principia Scientific International believes the “extraordinary outcome will likely trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr. Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to alarmist climate science claims that modern temperatures are ‘unprecedented.’”
Big news, right? Not in the U.S. The media that acts as the climate hysterics’ public relations arm has ignored the case.
So it’s just a Canadian story, then? Not hardly. The U.S. media played the hockey stick as an American/Western/global story. What happens to its author in a courtroom should be U.S. news.
It’s plausible that the media have deserted Mann. Several mainstream outlets sided with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, which the litigious Mann had sued for defamation. They were concerned that allowing the lawsuit to go forward would be a threat to First Amendment freedoms.
But the lack of coverage would be the same if any climate alarmist had suffered a legal loss.
Environmental Geoscientist
5 年Mann was also ordered to pay the defendant's costs
Manager Bantry Community Welfare Services
5 年Ciaran D Smith /ChiarráinSmithfield
Senior Health & Medical Executive & Strategic Consultant
5 年in 2007, Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association.? "Wegman found that Mann made a BASIC error that "may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians." Instead, this small group of climate scientists were working on their own, largely in isolation, and without the academic scrutiny needed to ferret out false assumptions. Worse, the problem also applied more generally, to the broader climate-change and meteorological community, which also relied on statistical techniques in their studies. "[I]f statistical methods are being used, then statisticians ought to be funded partners engaged in the research to insure as best we possibly can that the best quality science is being done," Wegman recommended, noting that "there are a host of fundamental statistical questions that beg answers in understanding climate dynamics."
Senior Health & Medical Executive & Strategic Consultant
5 年"Wegman accepted the energy and commerce committee's assignment, and agreed to assess the Mann controversy pro bono. He conducted his third-party review by assembling an expert panel of statisticians, who also agreed to work pro bono At its conclusion, the Wegman review entirely vindicated the Canadian critics and repudiated Mann's work. "Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported," Wegman stated, adding that "The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable." When Wegman corrected Mann's statistical mistakes, the hockey stick disappeared. Wegman found that Mann made a basic error that "may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians." Instead, this small group of climate scientists were working on their own, largely in isolation, and without the academic scrutiny needed to ferret out false assumptions."
Reluctantly retired and looking to be productive; finance, development, teaching
5 年Just to be clear. I favour balanced reporting; further research indicates that this case is open and that Dr Mann's research while inherently flawed -- since it is necessarily subjective at least in part -- remains empirically robust. Personally, while I know not enough to deem climate science as "settled", mankind nevertheless has an ethical imperative to world for which we are stewards not to pour any substance willy nilly into the ecology or atmosphere. As a risk manager by training, climate science versus climate denial is a probabilistic continuum the expected values of which reinforce the ethical imperative that sentience requires.?https://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2016/11/those-who-cannot-remember-past-are.html?