Tuesday
Oct232012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Double or quits
Oct 23, 2012 Climate: Mann Anthony reports that Michael Mann has come over all legal, filing a suit for libel against the National Review online and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And as he correctly notes, the process of legal discovery of documents should be interesting.
The Hockey Stick Story never seems to end, does it?
Reader Comments (73)
Interesting comment at WUWT?
That Mann would go ahead with the suit perhaps indicates that he believes the firewall he has established around his data will survive the discovery process.. and he may be right if his brief is tight enough to concentrate exclusively on the pedophile comment.
JC
Pass the cold beers and crisps/popcorn whatever- this is going to be a "must-see"..
Particularly WRT "discovery" and "independent replication".
I'm sure that Steve McIntyre could have alot to say about this....
Interesting times.
Italian seismologists have just been banged up for not been sufficiently alarmist.
What about Mann for been too alarmist?
After all people have died thanks to increased food and fuel costs which can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of AGW.
One of the greatest fights between a peer reviewed scientist and a non scientist was won because the scientist tried to sue the non scientist for libel and the real details of his science had to be released during discovery.
Another one ! Still given this track record if National Review online and the Competitive Enterprise Institute call his bluff he will run a mile so fast it will make Bolt look like a 90 year old with a bad heart and bad hip.
One day his going to over step this mark and his ego will drop him in right in it, may that day been soon and the fall long with a very hard landing.
There seems to be a recent sharp up-tick in climate science legislation following a long period without much happening. As belligerence alone cannot account for this it could be proposed that interaction with cant creates a positive feedback.
Just a theory.
I suspect, though I make no predictions, that the day of reckoning is approaching for Mann.
To date, he has bluffed his way through and past all objections and criticisms, all the while uttering his familiar assertions about peer-reviewed-validated science (ie his), his vindication by independent reviews, the sinister machinations of fossil-fuel-funded deniers, and the overwhelming consensus that CAGW is real.
In short, here he stands, the heroic defender of scientific truth in the face of a near limitless attempts to undermine him as a paragon of objective virtue.
The truth, of course, is more sordid – and more interesting.
There is a curious parallel with Gordon Brown, a man no less given to proclaiming his own virtues while permanently scheming, dissembling and seeking to smear his perceived enemies.
On the whole, Brown, the man who abolished 'boom and bust', was probably the more accomplished schemer. Mann, after all, can lay claim only to having disproved the Medieval Warm Period.
But that both, to put it kindly, have contrived not just to be utterly wrong but to have espoused a kind of vicious, spitting paranoia in the face of their opponents, real or imagined, is self-evident.
These are not the kind of people any rational society should be guided by. Unfortunately, everyone else being much politer than them, they are precisely the kind of people who have managed to inflict themselves on us.
That said, Brown, consumed by resentment, has since disappeared into well-deserved, self-obsessed obscurity. Mann on the other hand, his spluttering ego still very much intact, has decided to make a last stand in a court of law.
I don't think it too fanciful to imagine him him, a year or two hence, a broken, ruined man, still obstinately proclaiming that he was always right. I look forward intensely to his demise.
Given the vested interests backing him, however, I have a horrible feeling that he may yet emerge, at least in his own estimation, as vindicated.
There is a long way to go yet.
Mann is following a well trodden warmist path of portraying his accusers as deranged, right wing loonies which is exactly what the National Review online and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are. That's why Exxon sponsored these kind of outlets. It completely discredits the case against global warming / carbon trading in the eyes of the vast majority of the population.
That said, Brown, consumed by resentment, has since disappeared into well-deserved, self-obsessed obscurity
Unfortunately not quite correct; Brown has joined the communists of the UN.
esmith
Get a grip smithy. EXXON has given more money to green causes than any other cause. Corporations give money to make money. There is no money in telling the truth about AGW.
How this case pans out is going to depend on who tries it and as someone has said "how tight the brief is" and at the moment I don't think we know that.
As I understand it the comparison with Sandusky was not about child molesting but about the university "protecting one of its own" even though that person had transgressed. I guess it will depend upon exactly what all the comments by The National Review contained.
Hopefully this time he will get a fair trial hehe.
"Dr. Mann is being represented by John B. Williams of the law firm of Cozen O'Connor in Washington, D.C. (http://www.cozen.com/attorney_detail.asp?d=1&atid=1406). "
Ok, let's see:
"John successfully represented R.J. Reynolds in the three-month Blue Cross/Blue Shield RICO trial before Judge Jack B. Weinstein."
"He successfully defended R.J. Reynolds in the commercial speech case filed by the Federal Trade Commission challenging the cartoon character, Joe Camel. "
"He successfully defended Mobil Oil Corporation when seven state attorneys general, as well as the FTC, challenged Mobil's Hefty degradable bag claim."
"John represented Lukens Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Mobil Oil Corporation in a series of bid rigging cases in the electrical construction industry."
"He also represented one of the defendants in the Florida Power & Light oil trading conspiracy."
Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Energy, ... seems to me that John has specialized in defending all the bad boys ;)
The pedophile comment will not work. What seemed to bother Mann the most was the charge the he was the person who created the "fraudulent climate change hockey-stick graph." In their first letter, he and his attorney seemed most upset about that.
I think they have made the mistake of failing to distinguish between academic fraud and general fraud. It might have been that Steyn believed the graph was being used fraudulently and did not believe it was conceived fraudulently. Eventually the hockey stick was proven to have poor predictive power, but it was still used repeatedly by people to illustrate the problem of global warming. That may be the kind of fraud Steyn was referring to.
Here is the blog posting by Steyn that is at issue:
It really seems to me to be more an attack on Penn State and the culture of coverup and corruption there than on Mann.
Stephen richards
"EXXON has given more money to green causes than any other cause"
That should tell you who's side they are on. They threw a few pennies to the right wing extremists to discredit the opposition. BP, Enron and Shell publicly supported the Kyoto Protocol. Shell sponsored the Guardian's entire Copenhagen propaganda campaign and UAE's carbon trading research. Crude oil is ten times more expensive than in 1998.
The two major politicians who promoted AGW, Margaret Thatcher and Al Gore were both oil industry fronts at the time.
Apart from Dr Mann defending his much attacked 'Hockey-Stick,' for which he will have to provide reasoned argument against the case made by gifted opponents such as the host of CA, it seems that he has stepped up to the task of defending his employer from accusations of self-interest when confronted with uncomfortable home-truths.
As Sir Humphrey may have commentated
'Courageous, Very Courageous!'
In the case of his employer he may have added
'It is only totalitarian governments that suppress facts. In this country (college) we simply take a democratic decision not to publish them.'
In the more personal arena Sir Humphrey Appleton may have commentated thus.
'No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money or personal publicity.'
The show goes on and on, but fewer and fewer people care. Unfortunately, when his crunch comes, we'll all have long forgotten about him....
Forgotten about who, James?
If this case goes all the way ... I sense a third book!
I will post here rather than WUWT, because it is much more likely to NOT get lost in the noise.
IANAL, but Mann is suing for defamation which is almost certainly based on English common law libel/slander - I can't be sure because American law has diverged both at the State and Federal level - I am sure Mann "venue shopped" for the best place to file suit.
What I am saying is that the National Review and the CEI have to defend themselves WITHOUT discovery. They have to prove they already have enough facts to prove fraud - given the lack of a court case proving it.
I would be suprised if the Judge allows either of them to go on a "fishing trip" - so all the comments to contrary are just wishful thinking.
Esmiff: "right wing loonies which is exactly what the National Review online [is]." Good heavens. NRO is certainly right-wing, but they're hardly loons. I'm reminded of the numerous leftist college profs bemoaning Buckley's cleverness (read _merely_ clever), and how the Firing Line viewers would have realized that if only said prof had been able to properly express his/her brilliance. Must be nice to be able to totally dismiss one side of a debate so easily. You should just call them deniers. ps I know Mr Buckley is no longer with us. His arguments didn't die with him, however.
Carl
Buckley was a conservative. McCarthy, Yale, Skull and Bones, CIA, Catholic appealing to the pervasive sentimentality and profound ignorance of their country's activities of many Americans. He wanted them to believe his social milieu consisted of George Baileys (Wonderful Life) when they were a LOT closer to Jay Gatsby.
I don't have a problem with ambitious right wing crooks like Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, Blair, Clinton and Obama. It's how evolution works, but don't tell me they are good guys.
I wonder how the BBC is going to report this story?
Adrian at 11:44:
I'm not a lawyer either, and I have a different take. My take is that Steyn's lawyers will argue that when he used the term "fraudulent" he was not referring to Mann's actual work, but to what was done with it after the fact of its publication, and after its predictive power was proved wanting. We now know that the hockey stick graph, which asserted we were experiencing unprecedented warming and implied that it would continue, was flawed. 15 years of flat-lining temperatures prove it, and yet people still use the graph as an aid to frighten people into believing we will all be frying in heat by the end of the century. That could be the fraud that Steyn was referring to, or at least that's something he could assert he meant when he used the word "fraudulent."
I think Steyn and NRO have a lot of wiggle room here.
The other strategy Steyn and NRO could use is that they can and will prove that the hockey was fraudulently conceived, that Mann set out to get rid of the MWP without scientific proof, that he manipulated or cherry-picked the data, ignored results that falsified it, etc. I think there is ample proof to suggest to a judge that more evidence should be produced to see if actual fraud occurred in the formulation of the hockey stick graph. I also think that in such an important trial the judge will not prevent the defendants from seeking evidence that could disprove the charges against them. The fact that it is Mann who is bringing the charges means that the accused are presumed innocent and Mann has to prove them guilty of defamation and libel. If a judge thinks there evidence out there that will disprove the charges, he will want to see it produced.
This is the strategy that NRO Editor Lowry suggested they would take in his response to the demand that the statements be retracted and an apology proffered.
The accused in these types of trials are given every opportunity to prove their innocence. I think a judge will allow a lot of discovery and demand that the plaintiffs produce all working papers, data and code if NRO demands to see them. A great amount of circumstantial evidence exists that suggests that the hockey stick graph was not produced under the most rigorous and exacting scientific standards. A judge may want to look into the matter further.
Either Mann is narcissistic beyond belief, caught up in his own sense of importance and invunerability, or he can limit the lawsuit very well. We should take caution after the NIWA case went against the Coalition of Science in New Zealand: that went (in my opinion) as it did because the judge only had to rule that NIWA did not have to answer to anyone but themselves, and justify what they did to anyone. That 'suit never got to the data, nor to the ways the data was modified or presented. If Mann can have his case similarly restricted, then he will be on good ground for winning.
Did Mann manipulate the data for a pre-determined outcome? That is the critical point. If there is no other, better AND recognized way to look at the data, AND Mann knew of it, AND he rejected it BECAUSE he KNEW that the result would not be to his preference BECAUSE he had an AGENDA to be supported, then he could be found to have committed fraud. But there are so many points that must be both demonstrated and linked causually, that I see some potential bad days for the skeptical position and two groups of skeptics.
Highly sophisticated law firm, highly unsophisticated judge.
=====================
@eSmiff: Mrs Thatcher an oil industry front? Are you for real? Like her or hate her, she was possibly the least personally corrupt PM we've ever had.
She decided to crush the miners and push nuclear power right off her own bat. Given she has a degree in chemistry, and remembering the state of knowledge at the time, her believing in AGW in the 1980s is neither implausible nor unreasonable, and it doesn't require a conspiracy theory to explain it.
The judge does not appear highly thought of by the attorneys who practice before her.
http://www.therobingroom.com/dc/JudgeDetail.aspx?ID=3789
Anyone so regarded could only continue on in that position via political appointment.
Smacks a bit of George Jeffreys, although he was apparently technically competent.
Nothing good could possibly come from this unless the matter is referred to someone with a bit more wit.
I am not an AngloSaxon Common Lawyer, Doktor Recht not LLD but Adrian is NOT correct, in the US courts, but not English ones there is no notion of a 'fishing expedition' and Civil Procedure Rules mandate discovery and the deposition of witnesses and the Plaintiff, this can be used, by clever counsel to set up give in or perjury situations ... especially in the USA. He risks Summary Judgement and extreemly damaging admissions. Also he cannot just withdraw, his opponent may seek dismissal with prejudice.
MFG, omb
Kim: you forgot one thing: highly sophisticated defense attorneys.
jferguson: it's a freedom of expression issue. If this one gets to trial, which is by no means certain, it will be appealed to the bitter end. Maybe the ACLU will get involved on behalf of the defendants.
Oct 24, 2012 at 2:14 AM | Sebastian Weetabix
"Mrs Thatcher an oil industry front? Are you for real? Like her or hate her, she was possibly the least personally corrupt PM we've ever had."
Well, that's damning with faint praise, I guess.
But who do you imagine Dennis worked for? How many of the Cabinet she appointed had links with the oil industry, or went to work for them after getting the chop at Westminster?
And are you suggesting that it is really part of the duties of a Prime Minister to "crush the miners"?
"The Enemy Within", wasn't it?
Interesting that people have started to look again at the "Orgreave Riots" in recent days.
I'd order more popcorn.
If a genuine inquiry into the Miners' Strike and the deliberate destruction of the coal industry ever took place it could get REALLY interesting. (Don't hold your breath, though.)
In fact I think it would make the currently fashionable scandals (Saville, Hillsborough, Phone Hacking - as serious as at least the first two are) look like minor peccadillos.
And Maggie Thatcher dirty little fingerprints would be all over it.
And for the avoidance of doubt, I think Arthur Scargill and his clique would justly be condemned almost as much as Thatcher. But she was supposed to the Prime Minister of the country!
Sebastian Weetabix
Now then, now then young man. What's all this ? Someone saying naughty things about Mrs Fatcha. I will not hear a word against her. No sir, no sir.
She is a wonderful woman and so was her opponent Ted Heath. The difference was that Margaret's husband was a director of Burmah Oil. Everyone has to earn a living. No connection to the Americans or North Sea oil. If she had been a bad lady, she would have been exposed on the front pages by the razor sharp guys and gals of Fleet Street or locked up by my very good friends at MI5. Am I right ? She was every bit as as straight as Ted Heath. As it 'appens, her son was a bit of an international rogue. Nothing to do with her connections I'm sure.
She is a national treasure. The Americans loved her as if she was one of their very own. She paved the way for the great Lord Blair of Baghdad.
eSmiff
"Crude oil is ten times more expensive than in 1998." As long as you're not BitBicket in disguise (you certainly seemed to the same youthful arrogance as he/she does) do you have a reference for that claim? Not allowing for dollar inflation/deflation I make it 5 times at best. Also this is a bit of a cherry picked date, I'll pick 1981 and it is only about 1.25 in 2011 USD. I therefore doubt all your other facts unless referenced.
I also believe Mrs Thatcher also recanted on the CAGW meme as well.
Mark Steyn took down the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals.
Perhaps now the IPCC will fall before him.
Michael Mann starts lots of law suits. The one against Tim Ball seems to have stalled. Why would that be? And where does Mikey get the 'funding' for all this litigating? Can't come cheap, surely? I think we should be told.
I find it extremely funny that in the legal complaint, "Statement of Facts" number 16 introduces the Stick with the actual MHB99 graph and the following text (my bold):
And now they are sueing over the sentence "he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science"!
@eSmiff
Oct 23, 2012 at 9:09 PM
Oct 23, 2012 at 10:30 PM
Oct 24, 2012 at 12:58 AM
Oct 24, 2012 at 7:40 AM
It's not only Mann that has an agenda!
Also, "UAE's carbon trading research" - The UAE is a country in the Middle East, while the UEA an academic institution famed for its creative writing (http://www.uea.ac.uk/creativewriting) and is in the middle of nowhere.
"... every bit as as straight as Ted Heath" In light of recent events, you should ask the BBC to investigate: the results would be interesting!
A seminal time for truth and justice. Is it true that he has never been fully investigated or exonerated?
(a la Jones). " If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts" - Albert Einstein, to which I would add my two cents worth, "Never leave a politician as guardian of the facts"
The confusion over the difference between UEA and UAE reminds me a of a post I read back in CG1.0, which I think is always worth repeating:
Agouts
"I have a horrible feeling that he may yet emerge, at least in his own estimation, as vindicated."
I'm sure he will remain forever in denial. Ironic, really.
Either Michael Mann was assured the judge would be bought or he's trying to commit professional suicide. Did Mann not watch the US presidential debates? Not a single mention of climate change. Did Mann not learn anything from the Lance Armstrong debacle? You can keep lying and suing your critics and never admit your wrongdoings, but just like Lance Armstrong everything will unravel in the end--in Mann's case, the sky is going to really fall on him.
As a precise indication of the alarming parallel universe Mann inhabits, all apparently revolving around his genius, in point 2 of Mann's formal complaint – which can be found here: http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/michael-mann-complaint – it is asserted:
'As a result of this research [into rising 20th-century temperatures] Dr. Mann and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.'
If you were very generous, you could just about say that this was the truth stretched more or less to breaking point. If you were merely being honest, however, you could only call this preposterous claim a lie – unless of course Mann is actually Al Gore and/or the IPPC.
On the other hand, of course, perhaps he believes he is.
JC Oct 23, 2012 a
It's not a brief but a complaint although much the same. His complaint reads like all libel complaints including items directly related to the "tortured data", et al, of statement complained. Unlike Brit law, for a public figure in US to win libel is a daunting task. It would seem that the allegory/metaphore link had to be at issue. I.e., the tortured children - tortured data. Thus the complaint set out to show why Mann's data (viz, hockey stick) was "exonerated".
The Canadian case of Mann v Bell is moving toward whether Mann will be sanctioned for not providing the data. That might well happen (the matter is before the judge in the case as we type) before the Jan 25, 2013 conference with the judge in the US case.
In the US, the courts almost never take "judicial notice" of events such as the Canadian case. They require the adversaries to bring the matter before the court. The defense might even elect not to bring motion to dismiss (vairous grounds) in order to allow discovery to proceed. I.E., the three entities sued would seem to go all in to pry the data, methods, emails, etc., from Mann.
Imho, it will be a very long, protracted case. Reasons are obvious.
Ive read the complaint and its not impressive.
For the second time (the first being the ATI case) it is as if Mann has taken over the minds of his lawyers. The complaint sounds like Mann speaking or tweeting and makes all the usual false assertions, such as:
1) Sceptics believe the world is not warming;
2) Sceptics are all the same and the alleged damaging intent, at least, is attributed to all sceptics;
3) Mann is an angelic visionary
4) Mann has been exonerated and the issue of the efficacy of his work and his integrity are closed matters and criticism is not permitted.
I am still surprised that none of Mann's lawyers so far appear to have tempered his very prickly style at all. There is plenty of stuff in that complaint for the defendants to get hold of. Others have said all that needs to be said about public figures, discovery of data, documents, etc. Let's not also forget that it is permissible for the defence to comment on Mann the man, as it were. All of his previous dissembling, huge ego, untrue and insulting statements about those who disagree, etc. are all fair game in this case.
Given that (although the transcript does not yet seem to be available) the judge in the ATI case was reportedly highly unimpressed with Mann it may be that Steyn et al get to go to the judge in this case with some very useful judicial opinion and quotes about the angelic visionary Nobel prize winning Dr Mann.
NRO contributing editor Jonathan Adler has also picked up the story:
http://www.volokh.com/2012/08/22/mann-v-steyn/
It is worth putting the Hockey Stick into context, it does not really figure in current debate about climate but it almost single handedly got the world into the low carbon mess it is now in.
Many nations had signed up to the Kyoto Treaty but not one single country ratified it until the Hockey Stick was published.
Anyone care to put a figure on the Trillions that have gone up in smoke because of Kyoto?
Also I noted that Mann's lawyers describe him in para. 5 of the complaint as a Nobel Prize recipient. For those who don't recall this is the 2007 joint award to the IPCC and Al Gore. This issue has been addressed before and any claim that Mann is a Nobel Prize recipient or shared such a prize is false.
Note also that Mann claims on his own website to have shared the Nobel Peace Prize and makes the same claim in the sleeve of his recent book.
Here's what the Nobel organisation has to say about it:
“An award of the Nobel Prize to an organization does not under any circumstances permit an employee or other agent of that organization to claim to share a Nobel Prize. Only persons named explicitly in the citation may claim to share a Nobel Prize”.
I repeat, Mann states on his website that he shared the Nobel Prize.
And here is the IPCC in an email to an official connected with the National Observatory in Athens who was repeating that two of its scientists had "shared" the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize:
"Dear Mr Lazaridis,
Again, let me clarify that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the organization. Consequently, the following information is not correct: “Christos Zerefos, president of the National Observatory in Athens, and his colleague, Professor Alcibiades Bais of Thessaloniki University, are the first two Greeks to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even if they share it with dozens of other scientists.”
The sentence should read “Christos Zerefos, president of the National Observatory in Athens, and his colleague, Professor Alcibiades Bais of Thessaloniki University, have received a certificate commemorating their involvement with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with former Vice President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.”
About 2000 personalized copies of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize together with a letter of Dr R.K. Pachauri have been sent worldwide to Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, Review Editors, Bureau members, staff of Technical Support Units and of the Secretariat, who have contributed substantially to the work of the IPCC of the last 20 years.
However, the above mentioned figure does not reflect all contributors to the IPCC process. We can estimate that approximately 10’000 scientist and officials have contributed to the work of the IPCC over the last two decades. The only figures we can share with you are related to the publication of the 4th Assessment Report:
2500+ Scientific Expert Reviewers
800+ Contributing Authors and 450+ Lead Authors
130+ Countries
6 years work
1 Report
Best regards,
Francesca Foppiano
IPCC Secretariat
www.ipcc.ch”
So that's pretty clear then. Mann got a certificate of involvement as one of up to 10000 contributors.
And isn't it of interest that Mann's lawyers whose entire case is centered around the reputation of their client repeat the same falsehood that their client repeats every day his website is up? - namely that he "shared" or "received" a Nobel Peace Prize. Good luck putting that in your pleadings and taking it before the judge whilst whining about your client's "reputation".
"Dr. Mann and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize"
I expect he also invented the Internet.
WRT the peace prize, I'm with Tom Lehrer, who pronounced political satire obsolete after it was awarded to Henry Kissinger...
Agreed, James - only to double down on that recently by giving it to the EU.