Wednesday
Nov262014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill First day in court
Nov 26, 2014 Climate: Mann Mark Steyn's entertaining account of the Appeal Court hearing regarding the Mann libel case can be seen here.
The three lady judges - by comparison with that slapdash idiot Combs Greene in the trial court - were on top of the case, and they had some sharp exchanges. When Mann's lawyer sneered that the defendants did not believe in "climate change", Judge Easterly interjected, "Man-made climate change". It was interesting that she thought it an important distinction to draw.
Reader Comments (20)
Green (very apt), Mann's lawyer was sweating buckets when presenting his case. His face was a picture when the judge reminded him it was 'man-made warming'. He was trying to cram as many precedent cases in as poss but was obviously drowning in too much verbiage.
On the other hand, NR's guy came to the stand and let rip wonderfully. He was a very animated fellow (didn't get his name) and the judges said he only had two minutes. But he told the judges that he was representing all three appellants so the judges said, OK, just go for it - and he did! The way he hammered on the hockey stick showed that he must have read and taken to heart a certain ecclesiastical work on illusions. ;-)
Did the judge mean "Man-made" or "Mann made"?
It would seem that Mann might get a rough ride with these Judges. i do hope so, the man is a fool and deserves to go down.
Further to my earlier comment, I think it needs to be understood that the judges were no push-over. When the NR (etc) brief was doing his pitch and tearing into the fraud that was the HS - including a good piece of extempore on 'hide the decline' - the judges were quite pointed in their questions about how it was so very wrong to use various sources of data in one chart. They really got into detail about the use of the HS in the WMO cover page and IPCC first AR. For instance, they wanted to know how it could be fraudulent if the chart was annotated with the source of the various data.
Steyn may deeply regret tweaking the trial court judge as much as he has done. All people tend to empathize with their own. Judges are people too.
I do deeply hope that the main focus of this hearing was to talk about the free speech issues and how the anti-SLAPP rule should apply.
It's so strange! I've not seen a single alarmist blogger come out to support Mann and his assertion that bloggers do not have a right to say someone's work is misleading.
Well this is the best panel for Steyn. We don't know how men are selected to sit on the bench, but most woman who become judge are selected on the basis of merit.
Will there or is there a transcript of this?
There was a crooked Mann who walked a crooked mile
At the drop of a virtual puck, a lawsuit he would file.
From the safety of his keyboard, how he would primp and preen
Wallowing in his ignorance of how he was rightly seen.
This crooked little Mann, indeed, was far from lean
In his copious outpourings, little truth was there to glean.
Perhaps best known to all as a tweeting huffer and puffer
He did not care one bit that his rep would further suffer.
This crooked little Mann had built some crooked little moats
From which he'd lurk and lob his self-inflated gloats.
But when the time arose to defend his suits and preens
This crooked little Mann in court, alas, was nowhere to be seen!
I thought it was catastrophic AGW with the emphasis on catastrophic that we didn't believe in, climate change, man made or otherwise has always happened and will continue to happen. However the only justification for all the billions being spent (wasted) for our " benefit " is solely that it will be catastrophic and that co2 is the main driver. As both of these claims are now clearly erroneous we have every right to disbelieve, claiming that this means a disbelief in climate change on our part is (intentionally) misleading.
sunderlandsteve,
Mann disagrees with your assertion of a right to disbelieve him.
Only Prof. Mann gets to call people liars and frauds. Any return fire, Mann's world, is defamation and a legal injury.
@Frederick Colbourne
You are delusional
I think the Medieval Warm Period should have his own legal representative. This was clearly a mafia style hit carried out not by one Mann acting alone, but a 'team' of professionals.
"Man-made climate change".
That seems to demostrate a keen interest in the subject and a knowledge beyond the cretinous judges appointed by Blummer.
All this attention on Mann alone is simply a distraction for the fact that the disappearance of the MWP before Kyoto was a massively supported operation. Particularly by Gavin Schmidt and the RealClimate bear pit.
I think you mean stoat pit, esmiff.
Nice one, Hilary!
The irony of this case is, if Mann's overweening sense of self-importance hadn't intervened, Steyn's 270 word blog post would be mostly forgotten by now. Instead, it is being read and re-read by people all over the world, again and again.
He is a lonely figure these days. We do not see the clisci "establishment" lining up to publicy defend him. Why would that be, I wonder?
Harry Passfield "Further to my earlier comment, I think it needs to be understood that the judges were no push-over. When the NR (etc) brief was doing his pitch and tearing into the fraud that was the HS - including a good piece of extempore on 'hide the decline' - the judges were quite pointed in their questions about how it was so very wrong to use various sources of data in one chart. They really got into detail about the use of the HS in the WMO cover page and IPCC first AR."
This information from the oral argument is very useful. One question I have is whether the inaccuracies in Mann's complaint and brief (Claimed to have won Nobel, got WMO graph wrong) elicited any comment from the judges. Where I practice, most judges would make known their displeasure with the inaccuracies in Mann's legal documents.
JD
one of my favorite quotes about the legal proceedings applies to any stage (even if Steyn is really an observer for this appeal), so long as it's all still ongoing:
source of Steyn quote
JD Ohio: "...most judges would make known their displeasure with the inaccuracies in Mann's legal documents."
I think that in this particular case, JD, because the Appeal being heard was not on point with the actual defamation suit the judges didn't need to comment. I guess that when the real suit finally comes to trial the judges will certainly have something to say. I truly hope so.