Category Archives: Science And Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Our Recent Court Victory

55 Comments

ICYMI, Mark Steyn explains it:

1. Dr Michael Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, filed a fraudulent complaint falsely representing his client as a Nobel Laureate, and accusing us of the hitherto unknown crime of defaming a Nobel Laureate.

2. After Charles C W Cooke and others exposed Dr Mann’s serial misrepresentation of himself as a Nobel Prize winner, Mann’s counsel decided to file an amended complaint with the Nobel falsehood removed.

3. Among her many staggering incompetences, DC Superior Court judge Natalia Combs-Greene then denied NR’s motion to dismiss the fraudulent complaint while simultaneously permitting Mann’s lawyers to file an amended complaint.

4. The appellate judges have now tossed out anything relating to Mann’s original fraudulent complaint, including Judge Combs-Greene’s unbelievably careless ruling in which the obtuse jurist managed to confuse the defendants, and her subsequent ruling in which she chose to double-down on her own stupidity. Anything with Combs-Greene’s name on it has now been flushed down the toilet of history.

5. So everyone is starting afresh with a new judge, a new complaint from the plaintiff, and new motions to dismiss from the defendants. That’s the good news.

6. The bad news is that Mann’s misrepresentation of himself as a Nobel Laureate and Combs-Greene’s inept management of her case means that all parties have racked up significant six-figure sums just to get back to square one. In a real courthouse – in London, Toronto, Dublin, Singapore, Sydney – Dr Mann would be on the hook for what he has cost all the parties through his fraudulent complaint. But, this being quite the most insane “justice system” I have ever found myself in, instead the costs of the plaintiff’s vanity, his lawyer’s laziness and the judge’s incompetence must apparently be borne by everyone.

But at least, as a commenter noted in a related post, Professor Mann got a huge planet-destroying lump of coal in his stocking.

[Update in the evening]

I want to express my deep appreciation to everyone who has hit the tip jar today. I’ll try to deploy the resources to good use.

[Another update, a couple of minutes later]

Per that previous update, despite rumors/lies from Climate-gate deniers, I haven’t received check one from the fossil-fuel industry. The stingy bastards.

[Friday-morning update]

(Law professor) Jonathan Adler reports on the story over at the Volokh Conspiracy. He implies no disagreement with Steyn’s take.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Mark Steyn And Me

18 Comments

Happy holidays to us. The appellate court basically mooted the flawed rulings against us from last summer, and the new judge (who actually seems to understands the law and the respective cases) will rehear them. Thanks to ACLU, the media organizations and others for their amicus briefs which, while they didn’t address the merits of the case, were helpful in getting this decision. I suspect that it won’t be a happy holiday for Professor Mann.

[Update a while later]

What’s amusing about this is that Mann sort of screwed himself by amending his complaint against us after we’d filed our appeal. That gave the appellate court an excuse to just pass it back to the Superior Court, with the new judge who will likely be much less sympathetic to him.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Climate Models

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They seem to be modeling some other planet:

Christy compared the outputs for the tropical troposphere of 73 models used by the IPCC in its latest report with satellite and weather balloon temperature trends since 1979. “The tropics is so important,” Christy explains in an email message, “because that is where models show the clearest and most distinct signal of greenhouse warming-so that is where the comparison should be made (rather than say for temperatures in North Dakota). Plus, the key cloud and water vapor feedback processes occur in the tropics.”

When it comes to simulating the atmospheric temperature trends of the last 35 years, Christy found, all of the IPCC models are running hotter than the actual climate. The IPCC report admits that “most, though not all, of [the climate models] overestimate the observed warming trend in the tropical troposphere during the satellite period 1979-2012.” To defend himself against any accusations of cherry-picking his data, Christy notes that his “comparisons start in 1979, so these are 35-year time series comparisons”-rather longer than the 15-year periods whose importance the IPCC downplays.

Why the discrepancy between the IPCC and Christy? As Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry notes, data don’t speak for themselves; researchers have to put them into a context. And your choice of context-say, the year you choose to begin with-can influence your conclusions considerably. While there may be nothing technically wrong with the way the IPCC chose to display its comparison between model data and observation data, Curry observes, “it will mislead the public to infer that climate models are better than we thought.” She adds, “What is wrong is the failure of the IPCC to note the failure of nearly all climate model simulations to reproduce a pause of 15-plus years.”

There is too much that they don’t, and at least for now, can’t capture. And it would be economically insane to base policy on them.