Mark Steyn loses in Washington D.C. in the defamation trial surrounding Michael E. Mann’s unbelievable temperature ‘hockey stick’, while President Biden cannot be criminally charged for taking home state secret papers on the grounds that he is gaga. Only in Democrat America. There was initial relief in the usual quarters at the slaying of Steyn, but the ‘settled’ climate science crowd is now stuck with the ghastly Mann and his ludicrous hockey stick. That should be punishment enough for anyone saying the debate about climate change is over.
It has hardly begun, but now there is a new breath of life for the once ubiquitous poster temperature scare that was centre stage in the 2009 Climategate scandal, and has been stinking up the science joint ever since. With Net Zero coming apart at the seams as reality about mass deindustrialisation and starvation beckons, the politicised science stories forecasting climate Armageddon are starting to attract wider public scepticism. As all cults eventually find, the sandwich-board fearmongering starts to wear thin when the forecast disasters fail to come to pass. Self-appointed promoters of irrationality descend into wilder and wilder flights of fantasy to re-capture the fleeting moments when their emotional rantings offered them a temporary place in the spotlight.
Last week a jury in Washington D.C. awarded Mann $1 million in ‘punitive’ damages against Mark Steyn, although damages for Mann’s reputation was set at a derisory $1. In itself, this should see the larger award set aside, since in recent times the Supreme Court has been cracking down on punitive awards more than nine times the damage amount.
The disconnect between the two awards hints at the political nature of the case. Steyn and a fellow writer Rand Simberg had criticised the hockey stick which abolished the Medieval Warming Period. Running a 1,000-year slightly declining temperature line until a sudden claimed human-caused spike in the 20th century removed the concept of natural climatic variation for a whole generation. The court heard evidence from a senior statistician working at Mann’s own University of Pennsylvania that the graph was “manipulated”. First published in 1999, Mann spent years denying requests from other academics for information about his methods. The Climategate leak with emails referring to “Mike’s Nature Trick” and “Hide the decline” blew all that apart. At the end of the recent trial, his lawyer told the jury that Michael Mann was tired of being attacked. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way,” he added.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. attended the trial and he has concluded the mistake Steyn and Simberg made was thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case. Steyn’s frequent contention has been that the graph was fraudulent. “The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put by the prosecution and the defence. Mann simply had to show up,” observed Pielke.
In a statement, Mann said: “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.” Pielke comments that he would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science and climate scientists. “Such legal action may not be limited to climate – debate over COVID-19, also presents a target rich environment for unwanted speech to silence.”
Dr. Judith Curry blames Mann for destroying her academic career at Georgia Tech when he called her a “serial climate disinformer”. Her crime was to challenge the idea of a consensus around the science of climate and the involvement of humans in causing most if not all temperature change. After the verdict was announced, she tweeted that there was no justice from a Democrat, “climate-concerned” jury. “And a huge blow for freedom of speech,” she added.
She is right of course. The seven figure punitive damage was sought not to compensate Mann for any loss of reputation, but to deter anyone else arguing that the ‘settled’ climate activists backing the collectivist Net Zero project are wrong. For Steyn and Simberg to have lost an American defamation case, actual malice, defined as not believing what they wrote about Mann, needed to be proved. The reason many neutral observers of the case believe the result is perverse is that Steyn has spent over two decades criticising the methodology of the hockey stick, and no evidence has been presented that he doesn’t believe every single word he has written.
In commentary posted on Steyn’s website, it was noted that he was a member of the media and “supposedly afforded” First Amendment protections. “If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for everyday citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in D.C. or Montana – anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing.” It was noted that in 2019 the Supreme Court decided not to allow the case to be tried in the higher District of Columbia Court of Appeals, but there was a dissenting verdict from Judge Samuel Alito. He felt the case went to the “very heart” of the U.S. constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and the press. While not making any specific judgements on the case, he identified that the matter at issue was the “protection afforded to journalists and others who use harsh language in criticising opposing advocacy on one of the most important public issues of the day”.
The learned judge was also aware of the pitfalls of installing a jury to decide on the matter, noting, “the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be coloured by their preconceptions on the matter”. Climate change, he continued, has staked a place at the very centre of the nation’s public discourse. “The core purpose of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression is to ensure that all opinions on such issues have a chance to be heard and considered,” he said.
Not if the fake Nobel laureate Michael E Mann has anything to do with it, it might be said. A consistent abuser over the years of climate ‘deniers’, he was recently part of a gang of activists and journalists who persuaded Nature Springer to retract a paper by four Italian scientists who had investigated past weather data and concluded there was not a climate ‘emergency’.
Whether Mann gets his $1 million remains to be seen, but his trip to the libel courts, which has been spun out over a decade, will not cost him a cent. Wealthy benefactors are available to fund all his costs. Not so Mark Steyn.
Just over a year ago Steyn was in fine form on GB News serving up a scintillating prime time show on the fledgling channel – with a subversive subtext telling the state regulator of cable news to get stuffed. It was compulsive viewing, although it was never going to last in the highly-regulated Ofcom world of U.K. television. The same man, who in your correspondent’s view is incapable of writing or telling an uninteresting line, is pictured above outside the Washington D.C. court building. It might come as a shock to readers who remember him on U.K. screens as a dapper, bustling presence. Life has not been kind to Mark of late with rising legal bills and three heart attacks. White-haired, gaunt and confined to a wheelchair from which he conducted his own three-week defence in the trial. He clutches a Liberty hockey stick, a fund raising device. The stick has now sold out, but readers can provide support here.
Bravo Mark Steyn, a true radical, free thinker and brave defender of free speech.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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