The sad Michael Mann defamation case against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg ended last week in the even sadder confines of the Washington D.C. Superior Court. The verdict was awful for those believing in free speech and the right to engage in public criticism of public figures like Mann. And, of more concern, subtly continues the bashing of the scientific method that has become a feature of the last 20 years or so.
The trial showed that climate scientist Mann had no damages to his career or reputation – in fact, quite the reverse as he has become the darling of Leftie Hollywood stars and D.C. Politicians. However, the jury awarded excessive punitive damages against Steyn of $1 million. The reason for this was provided in the Plaintiff’s lawyer summing up for the jury: “The jury should award punitive damages so that in future no one will dare engage in ‘climate denialism’ just as Trump’s ‘election denialism’ needs to be suppressed.” Washington D.C. is one of the most far Left Democrat-leaning areas, and a D.C. jury is all in for a bit of Right-wing bashing, no matter how thin the excuse, and so delivered on the punitive damages. These damages cannot be awarded on their own hence the derisory award of $1 for actual damages.
The damages are likely to be overturned either at the Appeal Court in D.C. or the Supreme Court due to the excessive ratio between the two sets of damages. However, Mann can now claim vindication for himself and his peculiar, yet increasingly popular, belief that any challenge to orthodox climate science is a form of ‘denialism’.
We have come a long way from old school liberal scientists and thinkers such as Carl Sagan, who said in his last interview in 1996: “If we are not able to ask sceptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan – political or religious – who comes ambling along.” This belief in scientists as folks who fearlessly question everything, even their own work, as part of a method for understanding the natural world, is foreign to the climate fundamentalists. Rather, they seem to believe scientists should develop a hypothesis, smear or sue anyone who disagrees – or tie them up in endless complaints to press regulators – and enforce fealty to it.
But what of the actual science and the scientific method? Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ itself was not on trial, but was central to Mann’s defamation case in that Steyn said it was fraudulent. The hockey stick purports to show temperatures over the last 1,000 years. The graph produced for the temperature shows a flat stick through most of the timeframe with an upturned blade at the end representing the last 60 years or so. At a stroke it eliminated the natural variability that had long been the bedrock of climate science and replaced it with a long period of similar temperatures rudely interrupted by a huge spike coinciding with the world’s industrialisation. When it was first published at the turn of the millennium it immediately became iconic – oft-cited and revered. It was central to the IPCC’s Assessment Report 3 back in 2001 and slithered into the popular consciousness by being a huge part of Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
The beauty of the hockey stick was that it was a wonderful image to use to capture the emerging political view that those pesky humans were once again ruining the world, only this time with fossil fuels. ‘Global warming’ or ‘climate change’ cannot stir folks to action as they are by nature very complex, operate on very long timeframes and are riddled with uncertainty. But show a balmy period of little climate change destroyed by a terrifying massive uptick in average global temperatures caused by fossil fuels and you’ve really got something. It made Mann famous and for 20 years he has been accumulating friends in high places and all kinds of academic positions.
The hockey stick’s appealing simplicity, especially to the young, disguised its complicated birth. It was controversial among climate scientists who disagreed with Mann’s methods but its ascendance as the premier climate change symbol soon pulled everyone onside. Criticisms have been constant for 20 years coming mostly from Mann’s use of proxy data. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre and Roger McKittrick tore apart the underlying data and statistical methods: “The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann, Bradley and Hughes… for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects.” In addition, as Judith Curry points out in a comprehensive overview of the issues developed for the trial: “Mann’s efforts to conceal the so-called ‘divergence problem’ by deleting downward-trending post-1960 data and also by splicing earlier proxy data with later instrumental data is consistent with most standards of image fraud.”
A casual observer will also have noticed that plenty of historical records refute the hockey stick. From the well-known (Viking agriculture in Greenland) to the obscure (medieval Chinese annual citrus crop records), historical records describe a Medieval Warming Period from 900 to 1400 warmer than today, followed by a cooling period of the Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1850. Rather than being a relatively flat 1,000 years of temperature, the straight Hockey Stick shaft should really resemble a crooked stick. Mann dismisses this by stating that the Medieval Warming Period was only in the northern hemisphere. And yet it seems every time someone collects proxy records from the southern hemisphere they seem to show the same warming and cooling in the last 1,000 years as in the north, e.g. sediment cores from a lake in Chile or lakes on Signy Island, Antarctica.
Whether discredited or just ignored, the hockey stick went into limbo for a few years. But its appeal is so powerful it has emerged once more ready to hook, slash and high stick any and all ‘climate deniers’. Mann was at it again in 2021 with a brand-new stick (yet more proxies!) not much different from the first except an even bigger spike upwards on the blade. And then the IPCC popped up with its own hockey stick in its AR 6. Stephen McIntyre describes it succinctly: “If you thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick was bad, imagine a woke hockey stick by woke climate scientists. As the climate scientists say, it’s even worse that we thought.” The Hockey Stick is so powerful an image it lives on, despite its problems, and now, at least in D.C., woe to anyone who wishes to challenge its provenance.
So are we doomed to have an important piece of ‘climate science’ that underpins massive changes in energy policy across the world remain in place never to be challenged? I hope not, but after the Mann verdict I fear it will be harder to challenge the famous hockey stick.
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Let’s hope others follow her example. A Labour MP on World at One today was complaining that many of his constituents were having to use food banks and could not afford to pay more tax. As that is true we should not be handing over any money to foreign governments.
When Starmer told VP Vance that we have had free speech in the UK for a long time, I waited in vain for someone to ask Starmer if that was compatible with the very new concept of Non Crime Hate Incidents and if so, how?
I know the supine journalists failed to hold Starmer to account but I guess pissing off guests might not get them invited back.
When your own people are well cared for and happy, you can consider helping other countries if you have a surplus.
We borrow to give to others, and our own people suffer, just insane.
I assume that She, of the wild hair, will be persuading 40% of the Civil Service staff in that Ministry to leave as I presume they will be unnecessary.
The free speech remark by Starmer is a bit rich with Mr T Robinson in solitary confinement.
Also in the Telegraph from Stephen Pollard: “Good riddance to Anneliese Dodds, the minister without sense…”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/02/28/good-riddance-to-anneliese-dodds-the-invisible-minister/
“…In a Government of non-entities, Dodds was perhaps the most invisible of all. It is perhaps unfair to pose of Anneliese Dodds’ resignation the oft-cited philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
And a commenter adds, “It’s people like Dodds that give non-entities a bad name.”
Starmer is far right!
The Left will eat itself.
Only the plant-based left. Otherwise, they’d have to stop calling themselves vegan.
That was the most half hearted resignation I have ever seen. As International Development Minister it was down to her her to fall on her sword to placate the far left. She will be back in a top job before you know it. That International Man of Misery, Kier Starmer will find all the money for their stupid overseas spending projects from other departments, probably in a circular route back from defence.
“International Man of Misery” love it!
So will her trough money fall?
“Ultimately, these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people…”
How perceptive of Ms Dodds. She wouldn’t by any chance be referring to the people of the UK by any chance would she?
Oh, silly me.
Who?
Astonishing to think that this idiot was Shadow Chancellor before Rachel from Accounts.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-weekly-roundup/
Here’s £100 billion of savings identified.
Paul Homewood at TCW.
And another £22bn in the pipeline for wholly pointless carbon capture.
Brief summary:
“Dear 2TK, I am really upset that I am being forced to take my snout out of this lovely trough. Why me, when I know you all still have your own? It’s just not fair”.
Yours Ms Gummidge
Could be the start of something beautiful. Perhaps the neocon rats all over the West will leave their sinking ship of their own volition. More or less the entire British political class is neocon including the dissident parties. Probably more likely that the Brits will try to go it alone as they do seem to like playing last man standing. It is a disgusting position, being the head of the ministry of regime change.
Frederick Edward rightly exposing Bozo for the despicable mass murderer that he is. This utterly corrupt piece of shytr is as Frederick Edward blodly states
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-unflushable-boris-johnson/
“Given his track record – with the blood of thousands on his hands – together with his central role in covid and his obsession with the civilisation-ending perversity of Net Zero, one can only wish that Boris Johnson would crawl into the nearest foxhole and never return.
As one of the unflushables, however, there is no doubt that he will keep coming back.”
A better idea would be to cut the so-called foreign aid budget by 100%. If people living in the UK want to support charitable causes in foreign countries, they can always contribute money voluntarily. We’re presently at the point where recipients of so-called foreign aid claim they’re owed ‘reparations’ for taking it. So, let’s take this burden away from them.
Utterly agree. Splot the saving between defence and care for the old. £8 billion for defence and £8 billion for Elderly Care, should make a big dent in that problem.
DOGE the rest of the civil service budgets, too.
Down with this state!
And for a more comical yet equally eviscerating look at the Uniparty’s attempts to ensure that thousands more lives are lost in Ukraine here’s John Ellwood at his best…
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/your-bunter-needs-you/
“The KemiKorps: Not wishing to miss the show and inspired by the impressive tactics of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in World War Two, the Tory leader hopes to boost the flagging fortunes of her once-great party by forming a fighting force of young men from her ancestral home, West Africa. Because of her party’s immigration policies there are tens of thousands of Nigerians, Ghanaians etc in the UK who are available to volunteer.”
I’m sure our new arrivals cannot wait to prove their allegiance to their new homeland especially with the new leader of the KemiKorps.
What an unbelievably stupid woman.
Having risen without trace, the only time she makes the headlines is when she flounced out in a huff.
She so obviously hates the British people…
I’m sure she will be sadly missed.
Oh, how she will be missed. Having identified a pressing need for aid I am sure she will resign nd go overseas to some god foresaken place to assist.
Or not.
It is sad for the Brits who don’t go along with the agenda and feel temperamentally opposed to it. Russia has said that it is happy to take western refugees from neoliberalism. There was a secret clause in that 100 year agreement and pledge from Starmer to Ukraine which involved mineral rights. At that point in time it was the perfect opportunity to pre-empt Trump. The deal included complete British control over the Black Sea ports. That is why the British media went crazy when Trump suggested that Zelensky might be a dictator.
Good riddance to another evil,
Communist feminist who thinks foreign men are more in need of our taxes than out own men and women.
Nasty, middle class A-hole
And who is such a traitress that she would put our people’s defence behind aid to lazy, workshy foreigners.
They do love to eat themselves don’t they?
Read the Futurist manifesto if you want to understand where women like this one are going to end up. It is a beautiful document and a huge influence on the German national socialists. On a spiritual level the Trump movement is essentially an antidote to the horror of the sacrifice carried out in broad daylight in November 1963 on a Friday morning. The plotters hoped that it would lead into terminal decline of America and the age of the Antichrist. But in a sense the opposite has happened given just how much this event opened minds to everything else. There are deep spiritual links between Trump and Kennedy.
I’m praying for Almighty God to divide Starmer’s house, for a house divided cannot stand.
This is the beginning.
We do need to beg for direct intervention. Even if he just creates a new enclave in the desert and calls it New England. With taverns and bawdy houses. Perhaps in such an environment the best will wake up. I suggest that we approach the American embassy within the next few weeks and try to come to some sort of arrangement. Because the reality of staying here is simply too grim to contemplate.
Who she ?
Cares only for people in far away places, while voting to impoverish the old and needy here. As she has failed to instigate audits on the money she’s happily sending to these places, how much of it does she think reaches its intended target.?
She’s no great loss…
Nil desperandum. It is rumoured the role might be filled with a v close friend of 2TK, who can share those long, lonely journies to foreign parts together.
The inability for these inept politicians to see around the next corner and assess the consequences is quite staggeringly stupid.
If these politicians want to really see what has gone wrong with governance in Western countries, then need just look in a mirror and stop pointing fingers elsewhere.
Maybe they should be made to prove where that £13 billion Foreign Aid goes to, probably not much goes to those who need it, or should receive it.
Someone once quoted that Foreign Aid is where you take money from the poor people of a Rich country (taxpayers) and give it to the rich people of a poor country – might have been Ron Paul.
They can always find a school they’ve built somewhere, and maybe a hospital – but what these poor countries need are debt forgiveness and access to cheap reliable energy.
Those would be a start!
I understand some Foreign Aid is used to grease the palms of certain people to facilitate trade deals and overseas orders, but like USAID, lets have a full audit.
Dodds and co are peas in the same pod. Left and woke. High tax and anti white. Open borders and endless wastage on illegals. Good riddance. 500+ more to go.
Dear Anneliese
Greed is the belief you are entitled to other people’s money to use for your own purposes.
With respect to your greedy self, you believe you can take my money without my consent using the coercive powers of the State, to disperse in foreign aid to people I don’t know, or I don’t care about, or I don’t like so that you can feel warm and fuzzy about being caring and compassionate.
It’s easy to be generous with other people’s money, innate in Socialists, but if you care so much for others, use your own, and now you have gone, don’t come back.
Your ever!
A Taxpayer.