I called the hockey stick fraudulent because it is in every sense, both in its construction and in the uses to which it's been put....
So said Mark Steyn, a well-known Canadian author and a radio and television host and presenter, at a keynote speech at the Heartland Institute’s 10th International Conference on Climate Change in 2015. The hockey stick he was referring is a temperature graph for the northern hemisphere for the past 1,000 years, published in the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the IPCC’s third assessment report in 2001. The graph is called a hockey stick graph because the shape somewhat resembles an ice hockey stick with a long, flat ‘shaft’ and a big ‘blade’ shooting up at the end.
Michael Mann, a Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, was a co-author of the paper that carried the original hockey stick graph published in Nature in 1998. According to Mann, the paper showed that the Earth’s temperature had spiked upward during the 20th Century, an “unprecedented” rise over at least the past millennium.
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of Mann’s 'proxy reconstruction' of the Northern hemisphere’s average temperatures of the last millennia. It became the single most important trope in the modern “anthropogenic global warming” narrative. In Mann’s own words, the hockey stick told a simple story: “There is something unprecedented about the warming we are experiencing today and, by implication, it has something to do with us and
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I’m pleased that this result has finally emerged but don’t lose sight of the fact that justice delayed is justice denied and Mann has has free rein to peddle his falsehoods for all these intervening years.
And in many cultural pockets of NET Zero support, many institutional, the ignorance will continue for some time.
If only a large media company could report the news, with it’s implications on current government policy, and the national economy.
At least the Daily Sceptic has made a start.
The entire media of TV Internet and Newspapers is owned by only 6 corporations. They are able to spin the climate fraud story as they see fit and 90% of the public fall for it. Most people are too busy with work and family life to properly investigate issues and they assume Investigative Journalists are doing that on their behalf. —-Nope they are not. On Politicised issues like climate and energy a particular narrative is presented and as an old fiend of mine asked recently “Why would they say there is global warming if it isn’t true?”——-I tried to tell him that it is all politics but as many will know you might as well be talking to a brick wall because the pubic have been so thoroughly brainwashed and indoctrinated that the very idea that there isn’t really a climate emergency sounds like very wild conspiracy theory. Propaganda is a very powerful tool which is why government and the bought and paid for media use it.
Mann was never the same after Miami Vice was cancelled
I still support the statement (can’t remember who said it) that Mann should not be in Penn State but the state pen.
Thank you for that. All good news. There is another research scientist who does not attract as much attention. His name is Professor Willie Soon, astrophysicist. He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and he had many revealing thoughts, facts and ideas about the climate. His main focus in the interview was that fossil fuels do not cause climate change and he explains why. I believe he was a professor at Harvard, now working independently. Well worth a listen to.
Mann should have been made to pay Mark Steyn. What a joke the (il)legal system is.
There should be a class action against Mann by all those businesses which have been hobbled or incurred extra costs as a result of the hockey stick resulting in the cult of net zero amongst gullible, some would say pig ignorant, politicians.
Except that the process is the punishment. How many years, and how much stress with the threat of financial ruin hanging over his head, has Steyn suffered? We live in a post-truth world.
Excellent news. I’ll raise a glass to the incomparable Mark Steyn. Also shafted by a fearful GB News.
Mark Steyn talks about ‘the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Final Judgment Order’ wonderfully (as usual) here:
https://www.steynonline.com/mark-steyn-show-audio/15089/of-courts-and-corkers
Good stuff. I don’t see why they have to pay a red cent though. It’s Mann who needs to pay back the tax payer then go to prison for fraud.
2024: “Mann was awarded nominal damages of $1 from each of the defendants but was also awarded $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and an astonishing $1 million from Steyn.”
2025: “a court in our nation’s capital ordered Mann to pay us $530,820.21 worth of attorney’s fees and costs, and to do so within 30 days”.
2025: “the Superior Court of the District of Columbia issued a Final Judgment Order, reducing the punitive damages awarded against Steyn from $1 million to a more modest $5,000.”
So, after winning $1,001,002 in 2024
Mr Mann has lost $1,526,822 in 2025
That’s a net loss of $525,820 for Mr Mann (and his financial backers) compared to:
a loss of a negligible $5,000 for Mark Steyn,
which puts Mark Stein $520,820 ahead of Michael Mann, in addition to a moral victory.
Excellent news.
Mark Steyn is not ahead by any means. The strain on his health alone has nearly killed him and then there are his costs and loss of income – well done GB News, bastards – sadly a somewhat hollow victory.
Quite so. A brave, witty and brilliant man standing up to the lies of this post-truth age. Shame on GBNews.
Yes, I agree, but I hope this decision will boost his health. He sounds in good form.
Doing as well as can be expected considering what he has gone through. Somewhat fortunate to have been in France when he had his heart attacks because the medical care he received there was the best. Not sure what the outcome would have been if he had been elsewhere. He has many followers and well wishers and I hope that gives him added strength.
Thank goodness, common sense returns. Let’s hope for more!
What an excellent piece of news to accompany my boiled egg!
Hip hip hooray!
Excellent news. What a shame Mark Steyn isn’t still on GB News so that a sizeable proportion of the British public would be made aware of it.
Precisely why he’s not !
They know he’s spot on with his analysis of all the bulls1t !
Farage stabbed him in the back too
thanks to the Ofcommunists.
The person to look to on this clear example of climate fraud is Steve McIntyre. McIntyre, an expert statistician suspected something dodgy about the Hockey Stick and set about trying to investigate. After all, in science everything has to be reproducible. But McIntyre soon found that the Hockey Stick team were not going to play ball. Mann refused to provide his data, methodology or computer code so McIntyre could check his work. Why would anyone do that? Why the lack of transparency? McIntyre realised that Mann was hiding something, and this made him even more determined to find out what was going on. ———It took him 5 years to discover that the Hockey Stick was statistically flawed and was not a true representation of temperature over the last thousand years at all. It was quickly dropped from IPCC reports. The whole story is told in a book by Andrew Montford called “The Hockey Stick Illusion”. ——-Is this what science has become? Just another tool of government? On the issue of climate and energy I am sad to say that YES IT HAS.
A great book – worth the read. There were two US investigations into Mann’s Hookey Stick and both flagged up issues with a lack of ability with statistics which is behind the whole thing although the reports were written to make it look like Mann was innocent. Then you have ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ which was to splice real data on at the end of the treemometry because the tree rings were cooling. And if that wasn’t enough Steve McIntyre found putting in the prices from your shopping into Mann’s code produced a hockey stick. As one of them said, Mann should be in the state pen not employed by Penn State. The scumbag also never paid the late Tim Ball the costs for the case he lost against him. All Mann’s costs are met by ecofascist billionaires.
Thanks for your reply——Trust me I have been looking into the issue of climate/energy since about 2007 and am well aware of the Hockey Stick story and all the other pretend to save the planet stories.
“..McIntyre realised that Mann was hiding something..” and there is another thing Mann is still hiding: Who paid his legal expenses and fines mounting to millions, as he himself boasted that it wasn’t him. Conspiracy theories welcome.
I would have been interested to know the basis on which Steyn still lost the case. Was it slander for making a comparison with a child molester or was it for misrepresenting Mann’s finding?
It certainly should not have been the former, Mark Steyn clearly did not literally compare Michael Mann to a child molester.
And it should not have been the latter either!
It’s all explained here:
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/03/04/punitive-damages-award-in-mann-v-steyn-reduced-from-1m-to-5k/
There was no basis, except that the jury all believed in protecting The Science from criticism.
Remember it was a DC jury. It was always going to be hard for Steyn to win there. 1 dollar damages was about as close as he could get. I still don’t understand the American legal system that allowed Steyn to demonstrate that Mann was not damaged by his comments and then award 1M dollars punitive damages. Insane.
all you need to understand about the legal system there is that it is dirty, rotten, stinkin and corrupt as Mark himself often describes it.
Exactly – jurors today are sheep.
Sweeeeeeeeet
The Hockey Stick – Convenient Untruth on a par with Poland invading Germany on September 3rd 1939.
True climate justice getting ever nearer to being seen to be done – roll on rescinding of the U.S. Endangerment Finding (followed by repeal of the 2008 Climate Claptrap Act).
On a par with the fake bat virus from Chyna….on a par with ‘polls’ predicting the election of Kamalalalarama…on a par with ignoring the Muslim rapes of 1 million white English girls….on a par with the lies of Russia, Russia, Russia, on a par with the ‘moon landing’….on a par with WMD….on a par with 9-11….well a lot of pars anyways.
See a pattern?
Excellent news, I will be very happy to see the Mann’s of the world defenestrated.
Agreed. Very good news indeed.
agreed except I am not at all clear why it has cost $5000 plus irrecoverable legal fees snd likely damage to Mark’s health when what he wrote was true.
The construction and promotion of the hockey stick graphic were deceitful.
It’s excellent in the sense that the judge has rowed back from the jury’s insanity, but of course the correct result should have been Mann’s action failing.
Given the true measurements of temperature, wind strength and sea level together with observations of weather phenomena it can only be so long before the narrative of the AGW blob collapses. At that point it’s going to be embarrassing and possibly legally challenging to have been on the wrong side of the argument.
“defenestrated”? Surely not. Those first defenestrated survived!! This led to a 30 year war.
defenestration(n.)1620, “the action of throwing out of a window,” from Latin fenestra “window.” A word invented for one incident: the “Defenestration of Prague,” May 21, 1618, when two Catholic deputies to the Bohemian national assembly and a secretary were tossed out the window of the castle of Hradschin by Protestant radicals (the pair landed in a trash heap and survived). It marked the start of the Thirty Years’ War.