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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.