I’ve received a text message from Ann McElhinney, Unreported Story Society, it reads:
Hello Old Friend, we’re here in [Washington] DC, you’ve been mentioned fondly by Mark [Steyn] in the court and I was remembering your kindness to us …
Ann is in DC, with her partner Phelim McAleer, covering Michael Mann’s defamation trial against Mark Steyn; because Mark Steyn called the unfortunate hockey stick chart, that has become the cross of climate change delusion, a fraud. Yes. A fraud.
It may have been difficult for Conservative politicians, and others, to call it out as such (as fraud) at the time this nonsense historical temperature reconstruction was first published – in the journal Nature back in 1998. There was, however, opportunity to do exactly this after the publication of emails between leading climate scientists as part of the ClimateGate saga. Most importantly there is opportunity right now to call it out, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and also Rand Simberg.
FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the ‘whistle blower’ likes to calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009.
In an email sometime later he explained:
The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.
By circus he is referring to a get together of governments from around the world, under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Mr FOIA wanted to let it be known that leading climate scientists at that very meeting, that they knew key supporting evidence was unreliable; that the famous hockey stick chart had been created by using ‘Mike’s trick’.
Indeed, by providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded (with your taxes) global warming industry.
An interpretation of the hockey stick chart, and how different the temperature data looked before, and after, ‘Michael Mann’s trick’ was shown in court, in Washington DC last week. This was as part of the defence for Mark Steyn’s co-accused, Rand Simberg.
The short Youtube video stars Prof. Richard Muller from UC Berkely explaining to his students why Michael Mann used the ‘apple and banana’ combination and how deceitful it is.
Muller does not show, or refer to, apples and bananas. But Mark Steyn does quote from my blog in his 2015 book using this analogy of sticking an apple on the end of a banana with reference to this hockey stick chart. The important point is that the stick is not made of the same stuff as the shaft, in this famous historical temperature reconstruction. And most people don’t seem to realise or care. Yet how often, might these very same people claim it not appropriate to be comparing ‘apples with oranges’?
Ann and Phelim are in DC to support Mark Steyn, specifically they have started a new podcast series, entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’ – all about this trial, which is very much focused on the hockey stick of climate science and its veracity, or lack of.
Their podcast is working its way up the charts in the science category, at #2 in the UK.
This is rather an achievement, especially given it questions so much that the English King believes so hard in, that it suggests he would do well to be less ‘certain’ about the veracity of the hockey stick.
I’m paraphrasing the first witness for the defence, Abraham Wyner, a statistician who spent some time in court explaining the concept of ‘uncertainty’ along with ‘p hacking’. He also commented that it was important to understand that the shaft and stick are of different components.
As Ann says in their most recent podcast episode, they do more than feed us popcorn, at this circus, we even get to learn something about statistics.
Given most of my readers are interested in politics and science, consider clicking across, subscribe, and leave a review, after you have listened to some episodes. They are all good, and different.
I always like the last episode that I listened to best, which is Episode 11, Mann & [Judith] Curry. And I look forward to the next one, including to hear the banter between Ann and Phelim.
There is lot of nastiness in each episode not between my friends, but from the climate scientists and I’m finding it cathartic.
The extent to which mainstream climate scientists block the work of those they disagree with, and then ridicule them. That is something that needs to be publicly acknowledged, least this sad situation continues forever, or more likely until everyone shuts up and bows down to the authority of Michael Mann and the IPCC or at least, on the conservative side, those who only marginally disagree with them, including Judith Curry. Yes. Curry. While a witness for Simberg, and a good one at that, in the end Curry is part of the problem, Curry and her electric car. You will hear about the car, heat pump and all her batteries if you listen to Episode #11 of the podcast, click here.
We know from the ClimateGate emails that there was terrible abuse of the climate science process through the 1990s. I have firsthand experience of it still happening twenty years later, especially the difficulty of getting research that does not accord with ‘the consensus’ published.
Getting my research with John Abbot, on a new technique using artificial intelligence for better rainfall forecasts, published was not easy. But John Abbot and I persisted, and now this research is part of the official record in so much as it has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed journals in climate science.
Every time we tried to publish on rainfall and also temperatures, it was an ordeal. While mostly successful with the rainfall work, we have mostly failed when it comes to the temperature work. We got two minor publications through. I am going to try again, maybe later this year with Rutherglen, Darwin, and Mildura historical temperature reconstructions. The unpublished Mildura manuscript includes lots and lots of temperature data that the Bureau, well they now claim none of this data exists.
Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers. This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward. And it needs to be analysed for more than the one location of Mildura.
The importance of this analysis has so far been ignored by mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike. It has not been mentioned in this trial, with the impression given that the instrumental temperature record for the last 30 years is reliable, when it is not.
I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series at my weblog, the post is entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’.
My feeling is, that you will be much more sympathetic to what I have had to endure, and what I plan to begin explaining going forward, after you hear the extent of the shenanigans by way of the evidence in the Mark Steyn versus Michael Mann trial.
When I eventually get the Mildura data published, and when I eventually get to tell my story, you might actually believe me! Because it is all just an extension of the continuing malfeasance within mainstream climate science. As unbelievable as it often seems, even still to me.
After John Abbot and I did get our second research paper concerning temperatures and artificial intelligence (AI) – demonstrating how AI can be used to distinguish natural versus human-caused climate change – published by the Elsevier journal, GeoResJ back in 2017 (vol 14), Gavin Schmidt (a mate of Michael Mann’s) launched an attack including to get this paper retracted.
Schmidt worked hard, including at Twitter to destroy our reputation and to have the paper retracted by the journal. Of course, in the first instance, the campaign was focused on the editor of the journal. And so the editor wrote to us wanting clarification on various aspects of our method.
Those few years ago Gavin Schmidt was claiming that artificial intelligence could not be used for weather or climate forecasting. It is now recognised, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast weather – exemplified by Google’s experimental GraphCast AI and the Huawei Pangu-Weather model – to the point where the MIT Technology Review has declared ‘Weather Forecasting is having an AI moment’ and Nature reported that ‘DeepMind AI accurately forecasts weather – on a desktop computer’.
And, these few years later our paper is still standing, so to speak, which is more than Mark Steyn can do at the moment, and the journal that published us has since been closed down.
I am so sorry that Mark Steyn has had three heart attacks this last year and is now defending himself from a wheel chair. I am sorry that the journal GeoResJ no longer publishes real science, because it can no longer publish anything.
There should be much more acknowledgment of the toll all the unnecessary nastiness can take on individuals, and organisations and of course, eventually on our institutions.
There is a war, Mark Steyn is centre stage in just one of the battles.
It is a war against what Mr FOIA referred to as the ‘hole digging and filling in’. More specifically he wrote that:
[The] wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.
We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.
If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.
I have explained the significance of my very technical research on rainfall forecasting using AI, as published in volume 14 of GeoResJ, in an article for The Spectator Australia online.
The late Christian Kerr, another foot soldier in this war, told me at the time it was their most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.
You can still read the piece at The Spectator Australia online, entitled ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here’. The Spectator Australia still exists as a publication, that is something I am also grateful for. Rowan Dean, its editor, continues as another important foot soldier in this war.
As I listen along to the new podcast series produced by Ann and Phelim entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’, I know that this information is being broadcast, that it is being made public: that the ‘whole world’ is hearing how brazen and nasty mainstream climate scientists can be. And I’m feeling an ugly burden lifted. Sharing the ugly can somehow make it less personal, any good therapist will affirm that as truth. Thank you Ann and Phelim, for lightening my load in a very practical way.
I have often been told, by those who could better support my work in very practical ways, I’m referring to my work with John Abbot forecasting temperatures and rainfall using AI, that it is all very technical and difficult to understand. Even that I am not a very good communicator, and so they promote the work of Judith Curry instead, even though she is just rehashing the problems we already known about with General Circulation Models (GCMs). Curry and them, including the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship along with Jordon Peterson and John Anderson, they just rehash what we already know to be hopeless, rather than attempting to understand the solution by way of a new tool, that John Abbot and I are offering.
It was in 2015 that Mark Steyn published ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ that sets out in very plain English – Mark is not a scientist but rather a radio and television presenter, and expert on the history of musical theatre – how absurd a centre piece of one of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment reports really is. Of course, I’m back referring to the ‘hockey stick’.
It is so obvious that we need to abandon this absurd historical reconstruction, along with General Circulation Models and those who want to keep talking about them and publishing on them as though they have some practical utility. If we are to ever begin to unpick the nature of climate change and move to better systems for forecasting droughts and floods we need to abandon electric cars along with GCMs. They are not useful.
Steyn quotes me on page 55 of his 2015 book, and a witness in the trial has made the very same observation. Dr Abraham Wyner a statistician from the University of Pennsylvania explains that the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ is not of the same stuff as the handle of this infamous temperature reconstruction.
Mark Steyn thought my explanation very clear. Quoting from my blog, he wrote back in 2015, she found Mann’s famous graph an ‘unlikely proposition’. In 2013, I suggested it was analogous to ‘sticking an apple on the end of a banana’. We should be laughing at it, rather than buying electric cars.
We should be remembering that it is not always useful to treat apples and oranges as the same. They are very different things.
I began these scribbles with mention of a text I got from Ann, and the word ‘kindness’.
You can right now show your kindness in a very practical way by clicking across to their donation page. Send them some money, as a show of appreciation for all their efforts so far.
Show your kindness to Mark Steyn and also Ann and Phelim by making a donation to help them keep reporting on this trial, and the next battle, in this difficult war, LINK HERE.
This blog post was edited for clarity, with more detail added, on Monday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time. A version will be sent to my MailChimp subscribers, you can subscribe by clicking here.
POSTSCRIPT
It was a long time ago, 2006, that I travelled with Ann and Phelim, helping to promote their first documentary film, ‘Mine Your Own Business’. That was after I raised a good amount of money to bring them to Australia, and successfully booked their film into theatres in Hobart, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. I really wanted them to be well supported, that is the kindness Ann remembers.
And as Phelim McAleer explained during that tour:
The film [Mine Your Own Business], in its essence, is not really at all a story about mining, but rather, it is a story about human rights. The human right to a job, the human right to have your children educated, the human right to see your child reach their first birthday.
It is my very favourite film of all times – about the human experience, and totally politically incorrect. In that regard, it is much like this Mark Steyn defamation trial.
At the time I was covering a trial in Indonesia, that I wrote about for the IPA Review, it was about Richard Ness.
Against the odds, Ness won in what was the longest running criminal trial in Indonesia. Here’s hoping that Mark Steyn wins. This battle could be all over very soon.
To read Part 3, Part 2, Part 1, of this blog series, click on the respective links.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
If people would take the time to take a deep dive into the “Hockey Stick” the whole climate change fraud would be over.
I have thought for a long time that Global Warming/Climate Change is a fraud but I despair as Billionaires can never have to many gold toilets and need the extra billions from mining and construction while keeping back up Diesel generators at all their palatial mansions.
I called it publicly in 2006 in a letter to my local newspaper declaring it to be a new false religion while all my friends thought I was a fool. One friend privately believed me after Climate Gate but others since have told me I was threatening the future of their Grandchildren by my unbelief.
They may have kicked an own goal if they used that old Richard Muller video. A couple of years later he completely endorsed the “Hockey Stick” and AGW.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrarian-argues-humans-to-blame-for-climate-change/
It appears that the Roman Warming was 2 degrees warmer than today.
Rome had booming agriculture.
More CO2 did the trick.
The only interesting thing to discover about the incredible damage the climate consensus inflicted on society in general, governments around the world, developing 3d world countries, academia, etc is this:
Why? It was obvious fraud, total bullschitt.
*****
Comment in reply from JM:
And it began with Margaret Thatcher wanting to run a campaign against the coal miners, her preferences (according to her Memoirs) was to transition to nuclear. Transitioning such a large economy from one energy source to another is going to create opportunities. And it has across the world, it has culminated in extraordinary opportunities for already rich people to sell unimaginably large numbers of wind turbines (and other things) into coal-rich Queensland where I live. Many of these turbines are coming from Denmark/from Europe, as though we should be importing our energy and anything to do with it.
Worse, the transition is mandated and governments are using our taxes to pay for the transition with the contracts done-deals years in advance.
The climategate fraud is unravelling as the people suddenly find that their finances are under extreme pressure caused by the high cost of mitigating the so-called as yet undefined “climate emergency”. The people have no choice but to totally reject the man-made climate change scam and destroy the fraudsters who have promoted this scam.
Lots of words talking about minor players, most of whom I’ve never heard of. Lots of intrigue about the temperature records of one country and the BOM. The issue is that, globally, both temperatures and CO2 concentrations are marching onwards and upwards with no signs of slowing, never mind reversing. Clearly fossil fuel use has to slow and stop at some point, if only because it will run out and/or the atmosphere will accumulate astronomically high levels of CO2.
The Global Climate report for 2023 published by NOAA states:
“ The year 2023 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850 at 1.18°C (2.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). This value is 0.15°C (0.27°F) more than the previous record set in 2016. The 10 warmest years in the 174-year record have all occurred during the last decade (2014–2023).”
When are you guys going to stop waffling and take it seriously?
Rob,
If you had been following along, you might have learnt something about correlation versus causation.
And then there is the issue of the reliability of the proxy records. And how they diverge from the instrumental.
All of this is actually central to knowing for sure that we have a climate emergency.
As I’ve shown repeatedly, there was as much cooling in the average temperature for much of Australia from 1920 to 1950, as there has been warming since.
While you may consider that detail unimportant, that is because you don’t really understand anything about climate and what causes it to change. Worse, it appears you don’t care.
“The issue is that, globally, both temperatures and CO2 concentrations are marching onwards and upwards with no signs of slowing, never mind reversing. Clearly fossil fuel use has to slow and stop at some point, if only because it will run out and/or the atmosphere will accumulate astronomically high levels of CO2.”
A really stupid comment. Obviously the alarmist mind virus has destroyed your cortex. A few years ago I used to try and engage brain dead alarmists in reasoned conversation but it is impossible.
Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW, is a hoax, a grift and an ideological weapon. It is being used to destroy Western nations. If ‘rob’ feels so strongly about it he should hop on the nearest plane (actually to be consistent he should be on a raft) and display his placards in Tiananmen Square. He should take as many fellow ratbags with him as possible. I for one would follow his exploits there with interest.
Alex S.Gaddes stated to me while he was researching ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ in the 1980’s, he suspected El Nino was not the Climate Driver it was made out to be by the successors of Smith and Bryson at the University of East Anglia, (circa 1972/75.) He had an abiding respect for the competence of these two gentlemen, (Smith and Bryson) – and used their work extensively, in the development of his ‘Ratios Principle’ and the eventual forecast of Solar-induced Orbital Dry Cycles.
A key element was the use of Base 12 Maths, as a prerequisite for calculation of the Orbital Dry Cycles. The use of the Earth Period,(One Year) as his No 1 Constant, effectively destroyed the religiously fabricated Gregorian Calendar – and as such, exposed the Catholic vilification of Galileo. (Galileo was magnanimously ‘forgiven’ by Pope Francis in 1992 – the year ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ was launched.)
The exclusive use of ‘Decades’ and Base 10 ‘computer maths’ around this time, just distorted what was really happening – and made the mooted El Nino and Anthropogenic Global Warming projections,(exported from the University of East Anglia,) impossible to confirm or predict, (as they have remained to this day.)
The Orbiting of the Planet by these Dry Cycles, means that temperatures rise longitudinally, as the Terrestrial Footprint of the Cycles passes over the Land/Ocean, due to the depletion of Water Vapour Albedo in the atmosphere, by the bombardment of Charged Solar Particles expelled from the Sun, in an exact sequence and frequency. (see The Metal/Steam Reaction ) The Water Vapour levels (and temperatures) return to ‘Normal’ after the Dry Cycle passes.
Overall however, the Planet continues to ‘cool’ – as the current Ice Age continues – and basic rules of Heat Transfer would indicate.
I would be interested to find what would happen, if you and John Abbot used Base 12 in your ‘super computer’. For one thing, I suspect the Milankovitch Cycles (for instance,) would be further ‘refined’ and redetermined.
Jennifer,
I’m trying to stay polite, but telling me i know nothing about climate and don’t care? Really? If you recall we had some lengthy discussions by email while you were over in the U.K. recently and I patiently went through the issues of temperature records and processing, comparing Australian and U.K. methods. At the end we agreed to disagree but did not fall out over it.
Personally I do not see one small portion of the temperature record in one country as very significant. The science of climate change is about extracting relatively small long term changes in temperature from very noisy signals. To do that it is necessary to aggregate the data from all sources globally, both land and ocean, and combine it with many other useful channels of data such as satellite data, proxy records going back hundreds of thousands of years, etc. Yes, it’s complicated, but that’s science for you. No, I don’t believe it’s a scam. (A) it would require huge numbers of highly academic career scientists to be corrupted and plotting without any of them giving the game away, and (b) it is really not in anyone’s interests for climate change to be a thing. So much easier if we could say it was all a big mistake and get back to pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere with a clean conscience. The longer this debate goes on, the stronger the evidence becomes that the climate is changing globally. There are already very few people on your side of the argument and all the hordes of Exxon-supported keyboard warriors from twenty years ago seem to have vanished into the ether.
Best regards and stay safe. Rob
*****
Thanks Rob.
Apologies for being somewhat rude.
In the end, and following on from our discussion about weather stations and how temperatures are measured, you don’t seem to understand the importance of the detail when it comes to issue of evidence and science.
The global mean temperature is purportedly the mean of all the temperature records, or at least representative ones.
So, it is relevant that the representative one are very variable and that they do not generally have trends that accord with the official global mean. This is the case whether considering the last 100 years for Australia, or the last 1,000 years for the northern hemisphere.
Jennifer,
It’s a matter of statistics. The variance within the dataset of any single weather station is so great that it reveals nothing useful about the global trend. To attempt to draw such conclusions leaves you immediately open to criticisms of cherry picking – for example picking a dataset where you can draw a line through it with a slight down trend over a few decades.
If you are going to criticise climate science analysis in this way, then you would need to build a case showing that the sum total of all temperature records taken worldwide over decades contains a systematic bias over time, one great enough to counteract the observed 1C rise that is being observed over the last few decades. Scientists spend their whole lives trying to eliminate such biases so it’s not as of they are unaware of the potential issue. There are no papers out there which make the sort of case you present.
Wise comments from Rob. It’s a pity Jenn continues to cancel Steve and other dissenting posts. It seems the climate denier echo chamber is strong.
‘Huge numbers of highly academic career scientists’ have always been corrupted by ignorance and peer review…..(eg, the efforts of Ignaz Semmelweis to get the medical profession to wash their hands.)
The orbit of the short term Dry Cycles,(and attendant Temperature Fluctuations,) only repeats for any particular geographical longitude on Earth, every 81 Years.
You have some research and ‘enlightenment’ ahead of you Rob;
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TFFDXyhe5b0ZfLCiFt23W4PbubQaQfQo/view?usp=sharing
Don, I followed your link and what can I say? Ten minutes I’ll not get back. Whoever Alex Gaddes is, he has successfully avoided leaving any digital trace on the entire internet. That is an outstanding achievement these days, but not one guaranteed to put him centre stage in the world of climate science. There is fringe, and there is completely off the radar. Rob
Don,
I did (skim) read the first quarter of your book, rather than dismissing it outright. The stuff about cycles is not really based on much – it’s more like trying to see patterns in the tea leaves without any real science behind it. Sure, there are all sorts of short, medium and long term cycles which affect the climate system, but understanding them depends on a rigorous and scientific treatment of the data, not just playing around with numbers and looking for correlations with things.
On page 54 and 55 he does recognise the dangers of CO2 induced warming, but at the time of writing CO2 had only risen to 330ppm, some 50ppm over baseline. Today it is 420ppm and the effects are becoming real not abstract or theoretical. He argues that the warming is good because it offsets a fall in albedo due to agricultural activities. Fast forward to 2024 and we know a lot more.
The major albedo effect is in the polar regions where melting ice is increasing albedo and accelerating warming. The effect of particulates in the atmosphere is real but primarily from the burning of coal and bunker fuel in ships, both of which have been cleaned up dramatically in the last decade or so. In James Hansen’s latest paper, “Global warming in the pipeline” he argues that the particulates have been masking CO2 warming and, with the clean up, we are now seeing an acceleration, with climate sensitivity rising from 3C/doubling of CO2 to about 4.8.
Rob, you seem to have missed the part about the Carbon Sink, (Rankama and Sahama, Chicago Press, 1950) whereupon, after reaching saturation point in the atmosphere, CO2 is taken up by the oceans, especially nearer the Poles. You also seem to have missed the qualification on p 55; “However, (see Ref.Nos. 12 and 13) it [rising carbon dioxide level] could well turn out to be lucky for us, in the light of those other factors which act in the opposite way to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I refer to wind-blown and volcanic dust in the atmosphere and the ever-intensifying albedo factor.”
Albedo REFLECTS sunlight. The major sources are Water Vapour, Ice , Volcanic Aerosols and wind-blown dust.
I suggest you read on – and ‘skim’ more carefully.
Alex S. Gaddes published ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ in 1992 – he died in 1997
He never owned a computer.
Don,
I think it’s great that Alex (your dad?) was so interested in climate change but it’s ludicrous to be quoting it like some religious text nearly thirty years after his passing. He wasn’t a climate scientist and his book is just his thoughts and opinions based on bits and pieces he picked up from friends and the media. The science he does refer to is now far out of date in terms of both the data and the state of the science. If all your own thoughts and opinions are based on this one text then it’s an extreme case of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
I’m happy to discuss specific aspects of the subject with you, for example albedo, but it has to based on current scientific papers.
Rob
Rob, you are obviously incapable of conducting an intelligent discourse, or objectively analysing a scientific text by reading it.
Don,
Show me a scientific text and I’m happy to discuss it with you. No ad-homs either, just an objective look at some real science.
Rob
P.s. in case I wasn’t clear, your book does not remotely qualify as scientific research. I’m happy to explain why in case it isn’t obvious.
Don,
As an example of a recent paper that has caused something of a stir in the climate science community, take a look at this one published by James Hansen and a team in November 2023. I would be interested in your thoughts.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false#423296425
Depressingly, I have just read that the jury found against Mark Steyn and that he has to pay $US1 million damages to Mann. The Washington DC trial was always fraught with danger but, despite Mann’s hockey stick claims being thoroughly discredited, the jury somehow thought he had been defamed and suffered losses to the tune of a million dollars. Will Steyn be able to appeal and what likelihood of success would he have?
David,
It was nothing to do with the science. If you write things like this you are likely to get sued for defamation:
“ Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” Simberg wrote. Another writer, Mark Steyn, later referenced Simberg’s article in his own piece in National Review, calling Mann’s research “fraudulent”.
You could criticise the US legal system for the quanta of the award. On the other hand he got off lightly compared to Trump.
Rob,
I have read the paper you suggested from James Hansen and colleagues – and found it to be a litany of ‘uncertainties’ and ‘maybes’– included with the expected AGW oriented ‘forcings’. (Surely not to appease the IPCC?)
Of interest, (encouragingly) was the section on Scientific Reticence.
I draw your attention to the definitions and Chronology in the second half of ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ – 30 years on.
The Terrestrial Footprints of the Minor and Regional Dry Cycles as described therein, are exactly correct, according to my own observations over time and readily available global weather records.
I have also offered an explanation of the depleting effect on water vapour in the Earth’s atmosphere by the bombardment of the the ‘X Factor’ Particles expelled from the Sun in a set timespan and frequency – acting in a retrograde fashion on the Earth,(as mooted by Alex S. Gaddes,(p 36). It is the destruction of this water vapour albedo that causes the precipitation and temperatures to fluctuate,(Dryer and Warmer or Wetter and Cooler,) as the Cycle orbits the Earth in this retrograde orbit from East to West. These temperature fluctuations repeat over the same geographical longitudes every 81 Years, with the relevant returning Minor or Regional Dry Cycle Hierarchy. The introduction and effects of mooted longer term Dry Cycles is yet to be determined and defined.
It is the increase in other Albedo sources, (eg. volcanism,) that is responsible for an overall ‘cooling’ that keeps any ‘greenhouse effect’ in check – and ensures we will continue to live in various iterations of an ‘Ice Age’.
You may note (p 167) the embarrassing ‘disappearance’ of ‘ENSO’ is recorded over Australia from the end of the Minor Dry Cycle from mid-January 2023, to the start of the next Regional Dry Cycle in early January, 2026.