As Talkshop readers know, Prof Michael Mann isn’t on my christmas card list, since he repeated Greg Laden’s libel against me and added some further innuendo in the NYT article by Leslie Kaufman written following the raid on tallbloke towers.
Michael Mann has now threatened legal action against the National Review Online for an opinion piece written by Mark Steyn.
The NRO’s attorney has responded, and their letter to Mann’s attorney is well worth a read.
Here’s an extract:
Thwack! Take that Michael. 
So, what next? I recommend we all buy bumper bags of popcorn and sit back to enjoy the fun. It’s seems Micheal Mann is happy enough to repeat other people’s libel but gets all righteous when the tables are turned. In this case he’s reached for his Attorney’s phone number before stopping to consider the likely requirements for disclosure the defendant would be entitled to request.
Another libel case Mann is currently pursuing against Canadian Tim Ball because Tim said he should be in the State Pen rather than Penn State (University) is currently stalled for that reason. If Mann fails to make disclosure, he is liable for a hefty financial penalty and will have the case tossed out. Here’s hoping.
That “dirty laundry” has been in Mike’s closet for a lot of years and must really stink by now. What do the rest of the R^2 values look like for the Hockey Stick Mike? At stake here is a lot of IPCC credibility. They really should have checked Mann’s work before making the hockey stick the poster child for global warming. But then, as the climate gate emails show, prominent lead author Phil Jones already knew about “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline”.
I wouldn’t be too worried TB. Michael Man has a face theat says “I can not be trusted”. The truth will out.
Mickey Mann has blocked me from commenting on his “MichaelMannScientist” Facebook page (even when I “like” it) and has silently deleted my comments therefrom.
Comments on his Facebook page are all praise. He can’t deal with criticism.
He’s a bully. Picks on the ones who are smaller, who can’t defend themselves. Gone after Watts or Morano? I wouldn’t think so.
Sure would like to know what he was like in junior high. Formerly a bully, persently a bully.
What will really frighten Mann off is the fact that all of his research material will be subject to discovery and analysis, which is exactly what he has been trying to avoid all of these years. His bluff is being called, and like most bullies, he will chicken out when confronted.
Mann’s bravery seems to stem from his belief that he, along with the rest of the “team”, are fireproof.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/22/us-reaction-to-climategate.html
Based on the latest release of Climategate e-mails
“All communications on this issue are being coordinated with the White House. Therefore no communications with Hill or Press should go out without [Department of Commerce] coordinating with [White House].”
Friends in low places !?
Hi jazznick:
“Mann’s bravery seems to stem from his belief that he, along with the rest of the “team”, are fireproof.”
Hon y soit qui mal y asbestos.
Mentioning MM alongside convicted child molester Sandusky wasn’t too clever though.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78852.html
I had a quick look at the cases they cite in the letter.
If that’s all they have, they’re toast and Mann will win – though it’s more likely that NRO will cave before any actual trial.
[Reply] Got any US libel experience? I might know someone who could use your services.
One thing’s for sure Mark Steyn and the NRO will have funding coming from all over the world if they need it!
Oldbrew, that article says:
“blog post that compares Penn State’s mishandling of years of child sexual abuse to the university’s investigation of “Climategate.”
That’s an issue for Penn State, not Mike Mann.
Calling him “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” is a separate insult.
The parallels between Mann’s stonewalling and the blustering self-certification as true scientific experts by the whole Consensual Community is no coincidence. Both got away with some major ‘fast ones’ early on, and attempted to pyramid them to obtain international acceptance of their omnipotence and omniscience. Hubris, etc.
The whole edifice of AGW is without foundations, and relies for it’s support on a sky-hook dangling from a conceptual point in mid air called the “effective altitude of emission”.
The ‘underpinnings’ provided by illusory foundations such as the Hockey Stick and the satellite altimetry of sea level which is calibrated by bootstrapping the trend line off the theory are chimaeras which melt under the sunlight of clear analysis.
Looking at the latest missive from Mann’s lawyer, I can see Mann’s own instruction behind the statement. Telling your attorney what to say is a bad idea, and I suspect the attorney knows it.
“The response of the National Review is telling with respect to the issues it did not address. It did not address, or even acknowledge, the fact that Dr. Mann’s research has been extensively reviewed by a number of independent parties, including the National Science Foundation, with never a suggestion of any fraud or research misconduct. It did not address, or even acknowledge, the fact that Dr. Mann’s conclusions have been replicated by no fewer than twelve independent studies. It did not deny the fact that it was aware that Dr. Mann has been repeatedly exonerated of any fraudulent conduct. It did not deny the fact that it knew its allegations of fraud were false. Rather, the National Review’s defense seems to be that it did not really mean what it said last month when it accused Dr. Mann of fraud. Beyond this, the response is little more than an invective filled personal attack on Dr. Mann. And further, this attack is coupled with the transparent threat that the National Review intends to undertake burdensome and abusive litigation tactics should Dr. Mann have the temerity to attempt to defend himself in court.”
Looks to me like a Mannian rant sent to the attorney in a reply to the attorney’s advice to drop the matter rather than carefully worded lawyer speak anyway.
Hi Tallbloke with all the talk about litigation, how is your case progressing?
If Mann can confine the discussion in court to the narrowest of terms, he is in a good position to win. With Ball, it comes down to Ball’s offhand joke that Mann should be in the State Pen, not at Penn State, something that is legitimate only if Mann has done something for which he is criminally liable. If Mann did something immoral, unethical or for which he is civilly liable, Mann would still be correct in saying he was defamed. Steyn described the hockey stick graph as “fraudulent” and described the investigations, particularly by Penn State, as “whitewash(es”. Which requires a crime or misdemeanor at least to have occurred (otherwise there is nothing to make appear clean while it is, in fact, dirty). So if Mann can keep the Court on the narrow line that neither fraud nor other civil or criminal offense has ever been demonstrated, then he is, indeed, correct in his position that he has been defamed and libeled.
Mann’s weakness lies in the possibility that the Court will allow Ball and Steyn to present proof that Mann has actually done something willfully incorrect, i.e. with knowledge aforethought modified his data collection and presentation to show something he wanted it to show rather than what, without his modification, it would have shown. What would be his undoing would be earlier versions of the temperature graph that showed the MWP and the 20th Century cooling from tree-ring data and e-mails that have discussions of modifications and new versions of the graphs to conform with the desired endpoint.
It is possible that such early versions and e-mails exist. The comment by Overpeck(?) of needing to get rid of the MWP didn’t come from the blue, but from previous discussions. So they were aware of the “problem” as Mann was creating his Hockey Stick. His/their deletion of certain data and discussions thereof are clear evidence that they were aware of the untoward image the inclusion created, but deletions of “fuzzy” data is routine as data management to uncover the true signal inside the mess. But those e-mails and early versions don’t currently exist in the public domain. If Ball and Steyn are a) allowed to pursue the line that a crime of some sort has, actually been committed, so their charges are valid, but b) have to use what data there is at hand, when others – including Wegman and Inhofe and Morano – have not been able to do so themselves (or chosen not to), Mann could easily win.
Courts do not allow “fishing” for proof after the fact. Discovery could be limited to what is already available, not what is yet to be reviewed. Having a “reasonable” belief that a man is a thief is enough to say, publicly, that he is a thief and demand access to his house in order to get the proof that he is a thief IF you are a police officer AND the Courts agree you have enough grounds for that belief. I cannot say that would be true for a civilian. Ball, Steyn, you and me – we have suspicions, I would say. The proof would be in Mann’s house/computers. The charge of fraud etc. seems to me to require prior knowledge of the solid kind, not suspicion, the inferential kind.
All seems to me to depend on the Court being generous to the defendant (Ball/Steyn) on the date-received information they can use in their defense, and ungenerous to the plaintiff (Mann) on what he can withhold under discovery. Even then, the plaintiff should have the benefit, for it might not be enough to demonstrate unethical behaviour (of which there is little doubt), but that an actual criminal act actually occurred, i.e. legally actionable. Since obtaining a conviction in such a case is questionable anyway, demonstrating that a conviction is highly probable is even more difficult.
Breaking a vase brings anger, but only intentionally breaking a vase gets you put away. Proving that Mann “broke” the temperature record is not the same as proving he did so purposely to manipulate, misdirect, misrepresent or otherwise gain a result he would not have gained otherwise.
The good fight isn’t often the winning fight.
Reblogged this on contrary2belief and commented:
Climate “scientists” using lawyers instead of data to defend their practices.
Doug: the defense case appears to revolve around the idea that the word ‘fraud’ has a common language usage aside from it’s legal definition which makes it’s use legitimate, particularly in reference to ‘public figures’.
From Jones email about “using Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline” it’s pretty clear they intentionally and perversely removed adverse data from their dataset in order to ‘create the right impression’ in the minds of policy makers. Thus the ‘fraud’ referred to is a ‘scientific fraud’. I’m not sure that has a legal definition.
None of the inquiries required Mann to produce the key evidence which he has been consistently failing to provide, on various pretexts. Amongst this is the rest of the statistical validation data (R^2 values) which would show that the Hockey stick has no scientific value. He knew those values before publication…
I fear that you are correct that the court may limit the case within narrow constraints. We would like to see the whole AGW hype on trial, but that’ll have to wait.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/16/schmidts-conspiracy-theory/
“Dirty Laundry” and Verification r2
In December 2003, despite a number of prior data refusals, I asked Mann for the residual series from the individual steps (termed “experiments”) in MBH98. Unknown to me at the time, Briffa and Osborn had made an almost identical request three months earlier (which Mann had complied with). Residual series permit a reader to carry out standard statistical tests (verification r2, RE, etc) without having to re-do the entire calculation from scratch. I copied David Verardo of NSF on the request. Without waiting for Mann’s refusal (this surprised me), Verardo said that Mann was not required to provide this data to me. Verardo’s letter was later cited in Mann’s evidence to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and in Stephen Schneider’s book.:
His research is published in the peer-reviewed literature which has passed muster with the editors of those journals and other scientists who have reviewed his manuscripts. You are free to your analysis of climate data and he is free to his. The passing of time and evolving new knowledge about Earth’s climate will eventually tell the full story of changing climate. I would expect that you would respect the views of the US NSF on the issue of data access and intellectual property for US investigators as articulated by me to you in my last message under the advisement of the US NSF’s Office of General Counsel.
In response to the identical inquiry from CRU, Mann immediately sent the residual series to Osborn, warning him that the residual series were his “dirty laundry”, provided to Osborn only because he was a “trusted colleague”. Mann asked Osborn to ensure that the “dirty laundry” didn’t fall into the wrong hands, an assurance that Osborn readily gave.
None of the so-called “inquiries” delved into why Mann regarded the residual series as his “dirty laundry” and why he was so anxious to prevent this (apparently “inconvenient”) information from falling into the wrong hands.
One reason might, of course, have been that the residual series would immediately permit the calculation of the verification r2 for each step. (Favorable) verification r2 results for the AD1820 step were illustrated in MBH98 Figure 3; elsewhere MBH98 said that the verification r2 statistic had been considered. But in the SI to MBH98, Mann had archived the RE for each step but not verification r2.
In MM2005, we reported that the verification r2 for the AD1400 step was approximately zero – a very surprising result given the “skill” claimed for MBH98. (Zorita, for one, was surprised by this result and thought less of MBH98 accordingly.) In MM2005 (EE), we expressed our surprise that the results of such a central verification statistic had not either not been calculated or reported.
In Mann’s testimony at the NAS panel in March 2006, Mann was directly asked whether he had calculated the verification r2 for the AD1400 step; Mann flatly denied doing the calculation, saying that such a calculation would have been a “foolish and incorrect thing to do”. However, by that time, Mann had archived part of his source code in response to the House Committee and that code showed conclusively that the verification r2 values had been calculated for all steps.
That Mann had calculated verification r2 results is beyond dispute. That they were “inconvenient” is beyond dispute. That they were not reported is beyond dispute.
Wahl and Ammann announced in May 2005 that all our claims were “unfounded”. Since our codes were very close and I reconciled them almost immediately, I knew that their verification r2 results would be identical to ours. Again, I was asked to review the paper (though my review was disregarded.) As a reviewer, I asked for the verification r2 results. Wahl and Ammann refused. Rather than rejecting the paper, Schneider terminated me as a reviewer. At AGU in December 2005, I asked Ammann what the verification r2 for their AD1400 step was. He refused to answer – a refusal noted by Eduardo Zorita and others.
I asked Ammann out to lunch after the paleo session (I bought). Since our codes reconciled, it should have been possible to clarify the dispute. I offered to jointly (with our coauthors) write a paper stating what we agreed on and what we disagreed on. He refused, saying that this would be “bad for his career”. To this day, I remain dismayed at this answer. I urged him to report the verification r2 results; he refused. I told him that I would not simply stand by while he refused to report the adverse verification r2 results that confirmed ours; he shrugged. I therefore filed an academic misconduct complaint at UCAR; while the complaint was shrugged off without investigation, the verification r2 results appeared in the final article, confirming our point.
The Climategate emails show that Phil Jones, also a reviewer of the paper, was outraged that we had complained about Wahl and Ammann suppressing the inconvenient data, not by them trying suppressing the data.
Doesn’t Mann’s “status” as a public figure make him fair game?