6 members of a Dem DC jury order conservative humorist to pay scammer PhD a million dollars

The "leaders" of the Democrat party claim
   a) that the Erf is warming at a rate that is both unusual and dangerous;
   b) that this dangerous and unprecedented warming is being caused by duh dread poison gas carbon dioxide.  (That's sarcasm: as every grade-school student should know, humans exhale CO2, and plants love it.  The idea that CO2 is a "pollutant," as the Deep-Staters claim, is utter horseshit.  But unfortunately, they run the entire damn government.)
   c) that most of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is due to burning carbon-based fuel--like gasoline, oil and coal; and
   d) that most of the blame for this falls on Americans, since we use more carbon fuel per person than residents of any other nation.

Any of that sound familiar?  The only problem is, only one statement above is true, which is that Americans use more carbon fuel *per person* than residents of other nations.

And therein lies the entire reason for the push to "stop global warming:" cuz the communists have found they can use that claim to enable the Democrats and snowflakes to destroy the U.S. economy.

Naturally you don't believe a word of the above, cuz you rely on the Mainstream Media, the biden regime and the utterly, hopelessly, irredeemably corrupt United Nations to tell you what they want you to believe.  You don't do any research at all.

C'mon, folks: you well know that's true.  Not one person in 10,000 ever researches the Media's and regime's claims, and you know it!  And unless you DO your own research you'll believe whatever the Media and the regime tell ya, because you believe they tell you the truth.  Cuz "Why would dey lie, eh?"

Well, there IS an election coming up in November that will decide the future, but surely that's not a reason for 'em to LIE, eh?  So right now I'd like to show you how they've been lying to ya about just one topic--for almost 4 decades now.

Everyone believes--naively--that PhDs are honest.  Certainly most are, but not all.  And way back in 1999 a cunning PhD named Michael Mann created a graph for a paper that showed (so he claimed) that global temperatures started rising sharply starting in 1895.  

The idea of global warming due to CO2 had been posited around a decade before Mann's graph, and Mann found it convincing.  His graph used the width of tree rings as a proxy for recent temperatures in areas far from measuring stations.  The idea is that trees grow a bit better in warmer temperatures, so since each ring is a year, the theory is that wider rings equals warmer temperature.

His graph showed a relatively scary increase in world temps starting about 1895 and continuing to 2000.  This increase was so pronounced that the Mainstream Media immediately began describing it as looking like the blade of a hockey stick.

Then in 2001 a vaunted U.N. "panel" called the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" published a version of Mann's graph in its "climate assessment.  And instantly, Mann became a star. 

And like most people, he loved that, and would fight like hell to discredit anyone who claimed he'd committed scientific malpractice.  Cuz he beez a PhD, and certain personality types claim dey don' make no mistakes, eh?  When a PhD sez sumpin's true, dey say yew not allowed to challenge it!

[For the sarcasm-impaired, those last two sentences are utter horseshit.  Except Mann believes he and other PhDs who agree with him about Global Worming can't be criticized.  Read on.]

The problem with using tree ring width as a proxy for temperature is that tree growth is also highly affected by rainfall, and there's no reliable way of telling how much rain any given location got in a year.  That alone should have sunk the paper.  But Mann was cunning and connected, as we'll show.  And he didn't need to defend the many flaws in his graph, because other prominent PhDs--the Global Worming pushers--were doing that for him.  

A second problem was that scientists and critics who went through Mann's paper found that he'd only had access to something like 39 modern tree-ring width measurements.  (That's from memory so may not be exact.)  With such a small sample there's not a lot of predictive power, even aside from the rainfall question.

The third problem is equally huge: critics say that instead of using every tree-ring sample he had, Mann only used a smaller sub-set--something like 22 samples (again from memory from 20 years ago).  

This is a well-known type of "bad science" called "cherry-picking the data."  In good science you have to have a really sound reason for excluding ANY data.  Using just some data and ignoring others is bad science, since pursuit of the result you want could affect your choice of which data to use.  The paper doesn't explain why Mann used just some of the data but not others.  

Cherry-picking the data.  Seriously bad science.

The fourth problem is that Mann's graphs claim global temps rising starting around 1895.  But the amount of CO2 being emitted by humans back then was miniscule.  If, as he claims, temps were rising in 1895, the cause was NOT CO2.  So what was it?  He doesn't bother to try to explain.  That alone would be enough to debunk his conclusions.

The fifth problem is that from about 900 to 1300 A.D. average temperatures in northern Europe and Greenland were unusually warm, and in fact were warm enough to allow colonists to grow grapes--in Greenland!  It's called the "Medieval Warm Period," and it's been discussed in thousands of papers on climate.

Most experts believe the average temperature in the north Atlantic region was a whopping 1 degree C above the current average.  Problem is, Mann's graphs don't show any such warming.  Why not?  The absence of the higher temp in ANY of the "proxies" he uses to estimate temperature suggest that the ones he uses--which include northern Europe--might not be very reliable indicators of temperature, since it's a matter of record that settlers in Greenland grew grapes for well over 100 years.

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/MannetalPNAS08.pdf

SO...given the many valid criticisms of Mann's paper, many critics considered the paper to be fatally flawed...useless.  In the vernacular, garbage.  And it's those criticisms that Canadian columnist and humorist Mark Steyn drew on to describe PhD Mann as a fraud.  Co-defendant Rand Simburg wrote “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children he has molested and tortured data.” 

WELL!!!  One thing I've learned about PhDs: many have egos the size of Delaware.  And some are so prickly that they'll sue at the drop of a handkerchief.  And sure enough, Mann sued Steyn and Simburg for "defamation."  But you've just read the major flaws in his paper above.  So where's the alleged defamation.  Instead it would appear that Mann is either guilty of fraud or is simply incompetent.

In any event, a moronic, uneducated six-person jury in DC--conservative-haters--voted that Simberg and Steyn had made false statements about the pudgy, prissy, cunning PhD, and awarded Mann "compensatory damages" of...wait for it...one dollar--meaning the jury found that the asshole PhD's career was NOT harmed by the writings of the conservative humorists.

But DC juries are in another world, and the six ordered that Steyn pay punitive damages of ONE MILLION dollars.  (Simberg was ordered to pay $1,000.)  The jury decided that the pair made their statements with “malice, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”

As far as I can determine, the statements made by both writers were absolutely correct. The DC jury was stupid, uneducated and easily led by fiery liberal attorneys.  (The award is much like the one corrupt leftist tyrant Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay: $355 MILLION, though no one was damaged, nor did anyone claim to the state that they were damaged.)

Leftists were elated by the DC jury's verdict.  Kate Cell, "senior climate campaign manager" for the Union of Concerned Scientists (a totally leftist outfit) said “I hope people think twice before they lie and defame scientists.  We're far outside the bounds of civil conversation about the facts that I hope this verdict can help us find our way back."

Yes, Kate, if you and your communist comrades would stop lying about Global Warming we could, as you so soothingly put it, "find our way back."  But of course you won't, because you've staked all your credibility your claim that CO2 causes Global Worming.  You're so sure you're right that you refuse to even consider the flaws in your reasoning and your misunderstanding of what the data shows.

For example:  Some parts of Antarctica have ice sheets over three miles thick.  Both the U.S. and the former USSR sent teams to Antarctica to drill to the bottom of those sheets and retrieve "ice cores," which tell us the amount of CO2 in the air as long as 800,000 years ago.

Every year snow falls in Antarctica, and after the snow falls it's covered with a thin layer of dust.  By carefully counting the dust layers starting from the top you can tell how many years ago that layer of snow fell.  Then by analyzing the content of air bubbles trapped in the snow (now ice) you can measure the percentage of CO2 in the air each year for the last 800,000 years.

Is that amazing or what?

The same cores also tell us about the local temperature every year.

Now: no one I know wants to count 18,000 feet of thin layers of dust and snow, so to get a quick read they measured the length of, say, 200 layers (i.e. 200 years) in a part of the core.  Then they assumed--again intially, to get a quick result--that the number of "years per foot" stayed constant.  (Spoiler: it isn't constant.)  Got it?

And with that, a dozen research papers reported that when the ice cores showed the percentage of atmospheric CO2 rose, then around 200 years later the temperature in Antarctica also rose.

If that were true it would mean changes in CO2 could be causing Global Worming, exactly as the communists at the U.N. and the Media and NOAA and NASA had predicted, eh?

"Could be causing" because as every high school graduate should know, "Correlation does not imply ________."

If you don't know what goes in the blank above, don't feel bad.  Your school just didn't teach you what you need to know to have a basic understanding of science.  That's not meant to be a dig; I couldn't tell you a single song by Taylor Swift.  Couldn't tell you the name of a single fashion designer today.  So don't feel bad: your specialty just isn't science.

So there ya go, citizen: the Antarctic ice cores seemed to prove that Global Worming was indeed caused by CO2!  Yay!  See?  Duh Left just knew they were right yet again.  What's dat dey say?  "Follow the Science!"  Uh-huh.

Except (wait for it): later when they went back and counted the dust and snow layers ("varves") more carefully they found that instead of temperature rising 200 years after CO2 rose, it turned out temperatures rose first, and 200 or so years later CO2 increased.

Think about that for a bit.  If, instead of CO2  leading temperature changes by 200 years, CO2 actually lags temperature change, how can CO2 possibly be causing temps to change, eh?

The logic there should be really clear.  If it's not crystal clear, the Democrat party is definitely right for you.


It's hard to overstate the effect Mann's hockey stick graph had on what the Media quickly began calling the "settled scientific truth" about Global Worming (which, amusingly for a "settled science", was quickly re-named "climate change").  Almost everyone knew the shape of a hockey stick, which made the otherwise confusing graphs easy to understand.

The plot was given star billing in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report, where it appeared four times.  The "hockey stick" plot made Mann a climate super-star.

But the plot drew criticism from its first appearance. In response, Mann tried to suppress all criticism of his bit of stardom, and any discussion that questioned its scientific validity. A rival reconstruction by fellow paleo-climatologist Keith Briffa, for example, derived from tree ring data obtained from northern Canada and Siberia, showed a noticeable decline in temperatures over the latter part of the 20th century – opening up a divergence with the instrumental record.

If tree rings suggested declining temperatures when temperatures were actually rising, then how could climate scientists put any confidence in tree rings as indicators of global temperatures?

Briffa then wrote a paper for a journal called "Science" comparing the two clashing temperature reconstructions.  Then in 2009, emails leaked from Mann's allies in the U.K. show Mann had contacted the editor of Science to try to get the journal not to publish Briffa's paper.  Mann later wrote to one of his co-authors “Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us,”  

There's the true spirit of Science there, eh?  Nah, it's "Don't publish anything I don't like!"

Mann's star status had won him the post of lead author for the chapter of the IPCC Third Report that featured his graphs.  Since Briffa's results directly contradicted Mann's, the latter was determined to discredit Briffa’s paper.

To do this, Mann and his team made another "bad science" move: He explained to colleagues that his team had simply eliminated data from their rival's graph "that could serve as a potential distraction/detraction,” thus hiding the temperature decline shown by Briffa’s data.

Mann also used actual, measured temperature data to make the proxy curves look better, which Mann had done previously in a paper submitted to another scientific journal.

There was a more fundamental problem with the construction of the hockey stick.  Using a portion of Mann’s computer code that converted tree-ring data to an estimated temperature, Canadians Steve McIntyre--a critic with a strong grounding in mathematics, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick found that running Mann's program on random data produced hockey stick shapes 99 percent of the time.  In other words, Mann's computer algorithm was garbage.

Mann included in his proxy data set a series of bristlecone and foxtail pines from the western United States that had been selected by researcher Donald Graybill.  To get the hockey stick from the data, Mann needed Graybill’s tree ring data. Did Mann know what he was doing? Inside his directory of North American proxy data was a folder Mann had labelled "BACK TO_1400-censored," which contained all the North American data except all sixteen of the Graybill series.

When the numbers from the "censored" folder were run--omitting Graybill's 16 pines--the scary blade of the hockey stick vanished.

And as noted earlier, in Mann's graph the Medieval Warm Period had also vanished.

The Medieval Warm Period presented a huge problem to the Global Wormies:  As noted earlier, it suggested that for almost 300 years the northern hemisphere was a stunning one degree C warmer than normal, implying that 700 years before industry and CO2 emissions, the climate warmed and cooled far more than previously thought.

Second, a key premise of the alleged "grave threat" of GW was that once the climate warmed, it wouldn't cool again.  Instead you'd get a kind of "runaway" with the temp getting hotter and hotter.  The MWP showed that "runaway" theory was clearly wrong.

In preparing the U.N's Third Assessment Report, climate scientist John Christy recalled  pushing the report to include the results of a 1998 paper of ice cores from Greenland that clearly showed a 500-year period of warmer temperatures than the present, centered about 900 AD--essentially confirming the MWP.  Those results clearly suggested that Mann's omission of the MWP in his now world-famous hockey stick was incorrect, calling all his conclusions into question.

Because Mann was such a star, the critical Greenland paper wasn't included in the Report.

Mann went further in a 2008 paper that presented a 2,000-year temperature reconstruction. The reconstruction, by Finnish geologist Mia Tiljander, was derived from sediments from a lake in Iceland. But Mann’s reconstruction inverted Tiljanders proxies, so warming became cooling and vice-versa. According to one of Tiljander’s co-authors, the Medieval Warm Period was shown upside-down.

Saarnisto wrote “It has now been turned upside down twice in Science, and I doubt if that can be a mistake.”  He added that Mann and company were “skeptical about this Medieval Warm Period and have tried to hide it to some extent.”

In major court cases experts (and non-experts, for that matter) write "amicus briefs" all the time.  For the defamation trial in DC, climate scientist Judith Curry wrote 39 pages cataloguing the many manipulations of data needed to get the famous hockey-stick shape, and quoted severe criticisms of Mann's analysis.  She concluded that it was reasonable to have referred to the hockey stick in 2012 as “fraudulent” since “aspects of it are deceptive and misleading.”

DC Judge Alfred S. Irving refused to include Curry’s report in the case file, ruling it inadmissible.

Amazing how all the lights seem to turn green for the connected climate "star," eh?  It's almost like the result has been predetermined.

The trial closed with Mann’s attorney making a blatant appeal to jurors’ political prejudices.  He urged them to award huge punitive damages "so that no one will dare engage in climate denialism again.”

Attorney John Hinderaker wrote “In 41 years of trying cases before juries I have never heard such an outrageously improper appeal.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Errors cease to be dangerous when one is permitted freely to contradict them."

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/02/19/the_hockey_stick_trial_science_dies_in_a_dc_courtroom_1012630.html