I am currently listening to a daily podcast called Climate Change on Trial, hosted by two Irish film makers, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They are covering the defense of the lawsuit filed in 2012 by Michael Mann against pundit Mark Steyn and blogger Rand Simberg. There are ten episodes available so far, and guess who has listened to all of them? I am rapt, even as so far it is been Mann and company making their case and being cross examined. Real fun is in store, more to follow the very first defense witness, prominent statistician, Abraham J. Wyner of the Wharton School.
Climate Change on Trial is all available at Apple Podcasts, and a new episode will be dropped the day after each trial day.
Wyner comes off as a classic nerd who loves his work. Part of his work in statistics is about sports, and I think his podcast, which I have not located yet, draws a large audience because he gets beyond the dull science. Anyway, Wyner testified that Mann’s hockey stick work was “manipulative,” meaning that many outcomes were possible by torturing that data, but that Mann had an apparent predetermined objective, featured prominently by Al Gore and now the cause of trillions of wasted dollars in search of net zero, the hockey stick. Talk about being juiced.
What has come out of the trial so far is fascinating. Even though Mann and his legal team have had twelve years to prepare, they’ve been unable to establish damages or malice caused by Steyn and Simberg. Their presentation even seems sloppy at times … Mann’s lawyer Williams presented a witness, University of St. Thomas School of Engineering John Abraham, who stumbled into stating that Mann had been damaged by the Climategate emails, and not by the writings of Steyn and Simberg. That’s a big time goof showing lack of witness preparation. It opens the floor to follow that subject.
We also learned by his own testimony that Mann has never paid a penny in legal fees for his lawsuits. He sued the late Dr. Tim Ball, a Canadian, and Ball’s legal fees drove him into penury, or the state of being broke, on his death. Ball won that contest, and the judge ordered Mann to pay all legal costs, including Ball’s. Mann simply walked away from it, as a Canadian judge’s ruling is not enforceable in the U.S. Mann often comes off as a sociopath.
But think of it – he pays none of the legal fees he runs up while trying to bankrupt the likes of Ball, Steyn and Simberg. That must be his objective! This also explains the lousy case he has put together in the current trial – he does not care about the issue, libel, slander, anything like that. He only wants to harm people. And, he’s got no skin in the game!
Mann accused (real) climate scientist Judith Curry of sleeping her way to her PhD while at Penn State. Curry had already attained her PhD before accepting employment at Penn State, and was dating a professor who had been divorced for one year. Mann thought she was a mere candidate sleeping with her professor. That is obvious slander worthy of a lawsuit.
Where is Mann getting his money? He did not say, but there is an outfit that might be the people picking up his tab, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. When asked about its funding, Mann witness Abraham, one of the founders, pretended not to know of its tax status (501-C3), or being legally allowed to collect tax deductible donations. That seemed odd to me at the time, but I suspect after some reflection that Abraham did not want to get into who the donors are for CSLDF. 501-C3s are usually an open book, and by going there or looking over their 990 (tax form filed by all 501-C3s) we might at last find who is bankrolling Mann. I intend to do so.
Anyway, about the trial, the prosecution has rested, and not made much of a case. The defense, which will include true climate scientists like Richard Linzden, struck a heavy blow yesterday with Wyner above. Mann should go down in flames, but with the Climate Change Alarmism group, we can never know. They are, after all, juiced. This trial only happened because Steyn and Simberg refused to capitulate, and insisted that Mann follow through with his suit. Steyn, having suffered three heart attacks in recent years and months, is by his own admission on his last legs. I suspect he wants to take down the odious Mann as a parting gift to the climate skeptics among us.
Piece of Mindful 
A con man that I was friends with before I realized what a snake he was entered into a long-term contractual deal with my sister and her husband. They made monthly payments to him, which he was supposed to transfer to a third party.They held up their end of the contract and made the agreed-upon payments for years. He pocketed about ten thousand bucks of it and, when their business arrangement was coming to an end, claimed he had no idea what had happened to the money. He magnanimously offered to cover half of the shortage if they covered the other half. My sister and brother-in-law foolishly hired lawyers, and the con man gleefully inundated them with long, rambling emails and phone calls pretending to be just as confused about the missing money as anyone while raising all kinds of legal questions that he knew would keep the lawyers busy, busy, busy until my sister was broke, broke, broke. I read some of those emails and could tell he was having a ball. My sister dropped the lawsuit after wasting a lot of money and gave the sociopath exactly what he wanted because they had no choice.
Mann has nothing to lose and plenty to gain with this lawsuit even if he loses. Regardless of what happens, it won’t cost him anything, the media will spin it to make him look like a victim of right-wing-lunatic climate deniers, and the people he’s suing will gain nothing at best, lose a lot at worst. I can understand wanting to take down a slimeball like Mann, but the court system is designed to protect folks like him, not punish them. Everything about this lawsuit seems depressingly hopeless and pointless. Am I being to cynical?
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It appears from uncovered emails that Mann was not after Steyn or Simberg, but rather wanted to take down National Review. For reasons I have not looked into, NR and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were removed from the original suit.
This is a paid hitman. zhe will not be harmed by the outcome of this lawsuit. I will enjoy him having gastrointestinal issues in his seat as real climate scientists take him apart in the defense portion. His job is not an easy one, to pretend to be a scientist when he is a hack.
I subscribed to National Review for maybe 20 years in the Bill Buckley days, and tried again a few years ago but had moved on too far. I still have good feelings about the Buckley days, even as he was a Sun Oil brat.
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See, I have reached a stage of cynicism where I don’t imagine Mann will be having gastrointestinal issues in his seat. I am reminded of how Congress will occasionally hold hearings so that they can performatively rake the CEOs of various industries over the coals for doing things the public is outraged about. We watch these hearings on C-SPAN and like to imagine the CEOs are mortified or when confronted by their bad deeds on television for all the world to see. We think they are getting some kind of come-uppance. But that’s because we’re projecting how we imagine we would feel if our lies and bad behavior were splashed all over the news. It’s apples and oranges though, since most of us feel guilt and shame about our bad behavior that Mann and Zuckerburg and whoever the Goldman Sachs CEO is have absolutely no reason to feel. Hearings and lawsuits and the appearance of being publicly shamed are part of the job. Mann knows his hockey stick schtick is bullshit, he knows that powerful people have his back, and he knows he can’t lose performative battles like this even if the judge rules against him because it’s all for show. If he ever appears to be having gastrointestinal issues in his seat, I would assume he was acting, and if he was really convincing about it, I would assume he worked on it with an acting coach. But I realize I’m being a wet blanket and could certainly be wrong.
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You could well have summed it up best.
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Sounds odd just at face value.. if someone wants to drop their lawsuit, you can “insist” they go through with it? I would’ve thought you had to countersue or something.
But anyway.. is this one being held in a jurisdiction where Mann can just walk away from the judgment if he loses again? And really, shouldn’t there be some safeguard against that sort of thing? What’s the point of trying a case in the first place, in a venue that doesn’t have legal power to enforce its ruling on both parties? Aside from symbolic gestures.
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Mann chose the DC venue for various reasons, maybe having to do with SLAPP (DC not being a SLAPP venue?), maybe because DC is notoriously backed up and slow, allowing him to do his delaying game*. I do not think attorney fees are an issue. Each pays their own.
Regarding removal or National Review and Competitive Enterprise Institute, I’ve got to look into it.
*It is apparent in listening to the prosecution proceedings that Mann’s side has done no work on the case in twelve years.
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I found this interesting.. a believer in man-made climate change, who is only critical of the proposed path to transition.
The upshot is, in his view, energy saving technology – primarily heat pumps – would make it possible for “green, sustainable” tech to supply 80% of current/ projected energy needs over the next couple of decades.
I have no ability to assess his charts or claims, though they look plausible. Just find it an interesting angle – that perhaps even if one accepted the climate narrative, the plans for addressing it are all wrongheaded and illogical.
Possibly his heat pump claims are correct but he’s overly optimistic about the solar, wind power, etc – Ab at fakeologist is persuasive when he talks about the shortcomings of that tech.
Also too, I heard my uncle has a heat pump and it has some ongoing issue that makes it a hassle to operate.
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The move to heat pumps is, like all of the climate alarmist solutions to a problem that does not exist, foolish, as if the technology does not work outside of the scrawls of supposed gurus on paper napkins, then they will do severe damage to our ability to sustain our current lifestyles. The alarmists love to portray how we live as gluttons and have falsely decided that CO2 is an evil byproduct of living a clean and prosperous life. I think these are wildly misinformed people or misanthropes who either by sheer ineptitude and aggressive stupidity or mere evil intent are out to inflict massive harm on humanity.
We have massive stores of coal, oil and natural gas that will see well us in perpetuity. If those resources are to be replaced, it needs to be done using the principle of conservatism … first, do no harm. Shifting to wind and solar is a fool’s errand, as neither technology is reliable and both are harmful to the environment that their proponents claim to love. Further making that switchover ludicrous, presuming that CO2 emissions are dangerous (an unproven claim reinforced by brute propaganda backed by crap science), both wind and solar demand more CO2 to manufacture the hardware than is replaced thereafter.
It is tulip mania writ large. Gurus like Bill Gates, who supposedly read all those books (I assure you he did not), are little men behind the green curtain who others follow due to inability to think on their own. Gates knows this, knows he is a sock puppet for charlatans, and like the supposed “97% consensus” among scientists, is merely a way of assuring people that their inability to think and research for themselves will be rewarded by reliance on “experts.” As I like to say about Gates, knowing he was put in place by DARPA and is no more than an Asperger’s poster child than any kind of genius, he has never written a line of computer code. His fortune is nothing more than a government reserve of gains produced by the same technologies that gave us Apple and Google, government-backed research that produced real advances in technology that was then handed over to supposed “geniuses” like Gates and Jobs, false fronts for the true nature of our engine of advancement, highly risky government research that the private sector won’t, can’t afford to touch. That’s how the world works.
Everything we know is wrong.
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Can’t argue with any of that, it’s got to be a giant con, any way you look at it… Of course, dragging many millions of dupes and true believers along in tow. But I hadn’t heard these claims for huge energy savings from heat pumps. Which, according to that writer, are mostly ignored by the climate fear monger establishment, perhaps because it’s inconvenient to them somehow. For one thing, if they really work, it would change the (false) urgency of their projections, since it would mean much less “fossil fuels” are needed. Current or growing demand could be handled with less emissions.
I just find it interesting as another possible crack in their narrative, an inconvenient fact (if heat pumps are energy savers.)
I find his charts breaking down US energy use interesting too, but would not be surprised if he is missing the true picture of “green” energy use and output.
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Its just one of those things I need to look at further before I shoot off my mouth. I have in my mind of vague recollections that heat pumps in England, where it is all a foreshadowing of our future, do not work in extreme cold. One other thing, This Old House, that PBS series about building and remodeling and cutting edge stuff, was pushing heat pumps in recent years before I lost access, refusing to pay money to PBS for their stuff, you know. And, this is part of being 73, being in the oil and gas business, that the technology was being pushed hard in the 1990s, but never took off. Something to do with not working well enough to replace a nice warmth produced by a natural gas air flow. Very hard to replace something that works easily with something that does not, and at that time (the 90s) based on the false premise that we were running out of fossil fuels. It was that false premise that gave rise to the technology.
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I see, interesting. I haven’t looked into it much either but I would not be surprised if your sense of it is right. Like I said, my uncle in South Carolina or thereabouts has some ongoing issue with it I’ll have to ask about.
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