Friday, February 09, 2024

Defamation Suit for Torturing Data

A couple of opinion columnists badmouthed some climate sciente research, and 12 years later a jury found defamation.

Axos Science reports:

"Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data," wrote Simberg in reference to the former Penn State football coach who was convicted of child sexual abuse the same year the Competitive Enterprise Institute published his blog.

Steyn referred to Simberg's post in a National Review article, writing, "Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change "hockeystick" graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus."

What they found: The jury unanimously found both writers guilty of defaming Mann with "multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer," per the New York Times.

It also determined that the writers' statements were written "maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm," and added punitive damages of $1 million against Steyn and $1,000 against Simberg, according to the NYT.

As I understand it, the technical issue was whether it was proper for Mann to combined dissimilar data into one graph. Hann used tree dinv data to infer ancient termperatures, and got the blade of the hockey stick from modern direct temperature measurements.

This case is ridiculous. Mann is a Penn State professor, but he had nothing to do with the Penn State personel who were framed for child abuse. Whether he represented tree ring data properly is a matter of opinion.

Climate science can have a big effect on public policy, and we should all be free to criticize it.

Reuters reports:

The European Union's executive has started to compile guidelines for Big Tech platforms to prevent disinformation, hate speech and counterfeits from disrupting the process of democratic elections.

Over a third of the world's population will go to the polls this year at a time when the power and influence of tech giants is under growing scrutiny.

They will allow misinformation if it favors the approved positions on global warming, vaccines, migration, etc, but not otherwise.

They will approve arguments that Trump should not be on the ballot, but not similar arguments against Biden, Harris, or Haley.

1 comment:

CFT said...

Michael Mann is a fraud. He claimed he could not produce his data when required to do so, nor would he disclose his methodology for how he created his infamous hockey stick climate prediction.

Mann was funded by the state, and his work on his precious hockey stick also fell under the requirements of disclosure. The fact that his own emails were leaked from someone inside his own department revealing that Mann was intentionally hiding his work from outside scrutiny and being difficult in even conveying exactly how his 'trick' (his words) to hide certain declines in temperature data to produce the famous hockey stick graph. Mr. Mann basically removed the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) from the climate record entirely in order to produce his graph, if these two periods had been included, his graph would have been different.

Mark Steyn claiming Mann 'molested and tortured' his data is actually quite euphemistically correct and anatomically impossible, meaning it would be impossible for any sane person to think he was anything more than sarcastically accusing Mann of anything except fraudulent behavior concerning how he was producing his results.

To this day Mann has still not produced his data or his methods, meaning his hockey stick graph responsible for channeling billions of dollars into climate alarmism studies of is not science, ya gotta be able to reproduce it or NOPE.

In addition, Arborists the world over are still wanting to know how exactly Mann was able to produce temperature records to the fraction of a degree by proxy just by looking at tree rings from cherry picked samples on one hillside in Russia, as no one else in the world is aware how this is even remotely possible.