Shot in the Dark

From The Archives

Seems like forever ago that Michael Mann published his hockey-stick
graph, Mary Steyn made fun of it in a column for National Review, and
Mann sued for defamation.  The case has lingered for eight years in the
courts, only now entering the ‘discovery’ phase after National Review
was dismissed as a defendant.

Mark Steyn was deposed by Michael Mann’s lawyer.  Steyn uploaded the
transcript here: https://www.steynonline.com/documents/11106.pdf

I suppose reading deposition transcripts isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
but I found it entertaining.  Your mileage may vary.

Joe Doakes

I can’t imagine those lawyers knew what hit them.

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14 responses to “From The Archives”

  1. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Joe, the best lawyering ever came in a climate change lawsuit against Exxon a few years ago.

    Several cities, including San Jose and San George Floyd (formally known as San Francisco) sued Exxon for current and future damages due to Exxon causing climate change.

    They claimed that the seas were and will be washing over their wharfs and sweltering hot temperatures were melting their infrastructure.

    The usual stuff.

    Then a lawyer for Exxon dug up the risk assessments that cities are required to present to the SEC before selling bonds. These assessments inform the potential investors about any risks that might prevent the cities from redeeming the bonds.

    Under climate change, the risk assessments read (I paraphrase): nothing to see here and nothing will be seen here.

    Case closed.

  2. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    If ever there was a case of a “non-scientist” taking down a “speaking from authority scientist”, it was Steve McIntyre unloading on Michael Mann.

    Here is a good jumping off point to Steve’s excellent Climate Audit website.

    McIntyre worked in the statistical field of analyzing how much minerals a potential mine might hold. It is brutal hard-core economics surrounding the questions: if to dig, if so where —exactly and in what shape and how deep?

    If you get it wrong, your consulting business dries up and you might get sued.

    Compare that to Michael Mann’s never-any-consequences job where if he gets rewarded for being spectacularly wrong (in the right direction).

    McIntyre revealed that there were two problems with his hockey stick shaped temperature reconstruction:

    One was with the blade, it pointed the wrong direction (down), not because the world was cooling but because Mann’s own data said it was. Mann merely snipped off the nasty bits from his graph and pasted actual temperatures in their place.

    The other problem was the stick. To flatten the curve, so to speak, Mann relied on dubious data, a single tree in the Yamala peninsula and some dubious statistical methods.

    These things flattened the curve alright, but they also made 20th century temperatures take a nose-dive.

    McIntyre revealed all of this and more.

    The only idiot to outdo Michael Mann by selling Trillion dollar non-solutions to a gullible world is Anthony Fauci.

    But that is a story for another day.

  3. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    I read the entire transcript and found it as entertaining as anything Steyn does.

    He is very articulate, and is clearly intimately familiar with the topic (Global warming fraud). It’s also clear he was toying with the lawyers, and did so fairly well until they got around to discussing the National Review, which Steyn is obviously emotional about. His lawyer should have cautioned him at that point.

    In fact, although as I said, the interrogative was quite entertaining, and I give Steyn high marks for standing by everything he has said and written, it violates the first rules of talking to the police, or a adversarial lawyer: Don’t and Don’t elaborate, respectively.

    Still, this is an instant classic…”I RAN INTO RICH LOWRY A COUPLE OF TIMES IN TELEVISION GREEN ROOMS AND JACK FOWLER AT THE APPELLATE COURT HEARING WHERE I WAS WITH MR. KORNSTEIN, MY COUNSEL AND MY PUBLICIST KATHLEEN MITCHELL AND PHELIM MCALEER AND ANN MCELHINNEY AND A COUPLE OF IRISH FRIENDS WHO MADE A CLIMATE CHANGE FILM AND WE WERE ALL SHOOTING THE BREEZE ABOUT — AS I SAID, MR. KORNSTEIN ONCE REPRESENTED KING MICHAEL OF ROMANIA AND WE WERE HAVING A RATHER ABSTRUSE CONVERSATION ABOUT MINOR BALKAN ROYALTY, I BELIEVE THE PRINCE OF MONTENEGRO CAME INTO IT”

    lol

  4. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Steyn already won a case against Mann in Vancouver, BC a couple years ago because Mann refused(!) to disclose raw data.

  5. golfdoc50 Avatar
    golfdoc50

    Greg was New York involved in the Exxon lawsuit?

  6. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    jpa, not only do these snake oil salesmen refuse to share data, they refuse to disclose the source code of the modeling software they use.

    It’s all bullshit, meant to confuse the low IQ population and scare kids.

  7. Dr. Pete Strunk Avatar
    Dr. Pete Strunk

    Fuck…every other comment is moderated.

  8. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    In a just world, Mann and those with him would be laughed out of any court in the country for refusing to share data, conspiring against their ideological opponents, and mounting nonsense lawsuits like this. They would be mocked for having 75% of climate monitoring stations misplaced near known heat sources, for using anti-causal correlations to make their case, for using the upper bound rather than the mean of predictions, for deliberately hiding adverse evidence, and for “cooking” the numbers after they were taken to make it look like a much clearer correlation than it actually is.

    Well, certainly they are here, but one would hope that even the left would eventually clue in to this.

  9. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    bike, the worst part? Mann does NOT own the data! He worked for NASA at the time. It is US goobernment data. I am absolutely dumbfounded that he is able, obviously with the explicit permission by the US goobernment, to continue to refuse to hand it over.

  10. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Well, obviously, it’s classified information, because of the bad things that would happen if it got out. Like…..people would actually know the gig was up with climatology or something like that.

  11. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Greg was New York involved in the Exxon lawsuit? – golfdoc50

    You bet.

    And the courts handed (gubernatorial heir apparent) New York Attorney General Letitia James her lunch.

    Mann does NOT own the data! He worked for NASA at the time. It is US goobernment data. – justplainangr

    If I am not mistaken, Michael Mann did not work for NASA. You might be thinking of James Hansen or his protégé, Gavin Schmidt, who were employed by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

    Interesting note: Check this out. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is located upstairs from the famous restaurant featured in countless Seinfeld episodes.

  12. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Mann may or may not have been working for NASA, but I’m under the impression that the vast majority of his research funding does come from the taxpayer, and hence even beyond the basic issue of reproducibility in science, you do have the question of “exactly why do those providing the funding not get to see the data?”

  13. Troy Avatar
    Troy

    I thought Mann was a professor at a university in Pennsylvania (so government/government-subsidized is not far off the mark), but hiding data, or even hiding model details, is something that should be Large Red Flags in science.

    But that was just near the beginning. The whole “our models can’t predict the past, much less the future” thing should have sunk them a decade or two ago. But it is a religion now.

  14. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    There is no such thing as an “accurate” climate model. Some models are too hot, some too cold, so what to do?

    Enter the ensemble. Climate prediction are the product of a host of models averaged together.

    So what if we ran an airline that way?

    Customer: I’d like a ticket to Detroit.

    Model Airlines: Excellent, that will be $120. And how will you be taking the remainder of your trip? Train, rental car or Uber?

    Customer: Huh?

    Model Airlines: Obviously you have never flown with us, so let me explain. Half of our Detroit bound flights land in Lansing, others in Toledo, a few in Windsor and a couple in Toledo.

    Customer: WHAT?

    Model Airlines: But the average is Detroit and that is what you are paying for.

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