31 thoughts on “Another Blow To Mann’s Case”

  1. Good for your case. The judge should assign costs to Mann and his lawyers for presenting her as an expert, despite her made-up PhD

  2. The judge ruled on the admissibility of various “experts’ testimony”. All of Mann’s proposed experts were considered to be unrelated to the question of defamation. Steyn, however, had asked for a statistician named Abraham Wyner to present testimony. The judge allowed this expert to partake in the case to be presented to the jury.

    The statements Mann complains about relate to him “torturing data” to produce the “fraudulent” Hockey Stick. (That he was indirectly compared to a child molester / sexual predator was not a matter that has survived the court system.) In roughly 2009 Wyner and a partner statistician published a peer reviewed article in a respected statistical journal arguing that the statistical methods — data selection and analysis both — used in Mann’s work were … not capable of bearing the weight of the importance placed upon the results. This was roughly contemporary with the Climategate email scandal. And the whole thing was widely discussed on Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit blog — which Steyn has admitted (“bragged about”, might be more accurate) following in the three years prior to the publications at issue.

    Steyn doesn’t need to be a climate expert or an expert statistician to show he relied upon secondary media (the blog) in forming the opinions he expressed. So the question becomes whether (a) the reports in the media accurately conveyed the gist of Wyner’s findings and (b) Steyn’s opinions can be reasonably interpreted as derivative of Wyner’s. Wyner is the expert most capable of assessing both. He will be allowed to present for the defense. Mann has no such experts in his corner, as of today’s ruling.

    1. Looks like the judge is simplifying the case by cutting through the BS and forcing both parties to focus on the issue at hand and not get bogged down in things unrelated to the case.

      1. Hmmm — sounds reasonable. Seems that there is now a presiding judge that actually wants to finish this case instead of shuffling paper until the next judge takes over. Hopefully the result is a dismissal with prejudice of the suit.

  3. From the judge’s order

    Dr. Wyner’s opinions regarding the veracity or reliability of Plaintiff’s [Mann’s] work bears directly on Plaintiff’s required showing of falsity, and should be admitted for that purpose.

    McShane and Wyner (2010) in the Annals of Applied Statistics, abstract:

    We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up [ the hockey stick ] in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

  4. Oh we got trouble
    Right here in State College
    That’s Trouble with a capital ‘T’
    And that rhymes with ‘P’
    And that stands for Proof.

  6. Careful what you publicize. Im unsure of the rules, but an ongoing trial may be soured in some legal way by blogging.

  8. NRO hasn’t provided much coverage of this other than asking for money and some tiny updates on their case.

  9. Nine *bleep*ing years! I hope when this rotten nonsense is finally over, you can look back on it, Rand, and think “Yeah, that was worth it!”. Although, by then, the next Ice Age may have started.

    1. If we enter the next Ice Age, you know it will be blamed on the emissions of CO2 from human activity causing Climate Change.

      Because reasons.

      1. But not just any reasons, but those based on the solid scholia from reading and thinking.

    2. Technically, we are still in an ice age because we have ice caps. We live in an interglacial period.

      The last 10,000 years have been the warmest and most stable in at least the last 100,000 years. The small temperature variations we see today are well within natural variation. We could actually exit the ice age or we might stay the same or we might dip back into glaciation. No one really knows. What we do know is that this is the best time to be alive as a human in our long ling history and the climatic swings that come with glaciation were drastic and would likely prevent our way of life from continuing. Warming will alow our continued existence and possibly all life to flourish on Earth.

      1. Technically, we are still in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Cenozoic_Ice_Age
        “The Late Cenozoic Ice Age, or Antarctic Glaciation began 33.9 million years ago at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary and is ongoing.”
        Ice Age or Icehouse global climate.
        And we are certainly not in a Greenhouse global climate.
        And no one has been calling this a Snowball Earth global climate- yet.
        More wiki:
        “The Earth is in an Icehouse state when ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously. Climatic proxies indicate that greenhouse gas concentrations tend to lower when the Earth is in this state. Similarly, global temperatures are also lower under Icehouse conditions. In this climatic state Earth fluctuates between glacial and interglacial periods where the size and distribution of continental ice sheets fluctuate dramatically.”
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
        And
        “Earth is currently in an Icehouse state known as the Quaternary Ice Age that began approximately 2.58 million years ago.”
        {the coldest time period of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age}
        We had a lot of time periods called Ice Ages in last 34 million years. And it’s common to say a glaciation is an Ice Age.
        Not many have mentioned that our interglacial period has been a fairly cool interglacial period and so far with lower sea levels as compared past sea level peaks of other interglacial periods.
        But our total rise of about 7″ in sea levels over last 100 years has prompted many fortune tellers to predict a rather modest rise of 1 or 2 meters sea level rises, “soon”.
        It seems obvious to me, our peak temperature has already past us, about +5000 years ago. Which seems to me, explains why a hundred years ago some were warning we are entering an Ice Age. Or see the peaks in past temperature, and knew were warmer when our Sahara Desert was green, {+5000 years ago} and all the frozen stumps in arctic region which froze +5000 years ago [and are still frozen].
        It seems a hundred years ago, some were hopeful global temperature would increase due to rising CO2 levels and the amount warming we got, would probably have seemed, disappointing.

        1. “It seems obvious to me, our peak temperature has already past us, about +5000 years ago.”

          Could be but who knows? I have no idea what the future holds when it comes to climate. There is only one way to know with any certainty what the future will be like.

    3. Yes, Nine *bleep*ing years where Rand Simberg was to be silenced in the public debate — if not personally then on the “advice of his lawyers” that he not say anything that could be misconstrued in Court.
      IMO, Michael Mann should be fined (or his well financed backers) for this assault on Rand’s First Amendment Rights… but that is just my cranky pre-morning coffee opinion.

      1. Mann’s next motion, to delay trial for the collection of tree ring data of trees grown since the trial started.

  11. I think I should be admitted as an expert witness. Because I obviously keep reading about this on Rand’s blog and thinking about it.

  14. Great news! Hopefully this will wrap up soon with positive results for you and negative for a certain PhD. In a more obscure reference, I was thinking of the character in Foundation who believes he solved the puzzle of humankind’s origin because he read other people’s reports and weighed their opinions. He had no interest in doing actual research himself.

  15. I disagree that anything National Review has contributed to this case has anything to do with “good”.

    The case has dragged on so long it may be forgotten that many media outlets filed “amicus” briefs favoring Simberg and Steyn’s rights to express themselves, even if that expression was unpopular. If any of these groups have had second thoughts and pulled back, I’m unaware.

    Is there a link to the courthouse files for everybody’s filings: Mann’s, CEI, NR, Steyn’s, and amici?

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