"Hockeystick" Mann in financial trouble?

 by John O'Sullivan

Massive counterclaims, in excess of $10 million, have just been filed against climate scientist Michael Mann after lawyers affirmed that the former golden boy of global warming alarmism had sensationally failed in his exasperating three-year bid to sue skeptic Canadian climatologist, Tim Ball. Door now wide open for criminal investigation into Climategate conspiracy.Mann arrest photo

Buoyed by Dr Ball's successes, journalist and free-speech defender, Mark Steyn has promptly decided to likewise countersue Michael Mann for $10 million in response to a similar SLAPP suit filed by the litigious professor from Penn. State University against not just Steyn, but also the National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg. Ball's countersuit against Mann seeks "exemplary and punitive damages. " Bishop Hill blog is running extracts of Steyn's counterclaim, plus link.

Mann’s chief undoing in all such lawsuits is highlighted in a quote in Steyn’s latest counterclaim:

“Plaintiff continues to evade the one action that might definitively establish its [his science’s] respectability - by objecting, in the courts of Virginia, British Columbia and elsewhere, to the release of his research in this field. See Cuccinelli vs Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia...”

At last, after 3 years of legal wrangling, it is made clear why I was so bold as to formally undertake an indemnity to fully compensate Dr Ball for my own actions in the event Mann won the case.  Respected Aussie climate commentator, Jo Nova was one of the few to commend my unparalled commitment to Ball's cause.

Steyn’s legal team, aware of the latest developments from Vancouver, have correctly adduced that Ball has effectively defeated Mann after the Penn. State pretender’s preposterous and inactive lawsuit against Ball was rendered dormant for failure to prosecute. Under law, Mann’s prevarications, all his countless fudging and evasiveness in the matter, establishes compelling evidence that his motive was not to prove Ball had defamed him, but more likely a cynical attempt to silence fair and honest public criticism on a pressing and contentious government policy issue.

The fact Mann refused to disclose his ‘hockey stick’ graph metadata in the British Columbia Supreme Court, as he is required to do under Canadian civil rules of procedure, constituted a fatal omission to comply, rendering his lawsuit unwinnable. As such, Dr Ball, by default, has substantiated his now famous assertion that Mann belongs "in the state pen, not Penn. State."  In short, Mann failed to show he did not fake his tree ring proxy data for the past 1,000 years, so Ball’s assessment stands as fair comment. Moreover, many hundreds of papers in the field of paleoclimate temperature reconstructions that cite Mann’s work are likewise tainted, heaping more misery on the discredited UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) which has a knack of relying on such sub prime science.

SOURCE




The myth of ‘settled science’

By Charles Krauthammer

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.

Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.”

How inconvenient. But we’ve been here before. Hurricane Sandy was made the poster child for the alleged increased frequency and strength of “extreme weather events” like hurricanes.

Nonsense. Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it hit the United States. Indeed, in all of 2012, only a single hurricane made U.S. landfall . And 2013 saw the fewest Atlantic hurricanes in 30 years. In fact, in the last half-century, one-third fewer major hurricanes have hit the United States than in the previous half-century.

Similarly tornadoes. Every time one hits, the climate-change commentary begins. Yet last year saw the fewest in a quarter-century. And the last 30 years — of presumed global warming — has seen a 30 percent decrease in extreme tornado activity (F3 and above) versus the previous 30 years.

None of this is dispositive. It doesn’t settle the issue. But that’s the point. It mocks the very notion of settled science, which is nothing but a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate. As does the term “denier” — an echo of Holocaust denial, contemptibly suggesting the malevolent rejection of an established historical truth.

Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads. If you whore after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11).

Sounds like California. Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins — burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.

But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One, but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.”

Ah, settled science in action.

SOURCE





The Sierra Club’s War on Humans

As I point out in my new ebook, The War on Humans, the contemporary environmental movement is not only fast becoming explicitly anti-human in its rhetoric and advocacy memes–humans as a “cancer” on the earth, etc.–but also in its anti-prosperity prescriptions that would make the developed world far less prosperous–and devastate the ability of the developing world to escape its bone-crushing destitution.

Take a new book being promoted by the once sane Sierra Club that advocates cutting the work week in half so that we can all live less prosperous lives. From the promotion of the book Time on Our Side in Sierra magazine:

“There’s no such thing as sustainable growth, not in a country like the U.S.,” Worldwatch senior fellow Erik Assadourian says. “We have to de-grow our economy, which is obviously not a popular stance to take in a culture that celebrates growth in all forms.

But as the saying goes, if everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need four planets.” Whether you move to a smaller house or an apartment, downsize to one or no car, or simply have fewer lattes to-go, a smaller paycheck could reduce consumption overall…

Shorter workweeks could mean more time for psychologically gratifying pursuits such as gardening, reading, or biking.  In other words, we should intentionally become poorer in order to save the planet

Please. Rooting for less prosperity will not lead to people taking the time to smell the roses and write poetry, but to more of us leading increasingly difficult, and even desperate lives.

Indeed, it seems to me that the best cure for a dirty environment is increased prosperity as that gives us the ability to live more gently on the land and the resources to develop ever-more environmentally friendly methods of generating energy, traveling, heating and cooling our homes, etc..

Think about it: We despoiled the environment when we were poor, and have made remarkable progress in remediating past messes and making fewer new ones after becoming wealthy. The poorest nations today also tend to have the greatest problems with pollution. See China.

If you like today’s economy and want more of the kind of “fun” we have had for the last five years, just follow the green misanthropes.

SOURCE




Tokyo Pounded with Historic Snowfall as Globally Fierce Winter Continues

Tokyo received 10 inches of snow Saturday morning, the largest amount of snowfall the city has seen since the global cooling scare of the early 1970s. According to Japanese media reports, the snowstorm caused     12 deaths and more than 1,500 injuries. The historic snowfall debunks global warming activists’ assertions that this year’s unusually fierce winter is merely a North American phenomenon.

Global temperature measurements show there has been no warming at all this century, refuting alarmist assertions that the planet continues to rapidly warm despite the bitterly cold North American winter. Moreover, heavy snow events and record snow cover dispute frequent alarmist assertions that global warming is causing an end to snow.

While human emissions of carbon dioxide may be assisting the natural warming that pulled the planet out of the Little Ice Age a little over a century ago, the warming continues to be gradual and modest. A warming of 1 degree Fahrenheit is not going to put an end to winter or snowfall.

To the extent that global warming may moderate winter extreme cold and snow events in the future, this would benefit rather than harm human health and welfare. Mortality statistics for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations show cold weather and a colder climate kill far more people than heat.

These facts are inconvenient for global warming alarmists, but a welcome dose of scientific truth for the rest of us.

Tokyo received 10 inches of snow Saturday morning, the largest amount of snowfall the city has seen since the global cooling scare of the early 1970s. According to Japanese media reports, the snowstorm caused     12 deaths and more than 1,500 injuries. The historic snowfall debunks global warming activists’ assertions that this year’s unusually fierce winter is merely a North American phenomenon.

Global temperature measurements show there has been no warming at all this century, refuting alarmist assertions that the planet continues to rapidly warm despite the bitterly cold North American winter. Moreover, heavy snow events and record snow cover dispute frequent alarmist assertions that global warming is causing an end to snow.

While human emissions of carbon dioxide may be assisting the natural warming that pulled the planet out of the Little Ice Age a little over a century ago, the warming continues to be gradual and modest. A warming of 1 degree Fahrenheit is not going to put an end to winter or snowfall.

To the extent that global warming may moderate winter extreme cold and snow events in the future, this would benefit rather than harm human health and welfare. Mortality statistics for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations show cold weather and a colder climate kill far more people than heat.

These facts are inconvenient for global warming alarmists, but a welcome dose of scientific truth for the rest of us.

SOURCE





Irish logic

It's pretty plain he is omitting a lot from his calculations  -- like the large capital cost of putting up the turbines and the cost of running backup systems

Wind power has saved Ireland more than €1 billion in imported energy costs, cut greenhouse gas emissions and has not added to customers’ energy bills, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland has said.

“The evidence today is that renewable energy is working for Ireland and is bringing significant environmental and economic benefits,” said Brian Motherway, the authority’s chief executive, ahead of the publication of the renewable energy report for 2014 yesterday.

Ireland’s wind profile provided a plentiful renewable resource which also had great potential for export, he said. “More than €1 billion has stayed in the Irish economy which would otherwise have left to import fossil fuels from other countries.”

He said renewable energy sources were being tapped “in a way which did not add to consumer prices”.

Dr Motherway added: “Wind [power], if anything lowers prices when gas prices are high. Wind is a uniquely rich resource, it’s plentiful and it’s cheap and we should continue to exploit it.”

Asked if more and more turbines would scar the countryside, he said: “There are places we shouldn’t put turbines and other places which are perfectly acceptable. There are remote places and depleted bogs which people are looking at. We should remember that there are a couple of hundred wind farms out there already which are side by side with communities in harmony. We hear about the bad cases but we don’t hear about the good cases.”

SOURCE





Could Met Office have been more wrong? Just before floods, report told councils: Winter will be 'drier than normal' - especially in West Country!

The warmists of the Met office are a good example of the truism that if your theories are wrong, your predictions will be wrong

The Met Office’s ‘pitiful’ forecasts were under fire last night after it was revealed it told councils in November to expect ‘drier than usual’ conditions this winter.

In the worst weather prediction since Michael Fish reassured the nation in October 1987 that there was no hurricane on the way, forecasters said the Somerset Levels – still under water after more than two months of flooding – and the rest of the West Country would be especially dry.

Last night, it was confirmed the UK had instead suffered the wettest winter since records began.

The three-month forecast, which a Met Office spokesman conceded was ‘experimental to some extent’, was given to councils, the Environment Agency and other contingency planners to tell them what they could expect from December to the end of this month.

It was for the whole of the UK – not specific regions – but suggested only the east and south east might see average rainfall.

The forecasters – using ‘cutting-edge science’ – assured councils there would be a ‘significant reduction in precipitation compared to average’ for most of the country, adding that there was only a 15 per cent chance the winter would fall into the ‘wettest category’.

It will have been of little assistance to the many local authorities facing some of the most severe flooding Britain has seen in decades.

Swathes of the country are still underwater, the Army is still helping to pump out deluged homes and thousands of people have nowhere to live.

Last night it was confirmed that the past 90 days have seen the heaviest rainfall in more than a century.

The Met Office said the UK had been drenched in 19.2in of rain since December, making it the wettest winter since records began in 1910.

It had, it said, been exceptionally wet in the South West, South East, central Southern England and across Wales.

MPs and environmental planners yesterday said the long-term forecast had been a ‘mistake which could have cost Britain dearly’ and questioned whether the forecasting methods were fit for purpose.

Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris said: ‘The Met Office is very good at predicting the weather it can see is coming; but beyond that, its track record is pitiful.

‘Many government agencies and some government policies are dependent on these Met Office predictions and so these mistakes potentially are costing us dearly.’

Environmental planner Martin Parr said of the forecast: ‘It was a load of poppycock. I don’t know how they could have produced it and circulated it to emergency planners.

There was no way that was going to be the case.

‘It was known in November there were changes in the jet stream coming through. It was speeding up, there was more oscillation, that means strong winds were going to be prevalent, and it was going to be a wet winter.

The Met Office stopped publishing its long-range forecasts for the public to see in 2010, after its disastrous prediction of a ‘barbeque summer’ in 2009 – which ended in washouts throughout July and August.

The three-month forecasts are now sent only to contingency planners, such as councils,  government departments, and insurance companies.

The 90-day forecast was issued at the end of November, and makes clear planners should also consult the forecasts released 30 and 15 days ahead which are more accurate.

Using the Met Office’s super-computer, which can perform 100trillion calculations a second, experts in November predicted there would be high-pressure weather systems across Britain ‘with a slight signal for below average precipitation’.

But heavy rains began in December and the Somerset Levels has since seen some of its worst flooding ever, with hundreds of properties and farms affected.

Last month the flooding spread to the Thames Valley and official figures suggest 6,500 properties have been affected. Insurance companies fear the total bill could reach £1billion.

A spokesman for the Met Office said: ‘Our short and medium-term forecasts are the ones relied on by emergency responders to help them manage the impacts of severe weather.

'The Met Office’s five-day forecasts and severe weather warnings have provided excellent guidance throughout this period of exceptionally stormy and wet weather.’

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************