Watch the Ongoing Mann-Steyn Trial Live

Live link – you need to register to view.
This link for the Mann trial works every day of the trial, so bookmark it if you want to follow along every day.
Stream is live here:

https://dccourts.webex.com/webappng/sites/dccourts/dashboard/pmr/ctb518

Update:

Courtroom 132
https://dccourts.webex.com/webappng/sites/dccourts/dashboard/pmr/ctb132
Meeting number/passcode: 2343 119 3793

To see Mark Steyn’s POWERFUL opening statement, read this: https://www.steynonline.com/14039/opening-statement

My favorite part:

This case is about corruption, terrible, appalling corruption at the heart of a famous institution, Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Mann was the beneficiary of that corruption, as was Jerry Sandusky, as were others.


Addendum 1/20/24

Daily coverage here.

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January 18, 2024 10:13 am

All the best for Mark Steyn.

Bryan A
Reply to  Petit-Barde
January 19, 2024 3:03 pm

For those without webex, here’s a link to Heartlands Stream

Reply to  Bryan A
January 19, 2024 5:38 pm

Brilliant. Thanks for that.
Is it just me or does Anthony remind anyone else of Walter Matthau, at least a little bit?

daNorse
Reply to  Richard Page
January 19, 2024 6:29 pm

?

morfu03
Reply to  Bryan A
January 20, 2024 9:50 am

I just learned that Rand Simberg’s lawyer quoted Wyner in the opening statement from this video.. thank you for putting this up!
It makes me happy that they really seem on top of things! McShane and Wyner´s work was a bit later than Wegman or McIntyre, yet I find exceptionally clear and convincing! (big fan! 🙂 )

morfu03
Reply to  morfu03
January 20, 2024 11:30 am

And for Sterling Burnett´s question about selecting tree proxies, my favorite McShane and Wyner quote:
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]
“””

Mike Dombroski
January 18, 2024 11:07 am

Just watched Rand Simberg’s lawyer’s opening statement. Wow, she’s good! IMO she could win the case on her own just by overshadowing John Williams (Mann’s lawyer). She’s set a high bar for Steyn.

commieBob
Reply to  Mike Dombroski
January 19, 2024 10:05 am

For years I followed SCO vs the world on groklaw.org. IBM’s lawyers were always amazing and SCO’s lawyers always looked crappy. However, SCO managed to spin the case out over an obscene number of years. In the end, the good guys won but, in the mean time lots of damage was done to the good guys.

Bottom line … you can’t tell the outcome of a court case by how good the lawyers sound.

old cocky
Reply to  commieBob
January 19, 2024 1:16 pm

SCO was The Santa Cruz Operation. After SCO sold the right to act as Novell’s agent for UNIX to Caldera, SCO was renamed Tarantella, and Caldera renamed itself The SCO group.
</pedantry>

Sun Microsystems later bought Tarantella.

SCO was actually quite an honest company, unlike the scum which tried to derail Linux.

KevinM
Reply to  Mike Dombroski
January 20, 2024 11:38 am

Brilliant lady doomed to media invisibility for the crime of speaking for the opposition.

Kalya
Reply to  Mike Dombroski
January 23, 2024 8:28 pm

Having a good lawyer is good. Having a good judge is even better…

carol gebert
January 18, 2024 12:26 pm

I felt like applauding at the end. A very entertaining statement.

January 18, 2024 1:28 pm

The best part of trials like this is that we’ll get all kinds of juicy details that will ‘defame’ Mann much more than any comments Steyn or Simberg ever made about him, even if Mann somehow ends up with a pyrrhic victory.
Liars and frauds don’t tend to do too well in courts of law.

Reply to  Tommy2b
January 18, 2024 2:25 pm

Is the trial a jury trial? In my limited experience – thank God – it is hard to disprove a facile liar in a jury trial. In our case, the judge understood, but the jury did not.

Reply to  bernie1815
January 18, 2024 2:37 pm

I think this DC Superior court is without a jury , as the defendants won the application for Summary Judgement

Mike Dombroski
Reply to  Duker
January 18, 2024 2:44 pm

It’s absolutely a jury trial.

Willy
Reply to  bernie1815
January 18, 2024 2:50 pm

Jury.

Simon
Reply to  Tommy2b
January 19, 2024 11:13 am

Liars and frauds don’t tend to do too well in courts of law.”
True, which is why lately a certain x-president is doing so badly every time he sets foot inside a court room….

Mr.
Reply to  Simon
January 19, 2024 11:19 am

He really is living rent free in your head.

Reply to  Mr.
January 20, 2024 5:19 pm

He really is living rent free in your head.”

There is no-one else occupying it.

Reply to  bnice2000
January 23, 2024 9:33 pm

There is nothng else occupying his head

Bryan A
Reply to  Simon
January 19, 2024 2:47 pm

It’s not nearly as bad as your preferred liberal media outlets proffer to weak minded sheeple. In fact, Trump is leading in polls in far greater number than even comrade Xo Baiden can muster. Baiden is proving himself to be the Gray Davis of presidents.

Reply to  Simon
January 19, 2024 6:55 pm

Still have that Rachel Madcow poster on the ceiling in your bedroom?

“Russia! Russia! Russia!”

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 20, 2024 1:45 pm

As usual, Simon sees a world undetectable by anyone else.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 20, 2024 2:27 pm

Are you telling me Trump is not losing in his effort in court? Haha. Shall I list his recent loses?

Reply to  Simon
January 20, 2024 3:17 pm

Are you really this dumb?

MarkW
Reply to  karlomonte
January 20, 2024 5:00 pm

Was that rhetorical?

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 26, 2024 2:07 pm

Haha… just out. Another loss for the big guy……Trump has to pay 136 million for another loss in court. Brilliant. The man who is such a winner just endorsed my initial point here, which was, I was supporting the statement by Tommy2b that “Liars and frauds don’t tend to do too well in courts of law.” Seems we are both right.

Simon
Reply to  Simon
January 26, 2024 2:09 pm

Correction that is only 83 million US. Oh well he’s got plenty. Now will he learn and STFU? My guess is no.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 9:33 am

Look in the mirror

Simon
Reply to  Andy Pattullo
January 27, 2024 10:01 am

Nope… nope… I’m not in court. I didn’t sexually abuse anyone and I didn’t defame anyone. Other than that …. bingo!!!!!

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 11:54 am

Neither did Pres. Trump, you idiot. The “victim” is insane, and NYC/NYS changed their law so she could sue way past the statute of limitations. She’s a liar, just like you.

The “judge” then proceeded to bar Trump from presenting a defense, even telling his attorney what questions she was permitted to ask, and what answers Trump was permitted to give.

Slimon is remains the totalitarian marxist, an enemy of freedom.

ACHTUNG!

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:18 am

A woman who claims that Trump defamed her when Trump denied her claims that he had assaulted her 30 years earlier.
A law passed last year to allow law suits in specially tailored situations long after the statute of limitations had expired.
The defendant’s story has so many holes in it that it makes swiss cheese look substantial.
A far left judge who blatantly ignored the law during the trial.

And this is the case that poor Simon wants to hold up as an example of excellence in jurispudence.

As usual, Simon’s hatred towards anyone who disagrees with the party line means totally blinds him to reality.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 26, 2024 7:49 pm

The decision was decided before the jury was even seated.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 26, 2024 8:44 pm

Yes it was. The jury were there to determine the amount. Are you really that slow?

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 26, 2024 10:52 pm

Are you really that eager to make a fool of yourself again? Maybe if you repeated grade school one more time, you will finally be able to figure out this reading comprehension thingy.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 27, 2024 10:02 am

Really? That’s the best you got?

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:19 am

It’s all I need.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 27, 2024 10:04 am

And….I hope Trump got his pocket money this week, coz he is now off to hear how his tax evasion went for him. He just keeps winning.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 11:48 am

This obscenity of “justice” will be dead on appeal.

You are a liar.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 12:11 pm

Nope, it wont. You know why… because it is holding a crook to account. You don’t see it, I get that, but that says more about you than the justice system. And the good news KM, is there are a shit load more trials to come. It’s not his money we want now… it is his arse in jail.

Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 9:26 am

It isn’t quite yet but it will be holding a crook to account, along with an awful lot of corrupt officials – the clock is ticking down for Biden and his organisation.

Simon
Reply to  Richard Page
January 28, 2024 5:26 pm

Well they better hurry. Biden will be dead before they get him. But please so I can be clear. Is he a crafty plotting criminal who is so clever the republicans are struggling to lay a finger on him. Or, is he a demented old fool slobbering in the corner? I mean if we spin that round Trump has 80 something indictments waiting for him (and you think he is very clever) Biden has … well… none and you think he is a silly old fool.

Reply to  Simon
January 30, 2024 8:54 am

Read what I said again. You obviously didn’t understand it the first time if you even bothered to read all of it.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:22 am

Fascinating how Simon actually believes that the purpose of the law is to punish those that Simon doesn’t like.
Who cares whether Trump is guilty of this charge. Simon hates him, so he’s guilty.

Reply to  MarkW
January 28, 2024 10:18 am

Yep. CNN told him so.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 28, 2024 5:31 pm

I believe the purpose of the law is to bring those who break it to justice. For the sake of those affected and those who may well try to break the said law in the future.
Who cares whether Trump is guilty of this charge.”
Nope I care. On this one I think he has been a bit unlucky. But remember the money is for what he said about the woman, not what he did. And he really doesn’t help himself sometimes. Bragging about grabbing women’s genitals didn’t help his case.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 29, 2024 8:17 am

That used to be the purpose of the law. Now that leftists are taking over, the US is becoming much like other socialist paradises. The purpose of the law is to punish anyone who disagrees with the party.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 4:25 pm

Like all good little marxists, the ends justify any means for Slimon.

And who are “we”?

Creep.

MarkW
Reply to  karlomonte
January 28, 2024 7:23 am

We is everyone who blindly follows the party line, like Simon.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 3:03 pm

Another case that should never have been brought. The DA invented a brand new interpretation of a a regulation that has been in existence for years, and then tried Trump for not following the new interpretation.

The case was rigged from the beginning.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 27, 2024 3:33 pm

I sometimes wonder what color the sky is on the planet of MarkW. If that were true it would have been raised by those wishing to help Dementia Don. But it wasn’t because it is not. Question for you Mark. When you read these things on Planet Mark, do you google them to verify the truth and or reasonableness of the claims? If not, can I suggest you try doing it. It will save you a lot of heart ache when the world doesn’t spin the way Fox news says it will.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:24 am

One constant with Simon is that he can’t present a logical argument, nor can he be bothered actually refuting the arguments of others.

He actually believes that those he hates must be guilty and anything done against them is by definition, legitimate.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 4:39 pm

I give you the victim in this obscenity, Slimon, who is as insane as you (no wonder you identify with her, she’s a liar much like yourself):

Most of these were deemed “inadmissible” by the corrupt judge:

*She couldn’t recall the date, month, season, or year the incident happened

*She never told anyone about it, despite being publicly obsessed with her own sexuality

*The dress she claims to have been wearing didn’t exist at the time

*Her description of the dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman was inaccurate, making her sequence of events impossible

*Her lawsuit was bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein pal and Democrat (and Nikki Haley) mega-donor Reid Hoffman

*Democrats created a law (The Adult Survivors Act in 2022) to enable her lawsuit to proceed

*Her accusation is the exact plotline of an episode of Law & Order (one of her “favorite shows”) Trump’s Apprentice was also one of her favorite shows

*She has a history of falsely accusing men of rape, including Les Moonves

*She told Anderson Cooper, “most people think of rape as being sexy. Think of the fantasies.”

*She made a career promoting promiscuity, even writing glowingly of sexual assault and naming her cat Vagina

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 5:52 pm

Haha. Brilliant. Did you get that off your “bat shit crazy” racist Gatewaypundit?
But….while some of it might be true, I’d wager most of it twisted half truths. Either way, does it matter, the end result is she won…. and Dementia Trump lost. A common thread of late wouldn’t you say (you would if you were being honest). And I’d wager it is going to get more common. Next week show is….tax evasion.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:25 am

And once again, Simon has no argument, just mass overflowings of hatred towards those who fail to follow the party line.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 5:56 pm

And I just want to be sure…. was it the real Nikki Haley or the Nancy Pelosi version?

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 6:01 pm

And just a little digging shows you are completely wrong on the “she told no one” point. Enjoy….
https://www.reuters.com/legal/e-jean-carroll-called-minutes-after-trump-allegedly-raped-her-friend-testifies-2023-05-02/

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 6:25 pm

You’re drooling on the screen, go watch some more Joe Bribeme vids.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 8:21 pm

So I’m guessing no intelligent comeback means…. you have no answer to the article that says you are a liar.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 9:18 pm

Go ahead and believe any nonsense that floats your ego, creepo.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 4:25 pm

Slimon’s brain has been irreparably damaged by exposure to MSLSD.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 5:44 pm

Better than suffering from “Covfefe.”

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 7:20 am

And once again, SImon reveals that the purpose of the law is to punish those who disagree with the party line.

A disagreement in how a decades old regulation is to be interpreted. Trump’s accountants used the standard definition. The DA uses a brand new interpretation.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 11:42 am

Clown—that insane judge should be disbarred PDQ, would you like to be on the receiving end of what passes for “justice” in NYC?

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 1:20 pm

Except it wasn’t the judge who came up with the number….. it was a jury. So Trump can’t blame Biden, he can’t blame the Dems, he has to blame the jury…. oh and himself, but there is no chance of that.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 4:28 pm

A NEW YORK CITY jury, you idiot. About as impartial as a swamp D.C. jury.

And I’m absolutely certain the judge constructed the jury instructions (read up of them, fool) in such a way they had little choice.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 28, 2024 3:14 pm

And I’m absolutely certain the judge constructed the jury instructions”
And the evidence you found that made you absolutely certain was??????? I am going to take a stab in the dark and say it was a hunch that made you absolutely certain.

Reply to  Simon
January 28, 2024 4:05 pm

Fart-Breath returns, demanding attention.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 20, 2024 5:00 pm

The Georgia case is about to be tossed because of mis-condunct by the prosecutor.

Reply to  MarkW
January 25, 2024 8:12 am

There’s a hearing scheduled for 15th Feb where the judge will look into her misconduct; chances are, if its upheld, she’ll be removed from the case entirely.

MarkW
Reply to  Richard Page
January 25, 2024 9:21 am

Given the well documented grand jury misconduct, even the indictment needs to be tossed and the whole case restarted from scratch.

Given the way the prosecutor has been poisoning the well in the media, at a minimum the case should be moved, if not dismissed with prejudice.

Reply to  MarkW
January 30, 2024 8:57 am

What should happen and what will happen used to be roughly the same thing, now there is a huge discrepancy between the two.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 26, 2024 8:45 pm

In your dreams. Did you read that on Fox? the worst that will happen is she will be removed.

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 26, 2024 10:53 pm

I agree with you as to what will likely happen. The Atlanta court system is so corrupt I’m surprised they even bother holding a trial.

Reply to  MarkW
January 27, 2024 11:36 am

Yeah – I would like to see how they are going to stop him from lodging an appeal, however.

Reply to  Simon
January 27, 2024 11:49 am

Did you bother to hear what Pres. Trump’s attorney had to say after the Soviet-style “trial” was done?

Of course not.

Simon
Reply to  karlomonte
January 28, 2024 5:37 pm

Yep I heard her. She’s the woman who told a talk show host she would rather be pretty than smart. She got her wish

MarkW
Reply to  Simon
January 29, 2024 8:33 am

Wow, such solid proof. What is it with Simon and his absolute inability to actually defend his worthless claims. Instead he just spreads yet more insults.

Simon
Reply to  MarkW
January 29, 2024 11:29 am

Are you saying she didn’t say that. Well have I got news for you…… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZExbyZ8BiA

Scorpion2003
Reply to  Simon
January 21, 2024 7:20 pm

Who mentioned Trump? Insinuate much?

Reply to  Simon
January 22, 2024 3:48 pm

Disappointed, Simon, but not surprised.. the word ‘would be’ losses, if it were to happen in a corrupt court.

robaustin
Reply to  Simon
January 22, 2024 11:38 am

Computer expert demonstrates the ease of hacking Dominion voting machines in Georgia courtroom. And Trump did not have to set foot in this courtroom.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/gig-is-up-exclusive-local-reporter-describes-election/

TBeholder
Reply to  robaustin
January 25, 2024 5:23 pm

Sure. Do you expect this to actually change anything at this point?
Aside of providing yet another curious incident (as Mr. Holmes put it) of all the noisiest dogs uniformly failing to bark when something like this happens… which already happened a lot, and so far did never accomplish anything beyond a few people not used to this yet raising an eyebrow or two.

TBeholder
Reply to  Tommy2b
January 25, 2024 5:13 pm

we’ll get all kinds of juicy details that will ‘defame’ Mann much more than any comments Steyn or Simberg ever made about him, even if Mann somehow ends up with a pyrrhic victory.

Streisand Effect can be devastating, yes.

Liars and frauds don’t tend to do too well in courts of law.

Law?

January 18, 2024 3:16 pm

Is there any chance of adding a clock in ET so that those of us in different time zones can keep track?

3x2
Reply to  Richard Page
January 30, 2024 9:40 pm

Lots of “World Clocks” available (free) for every platform.

I’m UK so I tend to do Eastern time (GMT – 5) and Freakland time (GMT – 8) in my head. Aus is a problem in that it is generally tomorrow there.

MarkW
Reply to  Richard Page
January 31, 2024 8:40 am

On other sites, the time stamps always show up as local time.

January 18, 2024 3:34 pm

Interesting take-away’s from the first couple of days – Mann’s lawyers tried to get a reporter (and friend of Mark Steyn) thrown out of court whilst Bill Nye the Science Guy (and friend of Michael Mann) turned up in the jury area in a highly improper manner. There seems to be as much action outside the case as there is within it.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 22, 2024 1:00 pm

And now, on Monday, Mann’s lawyer’s have filed yet another motion to try to prevent Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick from testifying. They’ve had 12 years but, apparently, this is the only time they can file it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who wanted to criminalise ‘climate change denialism’, has come out in support of Michael Mann in this trial. I’m really wondering what’s next?

wh
Reply to  Richard Page
January 22, 2024 8:36 pm

So could McIntyre & McKittrick be prevented from testifying? Not very knowledgable about law.

Reply to  wh
January 23, 2024 5:30 am

I don’t know either, I’m afraid. Depends on whether the judge buys the line Mann’s lawyer is trying to put forward or not. Have to see.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 25, 2024 8:14 am

It looks like the motion wasn’t successful but I haven’t heard too much about it – just a mention about them still to appear.

wh
Reply to  Richard Page
January 27, 2024 4:16 pm

Good news.

Reply to  wh
January 27, 2024 4:29 pm

Mickey Mann has been flooding the court with garbage motions like this for over a decade.

jgorline
January 18, 2024 4:27 pm

Mikey Mann absolutely molested the data. He truncated tree ring data to ensure a predetermined outcome. This is not done in science. I hope Mark Steyn wins both on free speech and with the fraudulent hockey stick.

morfu03
Reply to  jgorline
January 18, 2024 9:18 pm

I think so too, but I believe more important is what he did not do..

McShane and Wyner, wrote an article and a rejoinder discussing raised arguments and counter arguments about Mann´s reconstrctions, the whole exchange is very interesting in my opinion.
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/23024822 this link is only the rejoinder, the discussion is distributed over many webpages, if interested you should be able to find them easily from there). Skipping to the end of that discussion and just looking at the rejoinder, one argument they make (among other excellent and condemming points): 
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]
“””

Look at this time slice as in example (colored points are the proxies, size of the dots give their statistical weight, according to Mann critic S. McIntyre):
comment image

Mann calculated a value and uncertainty from that, but there is no way of telling how that represents the global temperature at that time!
That critique is known for over 10 years and Mann yet has to correct for it!

Jeff Alberts
Reply to  morfu03
January 18, 2024 10:36 pm

but there is no way of telling how that represents the global temperature at that time!”

There is no global temperature.

morfu03
Reply to  Jeff Alberts
January 19, 2024 5:20 am

Ideology aside, at what point does it become fraudulent not addressing justified critique?

Jeff Alberts
Reply to  morfu03
January 19, 2024 4:11 pm

What ideology? Scientifically speaking, you can’t average intensive properties (of which temperature is one) from disparate locations and come up with anything meaningful. Yes, you can come up with a number, but it’s useless.

Reply to  Jeff Alberts
January 19, 2024 8:38 pm

I’ve been making this point for years, but Nick Stokes, AlanJ et al are unable or unwilling to accept it.

Reply to  Jeff Alberts
January 20, 2024 2:44 am

This is the key thing, though, climate enthusiasts are NOT scientists – they’re computer programmers that learnt some basic statistics and ecology. To them, temperatures are just numbers to manipulate with reckless abandon. To a scientist, a temperature is one of the intrinsic properties of an object, area or environment and can’t be stripped away and jumbled together with other temperatures from disparate areas that have little relevance to each other.

sherro01
Reply to  Richard Page
January 20, 2024 2:12 pm

Richard,
That map with red dots showing weights has a big dot over Tasmania. In more detail, this is about trees with the common name Huon Pine of in the vicinity of a local hill named Mt Read.
At the time before 2000 when the tree ring studies were done, there was no weather station in Tasmania with a set of historic temperatures reasonably able to be linked to My Read. Therefore, no adequately accurate calibration of tree rings with temperature at Mt Read could be done.
That red dot is big enough to hide some big assumptions that might not be scientifically valid. IMO, it is wrong for such global prominence to be attached to a dubious study. Geoff S

Martin Brumby
Reply to  Jeff Alberts
January 24, 2024 7:54 pm

I wouldn’t disagree.
But far more relevant to this case is the fact that Mann has admitted in court that in 12 years his legal attack on Mark has not cost him a penny, whilst his action against Prof. Tim Ball (which Mann lost) left Ball’s widow destitute.
Mann admits that every year he has “earned” more and he hob nobs with celebrities, our Beloved Leaders and Billioneers.
And the case is acted out in “the dank cesspit of D.C.’s “Justice” system” which has been allowed to drag itself along for a dozen years and under four different “judges”.
Under the corrupt D.C. system, Mark won’t even be able to recover his legal costs if he manages to win the case. And it will still cost Mann nothing even then!
Aa “vicious blowhard” indeed!

Reply to  Martin Brumby
January 25, 2024 8:17 am

Not so sure about that – Steyn put a countersuit in against Mann so, if he wins, he may be awarded something to at least cover some of his costs.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Richard Page
January 25, 2024 1:51 pm

The motion was dismissed August 25, 2019, with prejudice (so he can’t do it again), and Steyn to pay costs.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 25, 2024 1:51 pm

motion countersuit

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 25, 2024 3:13 pm

Dear God, what a system. You mean to tell me that Mann, who has actually materially benefitted since 2012, gets to drive a man into 3 heart attacks through his vindictive bullying and is going to walk away without paying a single cent? No matter if he wins or loses? That is a sick, sick system.

Reply to  Jeff Alberts
January 22, 2024 3:51 pm

Thank you!

goracle
Reply to  morfu03
January 22, 2024 5:59 am

What is global temperature? How is it calculated?

Reply to  goracle
January 23, 2024 10:41 pm

A pile of crap. Badly.

Seriously though, it’s an appalling mess. There are over 35,000 temperature stations in the world and most datasets cherry-pick a few thousand as ‘representative’ – meaning they pick the ones they know will give the results they want. Basically they think nothing of averaging summer temperatures with winter temperatures, desert with rainforest, tundra with savannah in a huge mishmash that beggars belief. What is most amusing is that some of the trolls that turn up on here are ever so careful to compare one september with another september, when frankly they could compare june with february for all the difference it would make with ‘global average temperatures’ and the statistical nonsense they indulge in – numbers porn for computer geeks.

paul courtney
Reply to  Richard Page
January 26, 2024 8:05 am

Mr. Page: Agreed on all points. Will add this, if their “work” (the GAT) showed the trend was down, they would hide it until “adjustments” were applied. There’s no longer any room for doubt that we’re dealing with motivated liars.

Reply to  paul courtney
January 26, 2024 8:26 am

What do you mean ‘if’? They have their ‘thumb on the scales’ where there are no temperature stations so they infill and adjust upwards.
The adjustments are going to have to be more and more drastic than they have been so far. They have to maintain a warming trend and, apart from the thermometers they use running a bit hot, they can’t adjust today’s temperatures without it being noticed. So they use that as a fixed point, cool past temperatures and it artificially raises the future projections in line with the models which are rapidly diverging from any kind of reality. They’ve adjusted everything in the past to keep their ‘hottest evah’ crap and their precious climate models going but it cannot continue much longer, it’s unsustainable.

Petermiller
January 19, 2024 12:03 am

In December 2022, Mark Steyn suffered two heart attacks and nearly died. I think I can safely say, there is at least one dodgy ‘scientist’ out there who did not send him a get well card.

Reply to  Petermiller
January 19, 2024 5:41 am

If you go to Steynonline and look at the ‘day three’ article you’ll see an email from Mann showing what he thinks of the whole thing and Steyn in particular. Frankly Mann comes out of this looking like a twisted, bitter p.o.s. with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 19, 2024 8:42 pm

I strongly suspect that much of his vileness comes from knowing deep down that he’s a fraud. In any case he will never experience the thrill and satisfaction of doing real, honest Science.

Reply to  Graemethecat
January 20, 2024 2:52 am

A fraud as a scientist – he knows he’s just an average intellect but he’s trying to portray himself as the equal of Einstein, Feynman, Newton and other great scientists and thinkers, without any ability or attributes that might raise him above the also-rans. The only attribute he has that has kept him where he is (so far) is that he is a vicious little attack dog, growling and attacking anyone that threatens (in his mind) his little empire.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 23, 2024 6:57 am

“Frankly Mann comes out of this looking like a twisted, bitter p.o.s. with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

Frankly, it goes much deeper than just looks.

roaddog
Reply to  Richard Page
January 23, 2024 8:50 pm

That is a very accurate portrayal of him.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 24, 2024 4:21 am

Nothing to do with this, but it so reminded me of this:

JAB
January 19, 2024 5:21 am

Does anyone know if the video will be available to watch later? I was not able to watch during the day and won’t be able to watch today either.

Reply to  Barnes Moore
January 19, 2024 5:38 am

Not sure the video will be made available, but they should release a transcript. Mark Steyn’s website, Steynonline, has court reports and excerpts that you can read though, if that helps?

Reply to  Richard Page
January 19, 2024 6:25 am

Yes it does – thanks!

wadesworld242
January 19, 2024 7:52 am

I would love to see Mann go down, but reality is, Mark Steyn is making a huge mistake by representing himself. It’s nearly impossible to win against a well-trained real lawyer.

Best outcome is likely Mann is forced to expose some embarrassing things.

Reply to  wadesworld242
January 19, 2024 3:00 pm

Rand Simberg has a very good lawyer and they are co-defendants in this civil law case. If it was a criminal case, I’d likely agree with the old adage ‘a person who represents themselves has a fool for a client’ but, in this case, I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary. Mark Steyn is a very good orator and, where the balance of evidence only has to be slightly in his favour, his speaking skills should help enormously.

Reply to  wadesworld242
January 23, 2024 7:01 am

My understanding of judicial proceedings is that a party (in this case Mark Steyn) can represent himself at the same he is co-represented by a skilled, professional attorney. Not true?

Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 23, 2024 10:49 pm

I don’t think it is, no. Although both Steyn and Simberg are co-defendants, only Rand Simberg has a legal representative. Whatever help and advice he gets in private, Steyn must represent himself in the court and Simberg’s lawyer can’t represent Steyn.

Martin Brumby
Reply to  Richard Page
January 24, 2024 8:04 pm

No. Mark has a lawyer in reserve, if only because after three heart attacks (yes, three) he physically has to have a lawyer to fall back on.
Mann’s legal team are already openly talking about “the appeal”, if the case goes against Mark. The object is specifically about destroying Mark (and free speech).

January 19, 2024 9:51 am

I’m not so hot on Steyn, I’m all with proper criticism of Mann.

However Steyn likened Mann with pedophilia and Sandusky.

I am not OK with that.

pillageidiot
Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 11:20 am

I believe Steyn said Sandusky behaved in an abhorrent manner, was “investigated” by Penn State, and was “exonerated”.

He also said Mann behaved in an abhorrent manner, was “investigated” by Penn State, and was “exonerated”.

I would consider that an apples-to-apples comparison. YMMV.

Reply to  pillageidiot
January 19, 2024 1:42 pm

And, if I’m not mistaken, some of the very same Penn State officials that “investigated” Sandusky also “investigated” Mann.

Martin Brumby
Reply to  Gunga Din
January 24, 2024 8:14 pm

Precisely. Penn State backed Sandusky (their star “sport” guy) against a twelve year old boy being anally raped and seen by a witness.

The exact same Penn State President backed their star “science” guy when seen anally raping established science and producing the fraudulent “hockey stick”.

That is the nub of Mark’s original blog post and has comment was and is factually correct.

Get a grip on the facts before criticising Mark.

Mr.
Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 12:04 pm

Steyn likened Mann with pedophilia . . . I am not OK with that.

Me neither.

Mann is so much uglier than Jeffrey Epstein.

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 1:22 pm

I don’t think he did and this is a key part of the case. Steyn, I think, likened the uni’s conduct with Mann to its conduct with Sandusky – it put the reputation and finances of the uni way above the concerns and well-being of students or academia, and exonerated Sandusky. Steyn argued that they would do the same with Mann as they did with a convicted paedophile. It’s not the same as likening ‘Mann with paedophilia and Sandusky’ which would have been a bad thing, but likening the behaviour of Penn State to both the Mann and Sandusky investigations does seem allowable.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 20, 2024 4:46 am

Since climate hysteria is damaging to the minds of youth- there is an analogy with pedophilia.

Reply to  Joseph Zorzin
January 21, 2024 10:49 pm

Child abuse maybe but I wouldn’t go beyond that point.

roaddog
Reply to  Richard Page
January 23, 2024 8:53 pm

The analogy refers to process, not to literality of behavior.

Reply to  roaddog
January 23, 2024 10:53 pm

And that is what I based my reply on. I agree that it is child abuse but I do not see it as analogous to paedophilia.
I have worked with victims of paedophiles so I think I have some understanding of what it is and I think you’re pushing the analogy too far there.

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 1:40 pm

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

The quote does not link Mann to paedophilia in any way. It explicitly does not make that link.

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 19, 2024 2:06 pm

As I’ve said before, climate deniers are HORRIBLE people. Typically bigoted, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic…

X post, Michael Mann 10/05/2023

And just to put Steyn’s quote in perspective, Mann and others implicitly link sceptics with holocaust deniers all the time. Its a literary trick to trigger you. At least its Steyn’s job to do that. This statement by Mann is just appalling.

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 19, 2024 8:45 pm

Sounds just like Hillary Clinton. Things didn’t turn out too well for her.

Reply to  Graemethecat
January 22, 2024 4:05 pm

Deplorable Pride here.

roaddog
Reply to  Graemethecat
January 23, 2024 8:54 pm

Better than she deserved.

Martin Brumby
Reply to  Graemethecat
January 24, 2024 8:20 pm

Agreed. But Hillary and Mann will have a lot more in their bank accounts than most people on here could dream about.

I don’t much care about the money. I do care about Science and about Freedom. That is the point.

MarkW
Reply to  Martin Brumby
January 25, 2024 9:14 am

I do care about the money, since much of it was either swindled or effectively stolen from the people who earned it.

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 20, 2024 1:34 am

One doesn’t excuse the other, and I find the statement by Steyn equally deplorable. One does not win public arguments by descending to Mann’s abysmally low level. On the contrary, Steyn loses the respect of those who would be, given their common points of view. his natural allies.

This has been an argument where one side tries to compare those differing from him to Holocaust deniers, and the other tries to compare him to a convicted pedophile, in both cases without the slightest relevance to the topics nominally under contention.

As Kissinger said of the Iran Iraq war: Its a pity they cannot both lose!

Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 3:39 am

the other tries to compare him to a convicted pedophile

I agree it uses an unsavoury comparison as a literary device for effect. But is “comparison to a paedophile” really what you see when you read that quote?

The Sandusky comparison also has the contextual implications of a whitewashed exoneration. Use of the term “climate denier” doesn’t come with any context.

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 20, 2024 9:22 am

I am no admirer of Mann, a terrible scientist and unpleasant with it. But the only way I would have any respect for Steyn after that outburst would be were he to apologize for an utterly tasteless and unwarranted comparison.

Till he does that, a pity they cannot both lose!

Drake
Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 10:06 am

Your inability to read a statement and understand what was said is typical of the disease known a liberalism.

If you want Mark’s take, you know, the truth, listen to the reenactment of his opening statement to the jury in this trial. It is currently linked above.

I don’t think you will understand what Mark says. You are too far gone in your Mann Idolization, regardless of your claims otherwise, typical of all leftists when trying to show they are not leftist. However, it may begin the process of the cure from your psychosis.

BTW: I am not as psychiatrist, but I did stay at a Holliday Inn Express sometime in the past.

Drake
Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 10:28 am

I especially like the very last part of Mark’s opening where he uses Mann’s books to show how indebted Mann is to the Penn State president who was CONVICTED for covering up for the child m@lester. He thanks him in his books even after he was convicted and imprisoned. He is thanking him for creating the panel who covered up Mann’s fakery on producing the hookey schtick through the rigged ‘investigation” of his “science”.

Of course THAT was the point of Mark’s article, that the corrupt Penn State @ssH@ts that covered up for a serial h@mosexual ped@phile also covered up for serial data manipulator.

Amazing Mann drug this case out for 12 years while he continued to add to Steyn’s defense by calling deniers every name in the leftist book. Of course ped@phile was not included in Mann’s attacks, since leftists would NEVER attack ped@philes unless they were associated to religion.

Every man has the right to an opinion but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. Nor, above all, to persist in errors as to facts.

Bernard Baruch, 1948.

Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 5:30 pm

I’m not politically or socially a liberal, nor am I any sort of admirer of Mann.

That does not mean I have to be an admirer of Steyn, or his increasingly rabid supporters. I don’t think what he has said is likely to be legally defamatory. But I find it contemptible. My view is that he and Mann deserve each other.

My view is also that the spectacle of these two contemptibles having at each other over the grotesque invectives one of them indulged in toward the other is very damaging to the prospects of having a proper rational discussion of climate and energy policy.

We have governments in the UK, Australia and the US, and to a lesser extent Germany and other EU countries, pursuing deeply irrational and damaging policies in the effort to solve an imaginary problem. The consequences of this are gradually coming into the open. It means poverty and misery for millions and less security for our countries. A colossal waste of national income on wild schemes which will not work, and if they did would not address the imaginary problem were it real.

Mann vs Steyn is an unedifying distraction from this, which is what we all need to focus on.

Reply to  michel
January 22, 2024 4:17 pm

You are speaking of Large Truths that need correcting to save ‘the masses’. A Smaller Truth that needs correcting is at least as important to ‘an individual’. Especially with respect to the vast difference in CHARACTER between Mann and Steyn. (just mnsho)

Reply to  michel
January 22, 2024 4:11 pm

Sounds to me (along the same lines) as though you think we should all apologize for making “tasteless” remarks, when all around us (and TO us) Dems/libs can say whatever they like, and have it applauded by all of the msm.
I am tired of that mind-set, and I am ‘all in’ for “mean tweets”.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 11:58 am

One doesn’t excuse the other, and I find the statement by Steyn equally deplorable.”

Actually, it was Simberg who said that, not Steyn. Steyn quoted it, saying
“Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.”
Which makes nonsense of the excuses that they were only talking about the actions of the Penn State president.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 3:04 pm

Which makes nonsense of the excuses that they were only talking about the actions of the Penn State president.

Whether people say that or not, its still validly about the context in which it was said rather than justification for saying it.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 3:14 pm

Which makes nonsense of the excuses that they were only talking about the actions of the Penn State president.

Also, we have commentary which directly suggests otherwise re: “actions of Penn State president” [and the whitewashes]

From here

Politico was, however, able to reach CEI’s Simberg. According to its article:

Simberg, in an email to POLITICO, said his Sandusky comparison “was to the fact that the Penn State administration covered up Mann’s behavior in a similar manner, not in the behavior itself,” adding, “neither I or anyone was accusing [Mann] of child molestation.”?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 20, 2024 3:56 pm

Simberg didn’t say that at the time. He said that Mann earned the title because he molested numbers like Sandusky molested children. Which doesn’t make sense, but whatever.

Steyn was uneasy with it. So was CEI, which scruubed the line from its website, saying:

“Two inappropriate sentences that originally appeared in this post have been removed by the editor.””

The link to Penn State admin was made up later.

Drake
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 4:48 pm

He said that Mann earned the title because he molested numbers like Sandusky molested children. Which doesn’t make sense, but whatever.

Nick,

You know that Mann used ex post fact elimination of every dendrochronology series that didn’t fit his desired results. You have been to Climate Audit and KNOW this to be true.

Elimination of the “numbers” that didn’t fit his desired outcome, using a series in the inverse of what the original scientists concluded was correct (and after modern agricultural runoff contaminated that record, thus creating a hookey schtick), and relying on a few other individual trees was the Mannipulation that created the schtick.

You know these things Nick, but instead of admitting the truth, you, like all liberals, are trying to attack the man, Mark Steyn.

And BTW Nick, why do you h@te the poor so much??

Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 5:23 pm

You know these things Nick, but instead of admitting the truth…”

Nick is fundamentally a VERY DISHONEST person.

You will get no admission of truth from him.

Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 5:34 pm

Yes, Mann did all of those things. However the statement in your first sentence is nonsense, and the comparison you’re endorsing is contemptible. The two cases are in no way similar and the only point of making the comparison is a slur by association.

Similar to the use of the expression ‘denialist’ by Mann himself, equally contemptible.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 5:44 pm

None of this is true. But anyway, it has nothing to do with the subject of the trial, which is whether S&S libelled MM.

Mann’s results have been replicated over and over.

Crispin in Val Quentin
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 7:20 pm

Nick, I read the claims for the “replication” at the time they were made. The result was indeed the same because his student, who did it, replicated his errors. Well, M&M also replicated the results by using the same filtering of tree temperature proxies and removing everything that didn’t agree with the desired result. Replicating something doesn’t mean it was done correctly.

The data sets used and not used are known, those not were found in the “Censored” folder.

Around 2009 or 2013 (I don’t care when) Mann produced a paper, which I read, claiming to replicate MBH98 but it was shown within days to be fatally flawed.

Personally I do not believe anyone has produce a temperature proxy for the past 1000 years that does not show the MWP and the LIA, except MBH98 and people associated with those three intent on replicating its errors and biases. M&M2003 is a brilliant exposure of the fraud. I am looking forward to them taking the stand.

PS Has anyone been fiddling with the court room air con system per Hansen 1988?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Crispin in Val Quentin
January 28, 2024 8:26 pm

Crispin,
I don’t know of the student of Mnn that you mention, but there have been many replications by senior scientists. I showed the AR4 listing just above, and the graph of their results a bit higher. Later results came from, eg the Swede Lungqvist, who was certainly not part of an Mann circle.

Of course one of the nutty things is that MBH was criticised for not showing a MWP, when now everyone agrees that it was well over by 1400. The Greenland settlement was gone by then.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 25, 2024 3:02 pm

I stayed out of this until you made that comment.
Sure—by Gergich whose paper was retracted after McIntyre criticism, and by Marcott whose paper provably committed gross academic misconduct.

Nick, you cannot ‘win’ by asserting blatant falsehoods against those of us deep in the weeds for over a decade.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Rud Istvan
January 25, 2024 8:17 pm

Gergis’ paper was on SH (and was published after correction); Marcott was over a different time period.

Here is the plot of actual NH reconstructions comparable to Mann’s (shown). There are a few showing much cooler earlier periods, usually using non-mainstream methods. MBH sits centrally in the upper stream of other scientists’ recons. Replication!

comment image

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 9:32 pm

There is MUCH more variation in subsequent plots. Long term trends too. Natural causes clearly play a significant role.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 26, 2024 10:13 pm

Please show such a plot. This is AR4, 2008, ten years after MBH98, and shows many authors, with their own methods, getting the same result.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 10:32 am

Your plot shows it. The comparison is between MBH98 and subsequent reconstructions.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 27, 2024 12:11 pm

That plot is from AR4, and as I said, it includes all methods, some of which are not mainstream. Incidentally, the deviants all showed much more warming.

Here is a key showing the tags and their various limitations. Some are land only, some like MBH99 are land/marine

comment image

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 3:54 pm

Incidentally, the deviants all showed much more warming.

Yes, historically. That’s because MBH98 was a rubbish reconstruction. It was bad science using flawed methods.

Its taking a very long time to recognise natural variation in climate and come to understanding drivers for it. There is too much focus on CO2 to understand what’s really going on. CO2 will, no doubt, play some part but not 100% of it and certainly not historically and regionally.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 11:46 am

Here’s a joke for you, Nick. How many crap and fraidulent papers does it take to ‘hide the decline?’

wh
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 24, 2024 8:13 pm

Nick,

Why do you kiss the ground the man walks? Serious question; I’m very curious.

Reply to  wh
January 25, 2024 12:09 pm

Because even Mann would get a restraining order if Nick tried anywhere else!

Luke B
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 22, 2024 11:52 pm

By using similarly shoddy statistical methods.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 22, 2024 1:15 pm

If you mean that anyone can use white noise and create a hockey stick, yes, you are right, it can be replicated endlessly.

There really is something wrong with you.

I’m glad i don’t actually know you.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  Pat from Kerbob
January 25, 2024 3:04 pm

Red noise, not white noise.

MarkW
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 21, 2024 7:23 am

Acolytes, using the same invalid data and the same discredited methods and come up with the same results.
Big surprise.

Drake
Reply to  MarkW
January 21, 2024 12:09 pm

Nick knows this, that even though others claimed to have used “different” data, while not posting the data, including pseudoscientists that received money from the US government which requires the data to be included. Steve M showed that the few data sets that formed the blade were the same as used by Mann, even though a few other inconsequential series were different.

Nick Knows, he has spent a lot of time at Climate Audit, yet he continues to claim the false narrative of other’s replicated Mann’s crap with DIFFERENT data, a bald faced l!e

And he still H@TES poor people soo much that he continues to support the unsupportable fr@ud of Mann and cronies, one of whom is Nick himself.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 10:48 pm

Mann’s results have been replicated over and over.

Not really, the blade isn’t flat in subsequent reconstructions.

robaustin
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 21, 2024 9:53 am

To be pedantic, I think you mean that it is the handle of the hockey stick, not the blade, that showed some deviation from ruler straightness in some subsequent reconstructions. Getting rid of medieval warming was one of the first things to raise red flags in the proxy reconstructions of temperature.

Reply to  robaustin
January 24, 2024 11:21 am

I was hoping Nick was going to correct it.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 6:38 pm

‘Mann’s results have been replicated over and over.’
Well no they haven’t, have they? Several attempts have been made by other climate enthusiasts using equally crap proxies, but nobody has replicated Mann’s results exactly because Mann lied about which proxies he did and did not use and hid his methodology for over 25 years. When the proxies and methodology were finally discovered they were found to be so poor that any decent scientist would have thrown them in the bin. Mann published his results and hid the truth for over 25 years because he knew they were fraudulent and didn’t want to be found out.

wh
Reply to  Richard Page
January 24, 2024 8:16 pm

Richard,

Weren’t the Pages2k studies replicated by Mann’s friends?

Reply to  wh
January 25, 2024 12:06 pm

I’m not entirely sure. I know that there have been over a dozen studies trying to do roughly the same thing over varying timescales and all of them have used really bad methodology, crap proxies and extremely poor scientific processes to the point where none of them stand up to scrutiny and all fail on their rather dubious merits. Many of them ‘borrow’ from each other and Mann, use the same or similar proxies and are just appallingly bad papers.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  Richard Page
January 25, 2024 3:04 pm

McIntyre shredded Pages 2 over many past posts. Stuff like using same ‘upside down Tiljander sediment cores.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 5:57 pm

He said that Mann earned the title because he molested numbers like Sandusky molested children. Which doesn’t make sense, but whatever.

Its a powerful, if off colour, metaphor to be sure. But no worse than “Climate denier” which is in common use and by many climate activists and journalists alike.

Martin Brumby
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 24, 2024 8:35 pm

Absolutely. And especially when going after Richard Lindzen who lost relatives to the Holocaust.

Jim Hansen threw in “Death Trains” (coal trains) and “Death Factories” (thermal power stations) in case anyone didn’t see the point.

Truth Deniers. Don’t you love ’em!

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 21, 2024 6:45 pm

Rubbish. As was pointed out in court the link between Sandusky and Mann via Spanier had already been made in the media, up to 6 months earlier – Steyn and Simberg were following a well beaten path by this point. The only difference between them and the previous writers were the size of publications – Mann is a bully and he hid from the major sites that had published this but picked on targets that he thought he could bully into submission.

climatebeagle
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 23, 2024 11:01 am

> The link to Penn State admin was made up later.

Not at all true, this was in Steyn’s original post:

 And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to “investigate” Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/football-and-hockey-mark-steyn/

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 20, 2024 1:27 am

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

I am afraid that really is making a comparison of Mann’s actions to those of Sandusky. There is no legitimate comparison to be made. Its the worst kind of gutter journalism.

If he had said something to the effect of

Penn State has a record of failing to investigate serious misconduct on the part of staff, as instanced in its defensive procrastination over doing a proper investigation of Sandusky, and it is showing the same behavior in its failure to do a proper investigation of Mann’s research misconduct…

– that would have made a legitimate point clearly.

What he actually wrote was to try to smear Mann by association with Sandusky, and there is no association and no legitimate comparison. Note the weasel words

could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky

No, he could not be said to be that. He is a terrible scientist, he has indeed misrepresented and distorted the data on which his contentions are based, he seems to have done this from a mixture of ambition and probably political conviction. But he is not the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, and could not be said to be that, because there is no such thing. Well, the only way to be such a thing would be if the person in question were a pedophile as well as a climate scientist. Which has never been alleged.

So Steyn was wrong to write those words. But that doesn’t mean they were defamatory. They were hyperbole and trashy jounalism and he demeaned himself with them. But just as Mann can have done junk science and misrepresentation with the Hockey Stick but not committed research misconduct, so Steyn can have written contemptible trash but not have committed defamation in it.

He then goes on from the phrase ‘could be said to be’ to qualify what he means by it. So the outlandish comparison is restricted to comparing Mann’s conduct with data to Sandusky’s with his charges. That’s probably enough to get him home free. But it doesn’t make the extract any less unpleasant, and it doesn’t change the fact that there is no comparison between the two things.

Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 3:41 am

I am afraid that really is making a comparison of Mann’s actions to those of Sandusky.

Not “actions of a paedophile”, it doesn’t.

Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 20, 2024 5:24 pm

I am afraid that really is making a comparison of Mann’s actions to those of Sandusky.”

ONLY in your petty leftist little mind. !!

Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 6:07 am

‘except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science”

This is excellent journalism. He’s exposing him as the contemptible fraud that he is. Steyn pours gasoline on the politically and financially motivated fraudulent research, then, with this sentence ignites it.

“So the outlandish comparison is restricted to comparing Mann’s conduct with data to Sandusky’s with his charges.”

Steyn makes an excellent comparison, in a literary sense. Perhaps it’s a new idiom, like comparing apples to oranges, but both rotten to the core. He might have added that he should be fired, jailed, and ordered to explain his falsifications to public school children from his prison cell.

Side note: in view of the left’s obsession with sexualizing children, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if it turns out this criminal is indeed a pedophile. In fact, some have suggested that changing the name democrat party to pedophile party would provide a far more accurate representation of what they stand for.

Reply to  K.F.Smith
January 20, 2024 6:13 am

Looks like the only slur missing is “pedophile.”

slur
Reply to  K.F.Smith
January 23, 2024 7:42 am

Noticeably missing from Mann’s post that you reproduced:
definition of “climate denier”.

Is a “climate denier”:
— any person that believes “climate” does not exist?
— any person that believes “climate” is the same as weather?
— any person that believes “climate change” does not exist?
— any person that believes “climate change” is different from what the IPCC claims?
— any person that believes “climate change” is different from what Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph asserts?

“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

As for Mann’s armchair psychoanalysis of the characteristics of “climate deniers” (however he might define them), that is worth exactly what I paid to obtain such.

The University of Pennsylvania must be oh-so-proud to currently feature him as a “Presidential Distinguished Professor” . . . why totally escapes me.

Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 25, 2024 12:16 pm

Mann is typical of the small and petty-mindedness of leftists that use horrific labels to vilify those that disagree with them. Once your victims have been so labeled then the leftists feel justified in heaping more and more abuse on them because who has sympathy for a bigot, xenophobe, racist, etc.
The exact same thing (even to the use of the same terms) was done to those that voted for Brexit in the UK.

Reply to  K.F.Smith
January 20, 2024 9:17 am

You say:

Side note: in view of the left’s obsession with sexualizing children, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if it turns out this criminal is indeed a pedophile. In fact, some have suggested that changing the name democrat party to pedophile party would provide a far more accurate representation of what they stand for.

This attempted slur is beneath contempt, and prompts the inevitable conjecture that its trolling in an effort to discredit the site.

Drake
Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 10:30 am

Democrat Much, LOL!

Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 11:44 am

Typical response from the left. Instead of calling out as beneath contempt those who sexualize children, you call out as beneath contempt those who expose these predators. If you have a problem with pedophilia, start with the teacher’s union.

drag2
Reply to  michel
January 20, 2024 5:26 pm

I thought you said you were someone who was interested in the FACTS.

Apparently only when they suit your inbuilt leftism.

rah
Reply to  michel
January 24, 2024 9:46 pm

DC is a sewer on par with San Fran. Witness Democrat Senators aide video literally taking it up the wazoo in a congressional hearing room. Lack of transparency Epstein, lack of action on child slavery.

lack of action on

Reply to  michel
January 23, 2024 7:17 am

Does the phrase “except that instead of” mean anything to you?

Anything at all?

MarkW
Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 23, 2024 9:59 pm

Yes it does. It’s saying that the phrase that came before “except that” would have been true, the “instead of” replaces part of the original statement with whatever follows the “instead of”.

climatebeagle
Reply to  TimTheToolMan
January 23, 2024 10:55 am

You realize that Steyn did not say that right?

In fact he said of that quote: “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/football-and-hockey-mark-steyn/

Reply to  climatebeagle
January 24, 2024 11:10 am

He quoted it.

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 1:50 pm

Steyn likened Mann with pedophilia”

WRONG.. you are posting leftist misinformation.

He likened the uni’s conduct with Mann to its conduct with Sandusky 

Craig
Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 19, 2024 6:25 pm

No, he did not.

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 20, 2024 4:44 am

Any great scientist would ignore criticism, if he/she was confident in his/her own science work.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 20, 2024 1:23 pm

Steyn likened Mann with pedophilia and Sandusky”

Actually, it was Simberg who said that, not Steyn. Steyn quoted it, saying

“Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.”

So Steyyn at least knew what was going on.

MarkW
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 2:02 pm

At least Steyn and Simberg know what a metaphor is, unlike most climate alarmists.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 20, 2024 5:29 pm

So Steyn at least knew what was going on.”

Is it now illegal to “know what is going on” ??

You are safe, Nick !!

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 20, 2024 1:34 pm

Lil,

I’ve had the columns in my spreadsheet set up for a while now (Ok; not OK), and have been slowly filling in the blanks.

I’ve got you recorded as’not OK’.

Thanks for your input.

Reply to  DonM
January 22, 2024 1:02 am

You need a spreadsheet? So, out of curiosity, where are some of the other commenters, then?

MarkW
Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 20, 2024 1:54 pm

You really should check with what was actually said.
Steyn said that Mann molested the data the way Sandusky molested children. Only someone with no understanding of basic English would equate that with claiming that Mann is a pedophile.

Reply to  Lil-Mike
January 21, 2024 5:19 pm

However Steyn likened Mann with pedophilia and Sandusky.”

Other commenters in the list above have already disproved that claim.
Shame you didn’t read the comments first.

January 19, 2024 1:43 pm

Assuming these tweets by Mann are real, he is a piece of shit.

The World’s Leading Climate Expert | Real Climate Science

Reply to  Nelson
January 19, 2024 3:04 pm

At least when I said it, I abbreviated it to p.o.s. for the benefit of sensitive readers!

And I can’t seem to get to the site from my phone, what do they say?

Reply to  Richard Page
January 19, 2024 3:13 pm

Do you really think Mickey Mann reads WUWT?
(He probably has someone else read it for him.)

Reply to  Gunga Din
January 19, 2024 3:24 pm

No, I wasn’t thinking of him, actually.
Btw – if you do a search for Michael Mann, GOP, twitter, I think you’ll find that those messages are typical of him – he’s got a real nasty streak and it shows in his views about Trump and Republicans.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 19, 2024 3:47 pm

Well, Mann is all about “The Cause”.
Political science rather than real Science.
He’s made his politics clear.

wh
Reply to  Gunga Din
January 24, 2024 8:23 pm

I often ponder that question. It wouldn’t be unexpected; it also raises curiosity about the identity of trendologist trolls. Are they climate “scientists” employed as ‘misinformation fighters,’ individuals with a vested interest in disseminating climate propaganda, or simply everyday people who, unfortunately, have been influenced in a misleading way? I prefer to extend the benefit of the doubt, but the longer they remain without showing an inclination to learn or listen to our perspective and instead continue to share their irritating content, the more I suspect their alignment with the first three mentioned.

Reply to  wh
January 25, 2024 8:23 am

I think they are, in the main, deluded idjits that are just playing with numbers without the slightest idea of what those numbers really represent or how to use them properly. Children playing at being grown-up ‘scientists’ but without a clue as to the consequences of their actions, if you will.

Doug S
Reply to  Nelson
January 19, 2024 6:54 pm

When you read those messages from MM it becomes clear he is a tortured soul.

Drake
Reply to  Doug S
January 20, 2024 10:32 am

You can’t be a tortured soul if you have no soul.

Reply to  Nelson
January 22, 2024 1:09 pm

Not sure why you go so easy on him, he’s so much worse than that.

Coeur de Lion
January 19, 2024 3:08 pm

Amongst the Climategate emails is one where Mann is arranging the sacking of a journal editor and asks “Sceptics – can we find a better word?”. Up comes ‘denier’, loved by alarmists. For the whole story nothing beays Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion’ See also McKitrick on the four whitewssh investigations none of which mention Mann’s science nor ask Phil Jones whether he actually deleted any emails to defeat a FOI enquiry. (criminal). The Brit House of Commons was incompetent beyond parody. See also McIntyre on the IPCC AR6 hockey stick. Fraudulent as well.

Reply to  Coeur de Lion
January 19, 2024 3:24 pm

Something to remember is that back then the Sandusky thing and Climategate were in the news fairly close together time wise.
(Or at least the Penn State “investigations”.)

Reply to  Coeur de Lion
January 19, 2024 3:26 pm

Wasn’t just the House of Commons – the Royal Society and the police investigations also looked the other way and gave him a free pass.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 23, 2024 8:01 am

That’s right. Among the most prominent “others” looking the other way and giving Michael Mann a free pass are Pennsylvania State University (aka Penn State), University of Pennsylvania, the National Academy of Sciences, AGU, APS, AAAS, and the periodical Scientific American.

Shame on all.

Scissor
Reply to  Coeur de Lion
January 19, 2024 8:57 pm

Al Franken says Mann is a Nobel prize recipient.

Reply to  Scissor
January 20, 2024 3:03 am

So who’re you going to believe, a failed Democrat politician who lied about paying his taxes for years and is Mikey’s stooge, or the head of the Nobel prize committee? It’s a bit of a toughie, isn’t it?

Scissor
Reply to  Richard Page
January 20, 2024 5:26 am

Al was for comedy before he was against it.

Reply to  Scissor
January 20, 2024 6:11 am

Nobody remembers the writers, only the performers. I guess, one way or another, he wanted to be some kind of performer, not just the forgotten writer.

Drake
Reply to  Richard Page
January 20, 2024 10:40 am

“failed Democrat politician”

No he was not.

He “won” the Minihaha senate race by several counties submitting more votes, the vast majority for him, than total voters in the county. The Minihaha supreme court was OK with that because it put a Democrat in the US Senate.

The DOJ had every right to investigate those counties since it was a US election, but didn’t. The same as not investigating the Miami Democrat officials vote manipulation after Bush vs Gore.

Any state or county that does not provide all documentation required to be kept by law should have their elections taken over by the Federal Government for the federal elections only. Let them do what they want with local elections. Excess votes in Democrat cities skew the elections of MANY states.

Reply to  Drake
January 20, 2024 4:13 pm

I was actually thinking how he resigned due to multiple sexual misconduct allegations but if you think I should have added fraudulent as well, then I’ll go with ‘Fraudulent, failed Democrat politician’ to the rest.

Drake
Reply to  Richard Page
January 20, 2024 4:57 pm

LOL.

What is really funny is the rac!st sex!st dems got rid of him specifically to put a woman in his spot, and used the “me Too” movement to do it. Affirmative sex!st action MUCH?

Reply to  Scissor
January 28, 2024 7:58 am

Whoever this Al Franken guy is, his is nothing if not B-O-R-I-N-G.

January 20, 2024 11:34 am

Very entertaining. This would be a whitewash at any reasonable court, but how knows nowadays?

Reply to  beng135
January 21, 2024 6:24 pm

It was a whitewash at Penn state but we’re all hoping this trial won’t be – we’re hoping Steyn and Simberg wipe the floor with that odious little Mann.

John Oliver
January 21, 2024 8:51 am

Only in this day and age and only with a piece of fecal material like Mann would this case have not been thrown out by some means already. You see the same thing with the Nazi like get Trump trials. All the result of evil people doing evil things hoping to creat a terrible and devastating precedent by praying on the ignorance of the general brain washed mass of sheep that make up jury pools in certain jurisdictions.

Reply to  John Oliver
January 21, 2024 6:26 pm

As Steyn said, ‘corruption spreads’ – climate change alarmism and activism is what has spread the corruption throughout our governments, academics and legal systems.

Reply to  John Oliver
January 23, 2024 11:27 am

Fecal material though smelly and unhygienic makes an important contribution to the web of life. Micky Mannish hasn’t earned the comparison, though he might well rise to the adjectives of smelly and unhygienic.

another ian
January 21, 2024 7:58 pm

 “The Steyn vs Mann Trial is underway

“Man Bites Mann”

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2024/01/21/138710/#comments

A grand collection of “Sayings by Steyn” in comments”

Reply to  another ian
January 21, 2024 11:11 pm

He has a certain way with words, as Mann will probably find out to his cost.

ferdberple
January 22, 2024 10:10 am

With faulty data and faulty methods of course you can replicate faulty science.

Grafting tree rings to thermometer data is more like Piltdown Man than Penn State Man.

TBeholder
Reply to  ferdberple
January 25, 2024 5:49 pm

It may be shaped more like Wicker Man, however.

January 22, 2024 1:05 pm

Story Tip!!!
If no one has beat me to it.
Pielkie taking a very public shot at Piltdown Mann, timing is good.

Is worth it just for the AI generated image at the top of the post.

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-science-gatekeeping

Reply to  Pat from Kerbob
January 22, 2024 2:51 pm

Ok the picture’s very good but read the rest, you really should.
Mann’s behaviour is borderline criminal imho – damaging career’s and reputations, supressing papers he disagrees with and plagiarism? I am strongly against locking people up that I disagree with but Mann has gone way over the line; so far over that he can no longer see the line.

Reply to  Pat from Kerbob
January 25, 2024 2:02 am

OMG – I know someone who looks exactly like that, I really do.
He lives in the village near my previous home and came past my house on the lane *every* day on an electric wheelchair/scooter (bought from eBay – £75)
He uses it to walk his (retired greyhound) dog and quite often, his autistic nephew (age ~ 8) rides on his knee.
He also owns (and rides) THE most customised mega-power Vespa you *ever* saw.
(It does need the power though, you can see why)
Answers to ‘Peter’

Jason S.
January 22, 2024 7:47 pm

WOW. I’ve listened to Steyn’s opening statements three times and can’t get enough. If there were Nobel Prizes for delivering comeuppance, this is a winner (unlike fake claimants of Nobel prizes…ahem). The way he simultaneously destroys Mann’s case and Mann himself at the same time, all while making it relevant and allowable is pure genius, art, a thing of beauty. I can’t start to think of the sum of money I wouldn’t pay to have been able to sit and watch crooked stick Mickey Mann’s face during that opening. But I can imagine, and that is good enough. Is there a countersuit? Would love Mann to have to pay all legal fees. This is great.

Reply to  Jason S.
January 23, 2024 8:57 am

Steyn had lodged a countersuit – more, I think, to prevent Mann from wriggling out of the lawsuit without penalty than to make money from him.

Reply to  Richard Page
January 25, 2024 3:21 pm

Apologies but, apparently, the countersuit was disallowed by the previous judge on an anti-SLAPP technicality.

MichaelMoon
January 24, 2024 8:23 pm

https://heartland.org/opinion/mann-v-steyn-and-us/

Read Steyn’s opening statement, amazing, he worked on it for 12 years, sums up Mann and his cohorts. I do not know why this was not already posted here before.

Moon

Jit
Reply to  MichaelMoon
January 25, 2024 12:46 am
rah
January 24, 2024 9:52 pm

Ok. Question for whoever has the time and persistence to follow thi case in detail?

Who do you think is winning on the face of it?

Reply to  rah
January 25, 2024 2:23 am

Its a tragedy.

On the merits of the case, Steyn ought to win. I don’t see any way that he can correctly be convicted of either stating things he believed and knew to be false, or having made statements in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity. And he cites in his opening statement quite a lot of circumstances which evidence that.

I also don’t think Mann is going to be able to show actual damage from what Steyn specifically wrote and published.

Whether he is winning in the court room however is a very different matter. His opening statement was a disaster, the basic logical argument, which is very powerful, wrapped up in a lot of irrelevant rhetorical verbiage, the logical sequence obscured by it to no purpose.

He was ill advised to represent himself. An attorney would have made the same points but in an accessible logical way, and would have severely pruned or eliminated all the rhetoric about Sandusky. It would have been easier to follow and more persuasive. His argument is a simple and powerful one and just needed to be calmly stated.

The rhetorical flourishes and diversions into irrelevancies are the most unattractive aspect of his journalistic persona.

The tragic element comes from his obviously not being a well man, either physically or more important mentally. I think he will probably win the case, or that Mann will lose it. But I think it will end badly for everyone, and most for Steyn.

Jit
Reply to  michel
January 25, 2024 7:34 am

The purpose of what you call verbiage is to keep the jury engaged. How did Mann’s lawyer do in that regard?

Reply to  Jit
January 25, 2024 8:30 am

I don’t think Mann’s lawyer did half as well as Ms Woodford (Simberg’s lawyer) who, in turn, didn’t do as well as Steyn. Steyn was articulate, engaging, amusing and spoke directly to the jury on their level, not talking down to them as Mann’s lawyer seemed to be doing.

MarkW
Reply to  rah
January 25, 2024 9:18 am

This is a DC court, it really doesn’t matter who presents the better case. The winner will always be whoever does a better job of supporting government.

Mr.
Reply to  MarkW
January 25, 2024 10:24 am

and hasn’t Steyn been saying this about the DC “justice” system ever since Mann started this whole debacle?

rah
Reply to  MarkW
January 25, 2024 1:21 pm

That’s why I said “on the face of it.

Reply to  rah
January 28, 2024 11:43 am

“On the face of it” Mann’s case is unproveable – he has to prove damages that arose solely from Steyns and Simbergs articles and no other. Given that there were several articles with far greater readership than these 2 before theirs came out Mann can’t prove it was them and not one of the others, nor that it was Penn State that was defunded, not just him. Whether that will come across to the court in DC is the unknown factor.

mews
January 25, 2024 12:48 pm

Who is paying Michael Manns lawyers? Mann divulged under oath that he does not, who does?

Reply to  mews
January 25, 2024 3:41 pm

No idea. There are about 3 or 4 different slush funds available to protect climate enthusiasts from justice so it could be any of these or even Penn State still protecting its damaged reputation.

ebarnes55
January 25, 2024 1:44 pm

Steyn is doing himself no favors interviewing Mann. Many of his questions violate the “Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to” rule. Dipping into the weeds of graphs and proxies seems like a bad idea especially not knowing exactly how Mann must answer to a question. I think the Judge and I’m sure the Jury must have been rolling their eyes at most of this questioning/answers.

lawrence
Reply to  ebarnes55
January 25, 2024 5:10 pm

I’m no expert but Mark did really well and then started arguing about the Hockey Stick with Mann who then developed a sickly smirk.Earlier Steyn made him look a dubious liar over his claim he received a severe disproving scowl in a supermarket some ten years earlier. Mark asked him as the stranger glare was so traumatic and he can’t forget it, as its changed his life he just like E Jean Carrol he couldn’t remember when it happened. Seriously how can such a statement be taken seriously by the court and the judge.. Towards the end though Mark drive to duel with mann over the earths climate over the last thousand years. Mark should leave that to McKitrick and McIntyre when they are in the witness box.

What was sad to see was Steyn’s shocking health deterioration and he is now wheelchair bound. He also remarked that the court room was stifling hot and his low hemoglobin levels were making him feel unwell. It was decided that the session end and resume next Monday. The judge said he’d try and find another court for then. Sadly Mark seemed very down and a couple of times remarked to the judge he hoped to settle this case before he died. Mark in full health is magnificent but you could hear more than see that he was under duress

ebarnes55
Reply to  lawrence
January 26, 2024 10:16 am

Mark’s questioning on the scowl was good. Mann is a snowflakes snowflake for even making that claim about a “scowl”.

The questioning on the “curriculum vitae” and Penn States President did make Mark seem petty IMO.

Agreed that Mark should have left the Hockey Stick questioning to Mcintyre and McKitrick.

Reply to  ebarnes55
January 26, 2024 4:37 pm

He can’t leave the questioning of the Hockey stick to the experts. One of the key planks of Steyn’s case is free speech – that he has the right to question the hockey stick even if he isn’t a qualified expert. Steyn, I think, will use Mann’s answers here with McIntyre and McKittrick’s testimony to undermine Mann’s apparent standpoint that Steyn cannot possibly question a person of such standing as ‘Professor Michael E Mann, Nobel Laureate!’

Reply to  Richard Page
January 28, 2024 11:46 am

Also he has established that Mann was not a statistician nor was he a dendrochronologist so he has pecked away at Mann’s credentials little by little.

TBeholder
January 25, 2024 5:06 pm

Eh. It will be a kangaroo court. And even if somehow not, the parrots will squeak their usual doublespeak. Much like that time when the Good and Great shut the door before the auditors could see much, and so «There was no misconduct found! In your face, oldthinkers who unbellyfeel!», etc. The zoo section of Circus World remains noisy, stinky and predictable.

morfu03
January 25, 2024 7:44 pm

I just listened to the podcast of Mann in the stand..
For the drop in proposal success from 8 out of 15 (or so) to 2 out of 9 after Steyns article..
How many of these newer nine were re-submissions declined already before (or minor edits of them)?
It´s quite common to resubmit declined proposals even if the odds getting them granted are not high.

Reply to  morfu03
January 28, 2024 11:50 am

And how many were because of Penn State’s cover up of the Sandusky situation and nothing to do with Mann? If it was the Steyn/Simberg articles then Mann could have turned up with grant proposals from other departments that were the same or higher than the previous year. The fact that he has not shown this speaks volumes.

Reply to  morfu03
January 29, 2024 8:58 pm

I wonder if Mann realises that correlation is not causation.

Coach Springer
January 26, 2024 5:46 am

I’m not watching, but did read part of the transcript of Mark questioning of Mann. On paper and in black and white, It did a good job of exposing the pettiness of Mann and his ego.

As for the assertion of Mann;s “fraudulent hockey stick,” I do hope Steyn or Simberg’s excellent attorney note that everyone understood the opinion piece is not the same as an investigative piece where a police department states it. Of course, they will then make a strong case for intentional fraud, given the willful manipulations of data and criticisms of colleagues.

Sad to hear Mark’s health is failing. Mann should not get to slink off like he did not paying Tim Ball’s attorneys as ordered by a Canadian court which Mann himself turned to. Absolute low lifes like Mann and Fauci get way, way too much influence and deference – that they never earned in the first place.

wh
January 26, 2024 12:29 pm

Does anyone recall the 2006 Wegman report on the hockey stick?

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians. In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue. It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

How did this report go unnoticed? Did the mainstream media simply not cover it?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  wh
January 26, 2024 1:08 pm

Of course the Wegman report was noticed. It was commissioned by Joe Barton, chairman of a house committee, who used it as his chief bludgeon in his 2006 inquiry into MBH. It took a few years for the evidence of how flaky it was to emerge:
1. It was full of plagiarism, especially the social network stuff. Apparently Wegman and co didn’t know anything about SNA, so they delegated to an uncredited author, a student, because she had been to a one week course. She just copied the whole thing from Wikipedia.
2. Their most famous bit was the claim that using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick, and they showed 12 examples of this happening. But behind the scenes, what they had done was run 10000 red noise instances, and selected the 100 that looked most like hockey sticks. Their 12 were chosen from thta set.
3. The most obvious question, with all their claims of statistical error, was, what if you do the calculation without those claimed errors. Wegman was asked that, and said, no, they didn’t have the funding to do that. That was a lie. McIntyre had already done that. It was Fig 1 in the 2005 paper that was supposed to be Wegman’s chief exhibit. And in fact it made very little difference. 

What Wegman had done, closely following McIntyre, as he did, was to focus only on an intermediate construct, P1, in the principal components analysis. But that just means stuff s was shifted to other components. Whne you add it all together, McI gets the same as MBH.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 2:57 pm

Not sure about point 1 .. I feel like that is acceptable for such a report, it´s a expert weihted summary after all
Point 2, “Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick” is correct adn very bad for Mann
Point 3 is confused! you call a financial statement a lie, so I would expert a financial counter argument, which is missing.
>> it made very little difference.
I am not sure what “it”, but McIntyre and other at his blog spend years to detail various factors and their effect.
The combination of the questionable decentered PCA analysis together with faulty proxies (Mann´s bristle cone pines are not temperature proxies) produces hockey stick graphs.
It seems that all you are saying here is that if the proxies are bad, the scientific method does not matter much, which might be true, but you should probably realize that you support shady science with your statement!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 26, 2024 3:16 pm

acceptable for such a report”
Barton et al promoted the report invoking the authority of Prof Wegman. Looks dishonest if it is just pasted from Wikipedia.

“is correct adn very bad for Mann”
HS in what? The big bamboozle in Wegman is that they are talking only about P1. No-one is interested in P1. They want to know about the reconstructed NH temperature. And as McIntyre showed, varying the centering made no difference to the HS of that.

But the cheat of the unreported prior selection of 100 out of 10000 by HS appearance prior to making that claim about P1 is very bad.

you call a financial statement a lie”

No. The lie is that they hadn’t computed a corrected NH reconstruction. Rep Stupak specifically asked if they had done that, and Wegman said no. But they had, and it made nonsense of all the confected fuss about P1. Congress was never told about this, despite two days of Wegman, McIntyre et al before the committee. It’s a key point.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 4:01 pm

point 1
“Barton et al promoted the report invoking the authority of Prof Wegman.
Looks dishonest if it is just pasted from Wikipedia.”

Not sure if anybody cares how it looks in your opinion!
The claim that these paleo reconstruction is done by a rather small group of people is true and Wegmann as an expert evaluated how this might spell trouble for independent reviews.

point 2
>> The big bamboozle ..
No it´s not. Like I said,
“Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick” is correct!
You should consider asking a mathematician if the first principle component in a principle component analysis is the most important, not a Mann-related climate scientist, but all your “wiggling” aside, the algorithm does not work as it should but generates spurious trends, when the underlying data has none!
Trying to make a thing more complicated that needed seems to show that you either don’t understand it or work on an agenda not involving the truth.

point 3
Me:“you call a financial statement a lie”
You: “No. The lie is that they hadn’t computed a corrected NH reconstruction.”
You wrote:
“Wegman was asked that, and said, no, they didn’t have the funding to do that. That was a lie.”
I am guessing wildly here, but the reason Wegmann didn´t do it was the missing funding, just like he says! Which means you say wrong things.

“But they had, and it made nonsense of all the confected fuss about P1.”
Well as it happens that is where the main information is found in any PCA, always!

“But that just means stuff s was shifted to other components. Whne you add it all together, McI gets the same as MBH.”
Yes, McIntyre is the bright one here, he can understand what Mann did decentering the PCA AND has many points of criticism of Mann´s work!

And again, because you seem to have missed it:
The combination of the questionable decentered PCA analysis together with faulty proxies (Mann´s bristle cone pines are not temperature proxies) produces hockey stick graphs. It seems that all you are saying here is that if the proxies are bad, the scientific method does not matter much, which might be true,..

but it is still mean that two times bad unscientific behavior in a paper produces nothing but BS!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 26, 2024 4:59 pm

You should consider asking a mathematician if the first principle component in a principle component analysis is the most important”

I am a mathematician, and I understand PCA very well. It simply expresses a multidimensional vector in terms of different axes. In those axes it is still the same vector. The point of what Mann did is that you can recombine the top few components (five, in his case) and get much the same result with a lot of noise gone. It may shift patterns between the new axis components, but they don’t go away.

And they don’t. Here is McIntyre’s reconstruction with centered PCA, in the third panel. Top panel is MBH. He also illegitimately removed Gaspe cedar data, which affects 1400-1450. But the modern HS behaviour is exactly the same.

comment image

Mr.
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 7:13 pm

Please correct me if I’m not remembering correctly (I know you will), but wasn’t there mention in the Climategate emails where paleo proxies expert and MBH98 supplier Keith Briffa (RIP) advised Mann and “The Cause” group that the proxies they chose for their hockey stick hypothesis were not appropriate for that purpose?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Mr.
January 26, 2024 9:29 pm

Climategate emails”

One of many examples where conspiracists trumpet something they found in an email when that thing was actually the subject of a published and much discussed paper (which is what they are discussing). Incidentally, co-authors on that 1998 paper include Phil Jones and Tim Osborn. They are describing just one more thing that they have to disentangle. Briffa published his own reconstructions.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 9:52 pm

Do you think that ‘short centered’ or de-centered PCA is a legitimate statistical technique?

Is it one which has been published and approved by the peer review process and statistical authorities and associations?

Why did Ian Joliffe say of it:

I can’t claim to have read more than a tiny fraction of the vast amount written on the controversy surrounding decentred PCA (life is too short), but from what I’ve seen, this quote is entirely appropriate for that technique. There are an awful lot of red herrings, and a fair amount of bluster, out there in the discussion I’ve seen, but my main concern is that I don’t know how to interpret the results when such a strange centring is used? Does anyone? What are you optimising? A peculiar mixture of means and variances? An argument I’ve seen is that the standard PCA and decentred PCA are simply different ways of describing/decomposing the data, so decentring is OK. But equally, if both are OK, why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret? Of course, given that the data appear to be non-stationary, it’s arguable whether you should be using any type of PCA.

I am by no means a climate change denier. My strong impressive is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics. Misrepresenting the views of an independent scientist does little for their case either. It gives ammunition to those who wish to discredit climate change research more generally. It is possible that there are good reasons for decentred PCA to be the technique of choice for some types of analyses and that it has some virtues that I have so far failed to grasp, but I remain sceptical.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  michel
January 26, 2024 10:08 pm

An argument I’ve seen is that the standard PCA and decentred PCA are simply different ways of describing/decomposing the data, so decentring is OK. But equally, if both are OK, why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret?”

That is a key part. That argument is correct. He complains that it requires extra effort to interpret. But Mann is using it as a sophisticated method of noise removal. His result does not depend on any interpretation, as McIntyre’s centered version shows. You get the same reconstruction, which is the point of the exercise.

The virtue that Joliffe has failed to grasp is that the short period is one for which you actually have an average over that period for every proxy. Truly centered PCA would require an average back to 1400 for every proxy, and they don’t have that.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 2:09 am

The virtue that Joliffe has failed to grasp is that the short period is one for which you actually have an average over that period for every proxy. Truly centered PCA would require an average back to 1400 for every proxy, and they don’t have that.

The contentious PCs were calculated from 70 tree ring series, all going back to 1400 or earlier.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ctyri
January 27, 2024 10:31 am

Completely wrong. They were not all tree rings, and rather few went back to 1400. Here is MBH discussing how they diminish:

comment image

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 11:08 am

Don’t be stupid. The North American PCs going back to 1400 were calculated from 70 tree ring chronologies.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 9:27 am

This seems to go on forever beside not being really that complicated!

IL: “why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret?” and
why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret?

Wegman and McIntyre answered this: Using “Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick” (cited from you if recall correctly)

We therefore know that Mann´s method produces spurious trends when used with good data, that should have been the end of this discussion right there! A wrong algorithm is indefensible.

And the argument that this wrong algorithm produces a similar result than a good one when used on unscientific data is technically correct, but what does that prove beside you should not work like that!
Nick Stokes, you should NEVER work like that!
This is decades old information!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 10:38 am

We therefore know that Mann´s method produces spurious trends”

Trends in what? That is what you never answer. Wegman only showed, augmented by cheating, that it made a HS appearance in PC1, which incidentally could be up or down. That is not spurious. PC1 is just a calcultion intermediate. It is an artificial glimpse of the data. It doesn’t change the reconstruction, which is what matters. McIntyre himself showed that quite clearly, although it suited him to stop talking about it.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 12:48 pm

I dont need to answer, I have you answering it for me:
Wegmann reports correctly
“””that using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick””” (me quoting you)

>> That is not spurious.
Yes it is! That is a classic example of creating spurions!
The data does not have, the PC´s show it => it´s spurious, the algorithm is bad!
IL already commented on the uselessness of Mann´s decentered PCA,
I don’t know how to interpret the results when such a strange centring is used? Does anyone?

Mr.
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 10:18 pm

You’re claiming that ordinary people who have read and are mortified by the Climategate cabal emails are the “conspiracists“?

Is the Antarctic continent in the far north on your upside-down planet, Nick?

wh
Reply to  Mr.
January 26, 2024 11:10 pm

In 2008, Kevin Trenberth argued that the absence of observed warming was a travesty. Wouldn’t the contrary be true and considered positive news? This would suggest that the theory might be incorrect, which is encouraging if one believes that a consistent increase in CO2 is causing an environmental catastrophe.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  wh
January 27, 2024 1:49 am

In 2008, Kevin Trenberth argued that the absence of observed warming was a travesty.”
You really should try to cite and quote properly. What he said was:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
He is complainng about the lack of instrumentation, not the actual climate.

Incidentally this was another case where “sceptics” get excited about finding something in someone’s email, when the email is actually talking about a soon to be published paper. Same with Briffa above. Of course they never quote or read the actual paper. It is much more enticing to think a conspiracy has been uncovered.

Here is Trenberth’s paper. And here is how he starts out:

” From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we? 

Well, it seems that the answer is no, we do not. But we should!”

sherro01
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 2:51 am

Nick,
A mature scientist knowing what you have quoted from Trenberth has a responsibility to speak up when there is a problem with his/her specialty, to avoid dangerous action being taken when there is incomplete understanding.
I my ideal world, Dr Trenberth would have gone public to say words like “Colleagues, we know that there are unresolved problems because we do not fully understand this topic. So please issue caveats when you write papers, to say that your conclusions are NOT to be used to inform new policies.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but there does not seem to have been any attempt to rein in the policies that are now, one country after another, on the road to creating a penurious citizenry.

Debate quickly became an ugly, snarling dog fight while we senior scientists mostly looked on and ate another vegemite sandwich.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  sherro01
January 27, 2024 10:45 am

What I quoted was a published paper by Trenberth.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 9:30 am

>> He is complainng about the lack of instrumentation, not the actual climate.

Is not correct, KT is talking about the models of that time being unbalanced, the measurement grid was good enough for his argument!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 10:54 am

KT says nothing about GCM’s or grids. He is complaining about measurement inadequacy, specifically at TOA. Here is part of his conclusion:

comment image

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 4:35 pm

“He is complaining about the lack of instrumentation, not the actual climate.”

That’s absurd. He’s terribly upset that he can’t account for where the “radiative forcing has gone” without considering that maybe it doesn’t exist.

Mr.
Reply to  wh
January 27, 2024 6:45 am

Did this come from the same emails chain where one of the contributors wrote –
“What if we’re all wrong? They’ll probably kill us.”

wh
Reply to  Mr.
January 27, 2024 9:27 am

I originally mentioned a different quote. I thought I had Trenberth in mind, but it turns out I was actually recalling a conversation between Mick Kelly and Phil Jones:

October 26, 2008

Hi Phil

I just updated my global temperature trend graph for a public talk, and noticed that the level has really been quite stable since 2000 or so, and 2008 doesn’t look too hot.

Anticipating the skeptics latching on to this soon, if they haven’t done so already…

It would be awkward if we went through another early-1940s-type swing!

Phil Jones:

Mick, They have noticed for years-mostly with respect to the warm year of 1998. The recent coolish years we put down to La Niña. When I get this question I have 1991-2000 and 2001-2007/8 averages to hand. Last time I did this they were about 0.2 degrees different, which is what you’d expect.

Kelly:

Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, I’m used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer-10 year-period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Niña, etc.

This is speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the graph before I give the talk again, as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

Mr.
Reply to  wh
January 27, 2024 10:02 am

Proper scientists would have remarked –

“Hhmm, our observations aren’t matching our predictions. We must review and revise our hypothesis. ”

But of course these characters aren’t subscribers to the scientific method.
They’re all apostles to “The Cause” (as M. Mann refers to his “science”.

Reply to  Mr.
January 27, 2024 4:30 pm

Unfortunately, too few people have read the “Climategate cabal emails”. I bet I could stop 100 people at random, and I’d bet that not one ever heard of them.

Mr.
Reply to  Joseph Zorzin
January 27, 2024 5:59 pm

I fear you’re right.

Nobody reads the details of anything any more.
They just skim headlines.
And the msm know this, so they put up ooga-booga headlines to convince folks that climate armageddon is imminent.

(aided and abetted by university media departments who write the press releases of course)

Gino
Reply to  Mr.
January 31, 2024 6:20 pm

…something you will see is that Niky doesn’t directly respond or address the question asked. He deflects and throws a related but oblique link that he represents as countering the initial question, but if you pursue it you find something like this from the Briffa team in the Paper Nick sent you too.

 ‘On annual, decadal, and probably even
centennial time-scales, tree-ring data are demonstrably
reliable palaeoclimate indicators, but where the focus of
attention shifts to inferences on century and longer time-
scales, the veracity of inferred change is di§cult to
establish’

which means the answer to your question is “Yes, Briffa did warn the InCrowd that they should be careful using his results”

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 26, 2024 8:23 pm

>> The point of what Mann did is
using a bad proxy and a bad method.

Since you are talking methods here, you have to test the method with good data, and Wegmann reports correctly that the method
“””that using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick””” (me quoting you)
You don´t seem to debate this (which would be silly)!

Instead you wiggle into what happens when a bad method is used with bad proxies.. nothing interesting, it´s just a bad idea! (seems equally silly to me, are you just trying to be silly here, it sure looks like it!)
Being a mathematician that should not be too difficult for you!
Can you understand that your silliness costs billions of real money?
You harm people by writing this nonsense!
Like I said earlier, I smell a different agenda maybe personal enrichment!? In which case: Shame on you!

Do we really need to debate, why bristle cone pines are bad proxies? Even a mathematician like you should have gotten that memo by now!
Are you trying to defend Mann´s use of that proxy in any way?
Or his use of a bad method (which you did not seem to debate, right? The hockey stick generation by his algorithm on simulated red noise data seems well documented and published, right?)

So what are you really saying here? Beside “look what happens if Mann or McIntyre or whoever uses a bad method on bad proxies”?

We know the method is bad, we know the proxies are bad, move along please! You seem to waste everybody´s time! Why is that?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 26, 2024 9:56 pm

Do we really need to debate, why bristle cone pines are bad proxies?”

Please explain why they are. But this is shifting the goalposts. Wegman was called in as a statistician. He doesn’t know anything about bristlecone pines, except what he parrots from McIntyre. Nor do you.

“We know the method is bad”

The method is not bad. You can use totally uncentered PCA if you want to. The penalty is that you have to calculate a PC corresponding to difference in means that you could anticipate.

But to get that gain, you have to subtract the mean for the whole period, and that is unavailable for most proxies. So you can subtract the data for the part periods that you have, or as Mann did, subtract a fixed part period that you always have. Either way, you come out between fully centered and uncentered, both sound methods.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 3:18 am

The method is not bad. You can use totally uncentered PCA if you want to. The penalty is that you have to calculate a PC corresponding to difference in means that you could anticipate.

But to get that gain, you have to subtract the mean for the whole period, and that is unavailable for most proxies. So you can subtract the data for the part periods that you have, or as Mann did, subtract a fixed part period that you always have. Either way, you come out between fully centered and uncentered, both sound methods.

Uncentered PCA is fine if we have reason to believe that the data already has zero mean. By construction, tree ring chronologies are nonnegative with mean around 1, so uncentered PCA is bad.

“Decentered” (Mannian) PCA is much, much worse. It’s not “between fully centered and uncentered.” Jolliffe explains this.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 10:15 am

>> Please explain why they are.
Does that mean you claim not to know this? How about your argument falling apart if that statement would be true?

NS: “The method is not bad. ”
Is not correct, and endlessly repeating it will not someheow make it true!
As you already said:
“using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick”

So here you have already agreed on that the method is bad!
(Or at least it´s doing something which it NEVER should be doing and thus distorts data in a reproducible way, which is NOT GOOD!)
I concede that for bad data like the one which was used by Mann, that difference does not matter, but it is also well known what happens when you remove the “Graybill bristlecone pines” from the dataset:
All of the sudden there is a very significant difference between Mann´s faulty method and a centered PCA analysis!
Here the faultiness clearly matters, there is not wiggle room about this!

For new readers, here is the information about Mann´s faulty proxies, again known since decades, Nick Stokes (and also Mann of course) knows this too, at least he has been told for decades :
https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/Theses/AbabnehDissertation.pdf
“”” Climatic factors include temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and prevailing winds (Fritts 1976), while other factors include soil moisture,
fire history, nutrient availability, and parent-rock material (Fritts 1976; LaMarche 1975; Taiz and Zeiger 1996). The degree to which these parameters affect tree growth varies mainly with microsite characteristics, elevation, and whether an area is mesic, arid, or semiarid. “””

and (about stripbark pines in her study)
“””Unfortunately, it was not possible to unequivocally identify a clear climate signal with a linear relationship to radial growth, and so no reconstruction was developed.”””

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 11:57 am

So your authority is a PhD student, writing in partial fulfilment of the degree requirements. The first quote is just standard. That is why they do the calibration and testing. The second is from the second (of 3) substudy of her thesis. She just had a small sample from one location, so indeed a full reconstruction was going to be difficult (whatever the trees).

But in the third study, ahe says:
“In this research, I use a paleoclimatic model that is based on temperature inferences and precipitation reconstructions from tree-ring widths of bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California to help explain aboriginal subsistence-settlement in alpine villages of the White Mountains. Temperature inferences and precipitation reconstructions are compared visually and statistically with calibrated archaeological 14C dates.”

IOW, a reconstruction based on bristlecone pines.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 12:27 pm

>> But in the third study, a he says:

Are you claiming here that Ababneh published a temperature reconstruction of stripbark pines?
That is wrong!
Or are you talking about some other trees?
That would make your defense of Mann´s paper weirder then it currently looks like..
“Mann´s method is wrong, but there are trees” does not really cut it!

So, it remains established that Mann´s method is wrong and Mann used a bad proxy! If you dont like the newer PhD thesis, Graybill was very clear about it too https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/92GB02533 :
” It is notable that trends of the magnitude observed in 20th century ringwidth growth are conspicuously lacking in all of the time series of instrumented climatic variables that might reasonably be considered growth-forcing in nature”

The 2006 NAS panel stated that stripbark chronologies (i.e. the Graybill bristlecone chronologies) should be “avoided” in temperature reconstructions.

It is instructive so look at the data
https://climateaudit.org/2018/10/24/pages2k-north-american-tree-ring-proxies/
comment image
(that is also one of McIntyre´s many articles showing what happens when Mann omits the faulty proxy the hockey stick disappears. Mann knew this and did not disclose it, data torture indeed, I hope McIntyre takes Mann apart in court!)

ferdberple
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 12:48 am

Nick, training the PCA as was done was faulty statistics. It is an error commonly made in the social sciences. It seems logical but it generates faulty results (spurious correlations).

morfu03
Reply to  ferdberple
January 27, 2024 10:16 am

Just to clear here, this was not some training accident, but is a fundamental problem of Mann´s method!

ferdberple
January 27, 2024 1:03 am

“Selecting on the dependent variable” is one of the most common, bonehead statistical errors. It shows up repeatedly in climate science and all the social sciences as “amplification” or “calibration”. It looks completely logical but it is an error. The result is spurious correlations (false cause and effect).

Chris Hanley
Reply to  ferdberple
January 27, 2024 4:26 pm

But if Mann and co. had simply collected as many ancient tree core samples as possible and selected entirely at random they would not have got their hockey stick 🤔.

ferdberple
Reply to  Chris Hanley
January 28, 2024 1:48 am

Agreed random selection would not have has the statistical problem of selection bias.

ferdberple
January 27, 2024 1:33 am

“Decentered PCA”

That is a red herring. Decentering is not the issue. The issue is using the CO2 period as a filter for PCA. The so called calibration is selecting on the temperature dependency on CO2 which is a bogus method.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ferdberple
January 27, 2024 2:20 am

The training interval was 1902-1980. But then it has to pass the verification interval 1854-1901.

sherro01
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 3:03 am

Thank you, Nick. And there are several publications to which you can link to show the mathematical results of such training and verification?. You and I know that these procedures have subjective elements that are seldom described as subjective and hence capable of error.
An anecdote. In my early CSIRO job, just graduated, I was handed several sheets of results of a factorial experiment, told to find Ronald Fisher’s text book and conduct a manual Analysis of Variance. These days peope can have a program to do the job on a computer somewhere, a process that usually lacks the learning of why the calculation was done in a particular way and what its limitations are. Same token, we encouraged field explorers to know how to navigate the wilderness without GPS in case of flat batteries, we encouraged hand-drawn and coloured maps for years after computer mapping aids were easy.
Remember those times?
Geoff S

morfu03
Reply to  sherro01
January 27, 2024 10:19 am

He does not need to, we already know that the algorithm is bad!
It has been tested and published!
Just stop using it already!
Oh and of course withdraw/correct any publication using it!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  sherro01
January 27, 2024 10:34 am

Geoff,
Mann’s Nature paper (MBH98) is a good starting point, especially the methods section.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 12:29 pm

Followed by the Wegman report showing how the method is wrong!
As you (Nick Stokes) already posted:
“using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick”

Asked and answered!

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 12:54 pm

You keep deliberately misrepresenting. My full para describing Wegman was:
Their most famous bit was the claim that using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick, and they showed 12 examples of this happening. But behind the scenes, what they had done was run 10000 red noise instances, and selected the 100 that looked most like hockey sticks. Their 12 were chosen from thta set.”

Plus what you deliberately and persistently overlook – none of this describes the actual reconstruction, which is not affected. Only the artificial intermediate PC1. Wegman insisted that he couldn’t be expected to do a recon, being too thick to notice that McI had already done it.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 27, 2024 4:12 pm

Like I wrote: Asked and answered!

>> You keep deliberately misrepresenting.
Is a lie! I was even quoting you!

>> My full para describing Wegman was:
Yes, for everybody to see, the faulty algorithm does something it should not do!

>> Plus what you deliberately and persistently overlook
Is another lie, I wrote:
I quote one of my answersn:
“””
Since you are talking methods here, you have to test the method with good data, [..] You don´t seem to debate this (which would be silly)!

Instead you wiggle into what happens when a bad method is used with bad proxies.. nothing interesting, it´s just a bad idea!
“””

I really think only very silly people defend an analysis with faulty data! You should know better, but the evidence I presented is

  • your quote showing that the algorithm is bad
  • Ababneh, Graybill and the NAS 2006 report having a beef the stripbark proxies (as well as the data for all to see a few posts back)

It is interesting that you somehow try to change the burden of proof! Mann did analyzes the data without that faulty proxy and the hockey stick disappears. It is unethical that he did suppress that fact in his article!

Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 4:32 pm

Nitpick Nick is another closet marxist for whom the ends justify any means.

morfu03
Reply to  karlomonte
January 27, 2024 5:51 pm

No amount of nitpicking can help supporting this view!!

  • your quote showing that the algorithm is bad
  • Ababneh, Graybill and the NAS 2006 report having a beef the stripbark proxies (as well as the data for all to see a few posts back)

And one of the first comments to this post is one of mine quoting McShane and Wyner:
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]
“””

So with that we have a faulty algorithm and (Nick Stockes agreed to that!), bad data and even if both of that were not a problem there is the question if the selected data is representative for the question.

At this point you can ask, what did they do right with that publication? They wrote their names on it so you can held them accountable!
Bradley is already trying to blame Mann for this analysis, but he is as accountable for the numerous mistakes made in the publication as is Mann! He should be questioned for his admission that he didn´t check the mathematics of an article he is co-author! He lent his fame, but of course now suffers the blame too!
And Hughes was Ababneh´s PhD supervisor and knew fully well about the problem´s of stripbark proxies not representing the temperature!
There is no believable way that not ALL three of them knew that this analysis is Bullshit! (Mann hid one without those trees and as a result without hockey stick shape in his censored directory, I am guessing they will talk about that tomorrow)

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 27, 2024 7:22 pm

Nick Stockes agreed to that!”

Lie!

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 7:37 am

“But behind the scenes, what they had done was run 10000 red noise instances, and selected the 100 that looked most like hockey sticks.”

Poor reasoning Nick: whatever happened “behind the scenes” does not invalidate the fact that 12 examples of red noise generating a “hockey stick” were indeed found and presented . . . just as was claimed.

morfu03
Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 28, 2024 11:33 am

Wait, maybe we can just say the algorithm is “just a little bit wrong”!
This way Nick Stokes has invented a new mathematical thing!
Before him there were only right and wrong algorithms, but this one is “just a little bit wrong” which is a completely novel way to look at things!

Before him only scammers and button feeders used terms like that, but now it can enter the world stage! Possible he gets invited to talk and prestigious societies about this and maybe he wins a Nobel price! How hard can that be with ideas like that?

Or of course it is just bullshit and Nick Stokes knows it well!
After all he also claims to be a mathematician!
Uh, here is a serious question not to post empty thins like “Nick Stockes agreed to that!”
Lie!”
and waste everybody’s time here!
Does anybody ever seen a more condemning verdict about a method by Ian Joliffe than this one? (It might be worthwhile to know who that man is to understand how bad that really is!)

Nick Stokes
Reply to  morfu03
January 28, 2024 12:14 pm

and waste everybody’s time here!”
To save time, don’t lie.

It might be worthwhile to know who that man is to understand how bad that really is!”
It might. Then you’d know that his name is actually Ian Jolliffe. You can tell who is getting their stuff direct from McIntyre from that mis-spelling.

But trhere is no evidence that Jolliffe actually looked at the effects of Mann’s algorithm. He just dismisses it as something that he doesn’t teach in his class.

MarkW
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 4:01 pm

To save time, don’t lie.

Good advice. BTW, are you still claiming that wind and solar are cheap because wind and sun are free?

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 29, 2024 8:54 am

You can tell who is getting their stuff direct from McIntyre from that mis-spelling.

You have spelled his name with one l in this very comment section, Nick.

The virtue that Joliffe has failed to grasp is that the short period is one for which you actually have an average over that period for every proxy. Truly centered PCA would require an average back to 1400 for every proxy, and they don’t have that.

And your claim is still nonsensical. The contentious North American ITRDB PCs going back to 1400 were calculated from 70 tree ring chronologies, all of which have data back to 1400 or earlier. Nothing stopped Mann from doing “truly centered PCA.”

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ctyri
January 29, 2024 12:55 pm

You have spelled his name with one l “
I wasn’t the one claiming “to know who that man is”

 The contentious North American ITRDB PCs going back to 1400 were calculated from 70 tree ring chronologies, all of which have data back to 1400 or earlier. Nothing stopped Mann from doing “truly centered PCA.””

The ITRDB PCs were only a small part in the whole reconstruction. The other indicators diminished as in the section I displayed from MBH99.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 29, 2024 1:45 pm

The ITRDB PCs were only a small part in the whole reconstruction. The other indicators diminished as in the section I displayed from MBH99.

They were not a small part, but that’s irrelevant. It’s not like ice core data from the Andes or whatever stopped Mann from using conventional PCA on the tree ring data.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 28, 2024 12:05 pm

If you take 10000 instances of red noise, without any MBH processing, and select the top 100 according to McIntyre’s HS index, then you’ll get hockey sticks too.

morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 1:12 pm

It is not the question what I can do, but what Mann did!

And there we have
the Wegman report wrote that ” using Mann’s methods even red noise input would generate a hockey stick” (your words)Graybill stripbark pines are not temperature proxies and shouldn’t be used in that matter according to the NAS 2006 reportand a spurious proxy selection procedureAs Mc Shane and Wyner write :
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]”””

Altogether solid published criticism, which makes that publicaiton indefensible, as Nick Stokes keeps on showing!
You got it all wrong, Nick Stokes! Mann´s decentered PCA method is uniquely bad! And “just a little bit wrong” as you may call it..
And I am NOT the one who needs to lie baout it!

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 29, 2024 9:44 am

“If you take 10000 instances of red noise, without any MBH processing, and select the top 100 according to McIntyre’s HS index, then you’ll get hockey sticks too.”

Please provide proof of that statement.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 29, 2024 10:23 pm

OK. Here is a plot from here of 12 instances of PC1’s of random noise, calculated with centered differencing. They should not have HS look; that is the point of Wegman’s 12 tableau with short-centered mean. But they have been subjected to McI’s HS 1% filter, so yes, hockey sticks is what you see:

comment image

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 30, 2024 8:08 am

“OK. Here is a plot from . . . so yes, hockey sticks is what you see:”

So, you seriously want to assert in front of the discerning WUWT audience that any single one of the 12 “instances” that you have given is in any sense similar in features to the infamous Mann “hockey stick” graph?

Seriously???

For your information (and it’s quite obvious you need the lecture), a hockey stick is characterized by a relatively flat linear “handle”, a fairly sharp break point (i.e., radius) and <90° turning to a “blade” extension, and the blade itself being relatively linear. In this sense, Mann’s graph appears to resemble a hockey stick laying somewhat flat on its handle on the left side with the blade turned upward on the right side.

To help you out in seeing how badly you missed presenting any “hockey stick”-like graph in your 12 cherry-picked examples, I’ve attached the original Mann, Bradley & Hughes [1999] hockey stick-like graph that is central to the above article and Mann’s trashing of scientific data and ethics (graph extracted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph_(global_temperature) ).

BTW, thank you for providing today’s comedy . . . I knew you had it in you!

MBH_Hockey_Stick
Nick Stokes
Reply to  ToldYouSo
January 30, 2024 12:27 pm

I’ve attached the original Mann, Bradley & Hughes [1999] hockey stick-like graph that is central to the above article”
That is not the original. The MBH1999 paper was in black and white. PAGES2K, as marked on the right axis, was not even thought of until ten years later.

My examples were cherry picked; that is the point. So were Wegman’s, by HS index, in the same way. My examples were not intended to emulate MBH98. They were intented to emulate what Wegman showed as supposed proof that MBH methods would produce a hockey stick. He said it, not me. And here is what he showed:

comment image

a fairly sharp break point (i.e., radius) and &lt;90° turning to a “blade” extension”

In fact, Mann’s proxy results did not show that, nor would you expect them to. The recon finished in 1980, and a lot of proxies didn’t get that far. The proxy method was never intended to tell you about recent times; it was to tell about the blade – how it was before we had instrumental data. The blade itself is much better attested by modern instruments.

Here again are Mann’s results, as plotted and verified by Steve McIntyre

comment image

Blade?

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 30, 2024 12:59 pm

 it was to tell about the blade”
I mean, of course, handle.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 11:58 am

Nick,
if you had bothered to consult the Wiki link I provided, you would see the that title of the associated graph I attached to my post states the following, verbatim:
The original northern hemisphere hockey stick graph of Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999, smoothed curve shown in blue with its uncertainty range in light blue, overlaid with green dots showing the 30-year global average of the PAGES 2k Consortium 2013 reconstruction. The red curve shows measured global mean temperature, according to HadCRUT4 data from 1850 to 2013″
(my bold emphasis added)
If you have a problem with this title, please take it up with Wikipedia . . . I’m sure they will give it all the attention that it deserves.

The hyperlink associated with “Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999” in this graph’s title is:
Mann, Michael E.; Bradley, Raymond S.; Hughes, Malcolm K. (1999), “Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations”, Geophysical Research Letters, 26 (6): 759–762, Bibcode:1999GeoRL..26..759M, doi:10.1029/1999GL900070
but you probably didn’t bother to notice this.

I intentionally referenced the Wikipedia article containing that graph instead of the MBH99 paper as I do not believe in propagating the scientific malfeasance and garbage presented by the MBH paper (here I’m making a exception to emphasize my point), but moreover because the Wikipedia article contains a discussion (albeit biased) of the details and history of the Mann “hockey stick” saga, as a reference for all WUWT readers.

However, since the Wiki graph (with its extra data overlay) bothers you —and in preparation for what’s to be said below—I’ve extracted directly from the above-cited MBH99 paper the infamous hockey stick graph as it was published as Figure 3(a) in that paper, and it is attached. Please note that this graph covers the years 1000 to 1998 AD.

And, yes, for your benefit, the Wiki reference specifically refers to the “blade” portion of the hockey stick in its second paragraph. And contrary to what you assert, I do believe the blade end of the attached MBH99 graph is quite easy to discern.

However, I notice that your posting of “Figure 1. NH Temperature Index” “as plotted and verified by Steve McIntyre“, which you claim “are Mann’s results” has a x-axis spanning only 1400–1980 AD. The result of your posted “Figure 1” graph having a greatly expanded x-axis (time axis) compared to that in the attached MHB99 graph is to make the break and rise in temperature anomaly appear much more gradual. Also, the result of your posted “Figure 1” graph terminating at 1980 compared to the MHB99 graph continuing to 1998 is reduce the apparent magnitude of rise in the “blade” portion of graph. Thus, your final question “Blade?” is see to be nothing more than lack of comprehension on your part or a sophomoric attempt at misdirection.

Finally, as to your back-peddling statement:

” . . . proof that MBH methods would produce a hockey stick. He said it, not me.”

I need only quote from your above post of January 29, 2024 10:23 pm:

“OK. Here is a plot . . . so yes, hockey sticks is what you see.

(my bold emphasis added)

MBH99_Hockey_Stick
morfu03
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 9:55 am

I fail to see your point of this line of arguments!
Are you saying that Mann´s method does not data mine?
That would be wrong!

Are you trying to say there are other ways to data mine?
That is correct, but irrelevant (until we start looking into Mann´s later publications)

How long are we supposed to look at each of those pictures using other mehtods, before we can conclude:
Yeah Mann´s method is bad, just Wegman said?

Reply to  Nick Stokes
February 1, 2024 3:14 am

If you take 10000 instances of red noise, without any MBH processing, and select the top 100 according to McIntyre’s HS index, then you’ll get hockey sticks too.

Probably. But if you a select them with correlated recent “warming” then they’ll all be hockey sticks.

Mr.
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 10:05 am

Nick, how would you go with this approach –

instead of using your expertise to defend all aspects MBH98’s science from all critics, try applying your expertise to investigating the flaws in MBH98, as the Scientific Method requires.

Remember Nick, as a scientist, you’re a referee, not a quarterback playing on the home-side team.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Mr.
January 28, 2024 12:34 pm

I investigated Mann’s technique. By so did McIntyre. He ran with Mann’s, and with centered differencing (or the best approximation to it that he could). And he got the same answer. The paper is here. The key graph showing that it makes no difference, is agaih:

comment image

Gino
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 29, 2024 1:54 pm

I don’t thinks those charts show what you claim they show, given there is a significant difference in starting point and trend prior to 1700.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Gino
January 29, 2024 2:51 pm

The difference in starting point is due to McIntyre erasing the Gaspe cedars 1400-1450, as the second bar shows. But “prior to 1700”? The argument has been about MBH creating hockey sticks, ie the modern warming. But McI has that exactly the same.

Gino
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 12:59 pm

No nick, the discussion is about the suitability of the methodology used by Mann et al. and the scientific integrity of the authors (you know, the reason for the OP and all of this discussion). And, specifically the ability of that model to…IN YOUR OWN WORDS… ” know about the reconstructed NH temperature.”

Abstract
The differences between the results of McIntyre and McKitrick [2003] and Mann et al. [1998] can be reconciled by only two series: The Gaspé cedar ring width series and the first principal component (PC1) from the North American tree ring network. We show that in each case MBH98 methodology differed from what was stated in print and the differences resulted in lower early 15th century index values. In the case of the North American PC1, MBH98 modified the PC algorithm so that the calculation was no longer centered, but claimed that the calculation was “conventional”. The modification caused the PC1 to be dominated by a subset of bristlecone pine ring width series which are widely doubted to be reliable temperature proxies. In the case of the Gaspé cedars, MBH98 did not use archived data, but made an extrapolation, unique within the corpus of over 350 series, and misrepresented the start date of the series. The recent Corrigendum by Mann et al. denied that these differences between the stated methods and actual methods have any effect, a claim we show is false.

I would suggest getting a 300 year temperature decline wrong is enough to hint that the model is not very good and the obfuscation and evasion by the authors is damning.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Gino
January 31, 2024 3:19 pm

You are quoting the Abstract of McIntyre’s paper. But all it says is something about the intermediate PC1, and the issue of Gaspe cedars. The latter is not an issue of method; it is typical of McIntyre’s auditor approach. He said that 50-year data set to 1450 had 4 missing values (which Mann interpolated), so it has to go. Nothing else wrong with the data. But this is the opposite of science:

  1. 46 years out of 50 contain real information. If you are really searching for knowledge rather than gotchas, you’ll learn from it.
  2. There is no way that any reasonable value assigned to those 4 missing years could have produced the big effect that McIntyre created by leaving them out.

“ihe scientific integrity of the authors”

How about the scientific integrity of McIntyre and Wegman. In the Wegman report, a main feature was this plot:
comment image

One of the most compellinbg illustrations… he says, and the narrative about Mann’s method creating hockey sticks out of red noise has been repeated endlessly. What he doesn’t tell you is that they did 10000 runs with red noise, but picked from that the 100 that look most like hockey stick (HS index). Then they select the 12 to show from that 1%.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 3:50 pm

You are quoting the Abstract of McIntyre’s paper. But all it says is something about the intermediate PC1, and the issue of Gaspe cedars. The latter is not an issue of method; it is typical of McIntyre’s auditor approach. He said that 50-year data set to 1450 had 4 missing values (which Mann interpolated), so it has to go. Nothing else wrong with the data. But this is the opposite of science:

46 years out of 50 contain real information. If you are really searching for knowledge rather than gotchas, you’ll learn from it.

There is no way that any reasonable value assigned to those 4 missing years could have produced the big effect that McIntyre created by leaving them out.

Of all 400+ proxy records, this outlier was the only one Mann decided to manipulate in this way. McIntyre spotted the cherry picking and undid it.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ctyri
January 31, 2024 4:10 pm

 this outlier was the only one Mann decided to manipulate in this way

Nonsense again. Like all datasets, there are many missing values, which are infilled. Gaspe ws not an outlier. McIntyre just invented a rule about when you can do it and when you can’t. And discarded a whole lot of good information for no reason. He isn’t interested in making use of what the data is telling us. He is only interested in the auditor’s gotcha.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 4:19 pm

It was the most hockey-stick shaped series with data back to 1400 (except that it didn’t go back 1400), so yes, it was an outlier. And again, it was the only proxy record that was extrapolated back in time. McIntyre correctly undid the Mannipulation.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ctyri
January 31, 2024 4:32 pm

It was the most hockey-stick shaped series”
Hardly relevant, if true. McI erased the years 1400-1450.
And again, it was the only proxy record that was extrapolated back in time.”
Again, if true, hardly relevant. The years 1400-1403 were missing. That doesn’t justify discarding 1404-1450.
As Mann said, even if they posted a recon back to 1404 rather than 1400, it wouldn’t make nearly the difference that McI’s botch made.

ctyri
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 11:39 pm

if true

It is true, and you would have known this if you had looked at the data.

Again, Mann “deleted” proxy data the same way McIntyre did, except for Gaspé. McIntyre correctly excluded the one proxy record that Mann cherry-picked.

Gino
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 4:59 pm

CHAIRMAN BARTON: Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman’s report?

DR NORTH: No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the claims are made, doesn’t mean they are false.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Gino
January 31, 2024 7:02 pm

From the North report:

“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pro- nounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprec- edented during at least the last 2,000 years. Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward. “

In 2006, of course, neither Dr North nor congress knew about the shenanigans of plagiarism and the hidden preselection of allegedly random hockey stick shapes, nor had they been told about the MM2005 paper which showed that changing the centering made no difference.

Gino
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 5:01 pm

“He said that 50-year data set to 1450 had 4 missing values (which Mann interpolated)”

The data was filled in at the beginning of a dataset, outside of the known data range….that is extrapolation.

Gino
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 31, 2024 5:53 pm

you know this whole line of “what aboutism” started sounding really familiar,

and now I know why. “One trick nick” at it again….

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/01/mcintyre-reverse-engineering-a-hockey-stick-shows-bogus-methodology/

Nick Stokes
Reply to  Gino
January 31, 2024 7:13 pm

The thing is, people here greatly condemn Mann’s science and statistics, about which they don’t really have a clue. If you ask why they think that, they say, well, Mcintyre said…

So it’s relevant.

sherro01
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 10:05 pm

Nick,
Thankyou, but do you think that I have not read MBH several times over already?
Geoff S

ferdberple
Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 1:04 am

So Mann used thermometer data to confirm thermometer data. Same problem. Selecting on the dependent variable. Thermometers being dependent on CO2.

sherro01
January 27, 2024 11:24 pm

Good fortune allowed me to conduct science (successfully) in the period 1960-1990, a time in which science flourished in a spirit of cooperation, achievement and mutual respect between scientists. We saw Man on the Moon and more.
 
In those times, a legal case like this would have been unlikely to happen. In those golden times, if there was a problem with some science, the more usual response would be offers from others
to help. Sadly, that attitude has been swept aside since the late 1990s by conflict, antagonism and growing disrespect of science by the public. I can even see “hate”, a troublesome trait, expressed by some of the trial participants.

The present case of Mann vs Stein has opportunity to reverse the present decline, to put respect back into the social picture. It is, in my opinion, unlikely to do this because in a trial by
jury difficult concepts tend not to be understood adequately. How can a jury be
wise about matters like the weighting of components in a PCA, when mathematicians
and statisticians have not settled their differences?
 
Thankfully, the Judge appears to have informed himself of matters like the Daubert Standard that provides a systematic framework for a trial court judge to
assess the reliability and relevance of expert witness testimony before it is
presented to a jury. This might be reflected in his final directions to the jury, before they gather to decide.

It is not for me as a distant outsider the try to tell the Judge what to do. All that I can contribute is some years of experience (including management of some past Australian cases before our highest court) and a good memory of the “Golden Years” and their benefits.

If I can be allowed to state a few preferences, they would include at least these three:

The Judge might consider asking the jury to distinguish between evidence that is vague, even misleading, as opposed to crisp, direct and relevant. An example would be to go beyond the Mann “I wash my hands” evidence that co-authors selected the data for the MBH hockey stick, when it was Mann’s deletion of parts of the selected data that was promptly criticised by others.

The Judge might consider that the evidence that some science was fraudulent is more important than who claimed fraud and how it was asserted. Fraud can approach a yes/no state like pregnancy; it need not matter who the father was. Long time readers of Climate Audit might like me, be convinced that Stephen McIntyre has shown many instances of fraudulent science in such unequivocal detail that the Daubert Standard is satisfied.

Finally, the Judge might consider recommending future actions that will reduce some of the harm being done to science by this case. He might recommend that the validity of the hockey stick findings be formally tested after 25 years of argument on many platforms. Simply, there are recorded criticisms of defined aspects of the hockey stick science. Many criticisms describe what “should have” been done to avoid the criticism. Surely, it is not beyond the wit of top US science administrators to assemble a team in the neutral corner to repeat the Mann, Bradley & Hughes work with the “should haves” included; then to show the results. A by-product might be the writing and publishing of better official guidelines for the required standards of conduct and reporting of science, such as requirements to report validation tests, to provide copies of original data, to fully detail estimation of uncertainty of measurement, to report sub-experiments in the work that failed to produce the expected result as well as those that did; and so on. There is too much sloppy science, of the types that people like Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman has made the subject of books.
Geoff S

Reply to  sherro01
January 28, 2024 7:29 am

“Surely, it is not beyond the wit of top US science administrators to assemble a team in the neutral corner to repeat the Mann, Bradley & Hughes work with the “should haves” included; then to show the results.”

Surely, you overestimate/misplace the objectivity, capabilities and motivations of “top US science” administrators.

The supporting evidence for this misfeasance and malfeasance of office has been amassed over at least the last 25 years, but unlike Mann they will never be brought to trial.

sherro01
Reply to  sherro01
January 28, 2024 8:35 am

My apologies. Steyn, not Stein.
Auto correct again. Of course I know the correct spelling.
Geoff S

Mr.
Reply to  sherro01
January 28, 2024 9:52 am

Crap science like Mann’s would sink without trace if it didn’t have the “vested interests” political activism backing.

Cleaning the academic stables of ideological / political influences is the Hurculean task that must be undertaken.

Reply to  sherro01
January 28, 2024 12:04 pm

Steyn is valiantly trying to get the hockey stick put on trial in this case but it isn’t the central part of the case at all. Mann cannot prove that Steyn/Simbergs articles caused him any damage alone as the media was abuzz with many similar articles saying the same thing at the time and Mann cannot prove that his grants were affected and not other departments. Whether the hockey stick was fraudulent may not be settled here.

ferdberple
January 28, 2024 1:14 am

Google: “selecting on the dependent variable”. It sounds like such a good idea. Only look at sick people to “amplify” or “calibrate your study of some medicine.
Only look at thermometer data to “calibrate” or “amplify” your tree rings.
It is bogus math. It is the same mistake that said the countries that eat the least fat have the lowest heart disease. It is the bogus math that is causing huge amounts of diabetes.

Nick Stokes
Reply to  ferdberple
January 28, 2024 1:31 pm

 Only look at sick people to “amplify” or “calibrate your study of some medicine.”

Which is, of course, exactly what they do. They don’t test a chemotherapy med, say, on random people. They test it on those they think might benefit from it. In the same way, they don’t look at trees in England. They go to places like Siberia and White Mountains, where temperature is likely to be a limiting factor. Th at practice long predates Mann.

You have to calibrate to get the proportionality constant between tree rings and temperature. If you can’t establish one, you can’t use the tree. No choice.

Reply to  Nick Stokes
January 28, 2024 4:10 pm

Nitpick Nick tilts at the windmills again, trying to prop up the tree thermometers.

What’s the real measurement uncertainty intervals of these, El Nicko?

ferdberple
January 28, 2024 1:23 am

Whether or not Mann used “Selecting on the dependent variable” on purpose is an interesting question.
If you have statistics training you should know about the problem and how hard it is for the lay person to understand because it defies common sense. I expect it is the sort of thing that would not be caught by peer review.
Human beings are easily fooled and the easiest person of all to fool is yourself.

ferdberple
January 28, 2024 1:46 am

The training interval was 1902-1980. But then it has to pass the verification interval 1854-1901.
=======
Nick,

I note you have not disputed that “calibration is a form of selection bias. Likely to lead to spurious correlations.

I contend that it is a form of selection on the dependent variable, wearing lipstick and high heels.

Others have called it circular reasoning, because it is a form of feedback. You are using the thermometer data to selectively amplify the signal.

But your feedback data is displaced in time, scaled, and trimmed, leading to distortion of the underlying signal. This distortion invalidates the result.

Reply to  ferdberple
January 28, 2024 5:33 am

Then after all this “training”, the models are nothing more than linear extrapolations along whichever CO2 growth curve the operators prefer. This is another reason why averaging the outputs of diverse models is bogus.

Plus the historic LIG temperature data before 1900 isn’t reliable for these purposes because of innate systematic errors they cannot “adjust” away.

Both of these problems were revealed by Pat Frank, BTW.

Mr.
Reply to  karlomonte
January 28, 2024 9:41 am

Yes, it’s like that grouse hunter in the woods in grizzly country who comes across a steaming 1-foot high pile of berry-laden dung,

and looks UP expecting to find his prey . . .

ferdberple
January 28, 2024 1:56 am

Years ago I read that 25% of the population have an aptitude for math. The other 85% do not.

Reply to  ferdberple
January 28, 2024 5:24 am

Very much akin to the old joke about how 10 out of 9 dentists prefer […].

Mr.
Reply to  ferdberple
January 28, 2024 9:28 am

Seems about right.

ebarnes55
January 29, 2024 2:52 pm
MichaelMoon
January 29, 2024 8:51 pm

This is part of the fraud of the Climate Change meme. Stokes continues to defend the MBH89 graph, which was flagrantly fraudulent as it purported to show tree ring data, but had thermometer records grafted in somewhere in the 1960’s, so a tree ring proxy graph which was not a tree ring proxy graph. BEST annilihated this , as did McIntyre.

Why do we re-litigate this?

Stokes is paid to lie.

Moon

wh
Reply to  MichaelMoon
January 30, 2024 12:01 pm

Nick Stokes tries to play the role of the “temperature data police” on this site. Whenever there’s a post about USCRN, hockey stick, uncertainty, UAH, etc., he’s here in a heartbeat!

Reply to  MichaelMoon
February 1, 2024 12:53 am

I thought old mate Nick would be in a DC courtroom called as an “expert witness” by Mann!

Neo
January 30, 2024 5:47 am

Michael Mann took the stand for the third day at the trial of his own making to start Week 3. Mark’s cross-examination continued in full force today. By the end of the day, Mann’s lawyers were clearly flustered as illustrated by their attempts to rebut Mann’s own testimony (in vain). C.S. Lewis (yes, that C.S. Lewis) once said, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.” We witnessed a lot of blame in Room 132 of the DC Superior Court today, so hell must be near.
https://www.steynonline.com/14056/the-emperor-has-no-clothes

DavsS
Reply to  Neo
January 30, 2024 10:09 am

Thanks for link.

It reports Mann as saying “[Judith Curry] is what I would a call a serial misinformer when it comes to science.”

Make of that what you will!

Reply to  Neo
January 30, 2024 2:05 pm

It also showed that Mann, whose statistical analysis of the hockey stick is supposedly beyond reproach, is unable to do a statistical analysis on his own grant funding or applications, getting 7 out of 12 completely wrong (one by over $3 million) between 2020 and 2023. Mann may end up getting sentenced for perjury at this rate.

morfu03
January 30, 2024 7:33 am

Anthony, the internet finds things.. maybe you can help!

  • Steyn is looking for a man who can testify under oath that he was staring at Mann angrily at Wegman´s on a Saturday uh was it summer 2009

I bet that stare ha nothing to do with Steyn´s article, but a very personal reason related to one of Mann´s insulting emails, a brother of a Nobel price winner maybe?

stevo
February 1, 2024 6:47 am

What a wordsmith and orator Mark Steyn is…such wit, such dripping sarcasm. I am in complete awe of his mastery of the written word and his ability to deliver same.