Michael Mann for giving him a bad name...
Posted on 08/22/2012 1:34:32 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
So, as you might have heard, Michael Mann of Climategate infamy is threatening to sue us.
Mann is upset — very, very upset — with this Mark Steyn Corner post, which had the temerity to call Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” The Steyn post was mild compared with other things that have been said about the notorious hockey stick, and, in fact, it fell considerably short of an item about Mann published elsewhere that Steyn quoted in his post.
So why threaten to sue us? I rather suspect it is because the Steyn post was savagely witty and stung poor Michael.
Possessing not an ounce of Steyn’s wit or eloquence, poor Michael didn’t try to engage him in a debate. He sent a laughably threatening letter and proceeded to write pathetically lame chest-thumping posts on his Facebook page. (Is it too much to ask that world-renowned climate scientists spend less time on Facebook?)
All of this is transparent nonsense, as our letter of response outlines.
In common polemical usage, “fraudulent” doesn’t mean honest-to-goodness criminal fraud. It means intellectually bogus and wrong. I consider Mann’s prospective lawsuit fraudulent. Uh-oh. I guess he now has another reason to sue us.
Usually, you don’t welcome a nuisance lawsuit, because it’s a nuisance. It consumes time. It costs money. But this is a different matter in light of one word: discovery.
If Mann sues us, the materials we will need to mount a full defense will be extremely wide-ranging. So if he files a complaint, we will be doing more than fighting a nuisance lawsuit; we will be embarking on a journalistic project of great interest to us and our readers.
And this is where you come in. If Mann goes through with it, we’re probably going to call on you to help fund our legal fight and our investigation of Mann through discovery. If it gets that far, we may eventually even want to hire a dedicated reporter to comb through the materials and regularly post stories on Mann.
My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else. If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country.
He’s going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world. In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn’t stopped him before.
DISCOVERY!
It means that our side gets to look in their documents.
Yes it does. I seriously doubt Mann will pursue this.
Michael Mann — another first-class embarrassment to Penn State University.
OUCH!
Fraudulent?
That hocky stick (and its pseudo-math) wouldn’t get a D in a womyn’s rights class.
It that clown really wants to fight, throw some math at him and watch the “Obamadork in the dark TOTUS” response.
Always call their bluff. They’re flailing. When a C&D letter is your best defense ... you’ve already lost.
SnakeDoc
I agree!
I think they will back off this pretty quick.
“It means intellectually bogus and wrong.”
Hey! Leave my name out of this!
Sigh. But that's why he won't do it.
They just called the bully’s bluff.
A true scientist would be excited about the prospect of sharing and explaining his data and analysis.
I think Michael Crichton (before he died) not only called Mann’s hockey stick chart bogus, he went further and stated the math and statistics behind it was not up to high school or college freshman level. Mann, Hansen and Jones didn’t go after him because they knew they would be destroyed in minutes.
DISCOVERY indeed. I’ll bet Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal
Foundation would be happy to help out having already been
involved with this topic,if memory serves me.
BRING IT!! Ya big dummy. I’m gonna buy some extra JollyTime
popcorn this week...
Michael Mann should be in a jail cell with Jerry Sandusky.
(( ping ))
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