Global Warming on Free Republic
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.
Oh, I thought it was Michael Mann the film/tv producer, and couldn’t figure out the connection.
True scientists want to know what's true, and understand that any worthwhile experiment or analysis is repeatable.
Worthless hacks say, "You won't take my word for it because you just want the world to be destroyed. You're so mean! Mean people suck!"
Global Warming on Free Republic
Ping for later enviro-weenie rebuttal.
Maybe Mr. Mann should’ve thought twice about throwing a rock at this particular hornet nest.
Ya think he’ll bring the stick??
I quit reading NRO around 2008.
Back then Lowry was slowly but surely embracing the man made Global Warming hoax.
It's a demand letter from his lawyer. I've read that it's greatly frowned upon in the legal community to send a demand letter and not follow up with a lawsuit if the demand isn't met.
Just after the Obama election in 2008, Rich Lowry wrote in a piece on NRO, that Republicans claimed that Obama was a socialist, but he, personally, never saw any evidence that Obama was a socialist. I gave up on NRO at that point. I still read it occasionally, but not like I used. I like Jonah Goldberg,and Stanley Kurtz, who used to contribute, but I can’t say much for Rich Lowry. He is indeed, a light weight.
LMBO!!!!
wonderful response from Rich—Wow!
Concerning the court case wherein ATI was attempting to get their hands on Mann’s e-mails archived at UVa, here is an update as of July 26:
http://www.atinstitute.org/american-tradition-institute-v-uva-and-mann-update/
With discovery, they’ll be able to crawl so far up Mann’s scientific butt that he’ll wish they had used an actual hockey stick.
Back then Lowry was slowly but surely embracing the man made Global Warming hoax.
He is indeed a lightweight.
You have both pegged Needle Nose Lowry correctly. Lowry makes ferrets look absolutely endearing with about the same amount of intellectual heft. His firing of John Derbyshire didn't make him look strong - it defined his weakness. NRO is a shadow of its former self with Ann Coulter's denouncement of "The Girly Men of National Review" still stinging in their ears. Why Steyn hangs around in The Corner is a mystery to me.
TS
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.