Free Republic

Good news! As I predicted four years ago, alarmist climate scientist, Michael Mann’s gambit of using the courts to silence debate about his faked “hockey stick” graph is backfiring spectacularly. 17 mainstream media outlets now agree Mann should put up or shut up.

Mark Steyn has decided to countersue Michael Mann for $10 million. The legal document reads like a drama. See below. FIRST COUNTERCLAIM 130. Plaintiff [Mann] has engaged in a pattern of abusive litigation designed to chill freedom of speech and to stifle legitimate criticism of Plaintiff’s work. He is currently suing Dr Tim Ball in British Columbia over a hoary bit of word play (“should be in the state pen, not Penn State”) applied to innumerable Pennsylvanians over the years. Having initiated the suit, Dr Mann then stalled the discovery process, so that the BC suit is now entering its...

UPDATE: it seems the language was lifted from a “Skeptical Science” web page, see below. Steve McIntyre had a busy day yesterday. While yesterday there was an incorrect story called “Michael Mann Faces Bankruptcy as his Courtroom Climate Capers Collapse“ being pushed by John O’Sullivan at Principia Scientific International (aka PSI and The Slayers) claiming Dr. Tim Ball had defeated Mann’s lawsuit, Ball confirms through communications with McIntyre yesterday that while stalled, Mann’s lawsuit is still very much on. Also, for those who don’t know, we’ve heard that Dr. Mann’s legal bills are being paid by the Climate Science Legal...

Well, I can't speak for Dr Mann or my co-defendants, but I want to put it in front of a jury - in part because I loathe "settling" and regard it as a malign and corrupting influence on the American "justice" system. Nobody's guilty or innocent any more, are they? It's all about the settling. But the pressure to "settle" means that, for a litigious goon like Dr Mann, simply launching suits relieves him of the need to win them. Nuts to that. He wanted this case, so he can have it and take it to a jury.

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...