Michael Mann pretends to be an involuntary ‘public figure’; Posturing for libel suit?

In today’s The-Scientist pity-me piece, Michael Mann goes out of his way to assert (he) is an “accidental” public figure. Why?

He and/or his lawyer may feel that his status as “public figure” will have adverse implications in the libel suit he filed against Mark Steyn and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

But Michael Mann has been a voluntary public figure since at least 1998. He first volunteered to be a public figure as early as April 22, 1998 when he appeared on NBC Nightly News to discuss his hokey stick study.

You can’t promote yourself and your work in the media and them claim “my critics turned me into a public figure.”

I love how Milloy refers to Mann's "hokey stick." In the comments, he says that it's intentional.

The rest of the article is a transcript of Mann's interview in 1998. Mann has cooked his own goose; his lawsuit against Steyn is toast.

I had to truncate the title of the blog post because it was too long to post here.

Dr. STEVEN SCHNEIDER (Stanford University): We’re performing an experiment in this lab. It’s a lab, however, that happens to be earth. And it’s not made up of–you know, of glass and wires; it’s made up of soils and animals and insects and us.
Actually, this is true. But America is a (excuse my lapsing into English rather than Newspeak) progressive country, seeing that its Constitution specifically authorizes an action by Congress “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” and its mission is to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Liberty means being able to do things differently. The authors of the Constitution styled it, “the great experiment.”

When an experiment has been under way for over two centuries, it’s a bit late in the day for people - people who style themselves as “progressives” - to notice that an experiment is under way. In any case, it does not any longer, if indeed it ever did, lie in the gift of the American government and the American people to stop it now. Seeing as China alone is building dozens of coal-fired electric power facilities even as you read this, it is a given that, globally, coal and atmospheric oxygen will continue to be converted to atmospheric CO₂ on at least the present scale for decades, no matter what.

Michael “Piltdown” Mann is one of the biggest frauds that has ever lived. He will be getting what's coming to him soon enough, along with his phony global warming cohorts and Penn State homo faculty. The entire charade will be exposed for what it is. I've seen his FORTRAN source code used to create the “hockey stick” graph. He actually had comments in the code where it was supposed to be plotting the points, to fudge the numbers because of so-called missing data. This was from the University of East Anglia email dump. I saw it with my own eyes. Michale Mann, you stinking fake phony fraud.

"From "The Scientist":
Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.
By Michael E. Mann| March 27, 2013

See:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/27/the-descent-of-manns-legal-standing/#more-82903

Since Mann said that two days ago, he has certainly changed his mind quickly.

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