Will Steyn now Stick it the O’Sullivan Way to Climate Fraudster Michael Mann?

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.

I've seen that accusation before, but I've not seen any type of proof that would stand up to a court of law. And before you bring in ClimateGate and East Anglia, that's a separate issue totally unrelated to the work done by Mann in 1998. If you want to have a separate conversation about that, that will be fine, but I prefer to stick to the on topic. Now, if you have convincing evidence that Mann lied and hid the data - and by convincing proof, I mean documents, videos, audio recordings, so on - please feel free to link me.

Scientific proof is NOT required to "stand up in court," GAFreedom, it merely has to falsify the thesis. . . and when data that falsifies the thesis is systematically excluded from the presentation, not reported in the studies, and then actively hidden to prevent the contrary data FROM falsifying the thesis, that is serious.

In the mid 1990’s the Polar Urals were the place to be for interesting tree rings, but then as the data got updated and yielded a medieval warm period that Team AGW preferred to ignore, they moved their focus to the Yamal Peninsula. There was plenty of data to pick from, but that’s the point. They chose 10 data sets from 1990, and only 5 post 1995. Which seems curious as presumably there is no shortage of 20 year old trees on the Yamal Peninsula. As Ross McKitrick notes, a small sample may have been passable, but it appears that these trees were not selected randomly.
Thus the key ingredient in a lot of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series (red line above) depends on the influence of a thin subsample of post-1990 chronologies and the exclusion of the (much larger) collection of readily-available Schweingruber data for the same area.

All of this, and more, in the form of other dendrochronological data from OTHER trees from the same periods, in different locations, that DO NOT SHOW the same climatological (general temperature proxy) data, have been repeatedly been brought forth. . . many of which were close to the same trees that Mann claimed showed good proxy representations. . . But these don't. Why not?

. Many question if tree ring data are even good proxies for temperature changes. . . and since the data for twentieth century tree rings DO NOT correspond to temperature variation, why should it be assumed that it does for any previous era???

That wouldn't matter in dendrochronology. Replication would take care of that, and if it didn't, comparison of radiocarbon dating with the dendrochronology would resolve discrepancy.

What???? That has nothing to do with this issue. The issue has to do with the comparable WIDTH of the rings on the same tree—and using the widths to claim greater width as a proxy greater temperature—but it is well known that rings from near the roots grow considerably wider than do rings higher up the bole given similar conditions. . . but Mann did not adjust for the discrepancy, assuming the later sampled root rings, with their greater widths, meant warmer, than the earlier sampled, but narrower rings from higher in the same tree. Carbon-14 would not help on any of this. . . bad assumptions are bad assumptions.

One other issue that archaeologists are well aware of is that dendrochronological data is basically about merely counting rings of growing seasons. . . But the rings' thicknesses represent a relationship to Draughts, no necessarily temperature. That is a leap of logic that is hard to make.

Wegman failed to acknowledge that since the Medieval Warm Period (and the Little Ice Age) was a regional and not global phenomenon, they should not be included.

Say what?! Let's see, since the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice age—both of which occurred during the last 600 years—are "regional" and not "Global" affecting only the North American Continent and much of Europe, then they should be excluded from a data set and graph representing temperature claiming to show "global" temperature increases over 600 plus years using data COMPILED ONLY from the NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT and EUROPE??? You want to run that one by me again???? Do you realize how completely nutty that is?

Re: Liberal... Fine you be hot. But we have a LOT of experience with trolls who write and claim to be conservative exactly as you are. . . They were trolls. Time will tell. so far I see no difference between them and you. I would prefer to be wrong. . . But, frankly GAFreedom, the odds don't trend well for you.

@Valpal1:

Steyn has lawyers now, Kornstein and Platt, and they are really big guns.

Yup, if the motions are approved he should be good to go, so long as he doesn't argue with them.

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@FredZarguna:

That post is a month old, and like yours, is mistaken:

You missed his post from March 18th there, bud. Steyn only posted today, too. I don't think Ken White can see into the future from March 18th, do you? Or did you notice my commentary was before Steyn posted? I'm guessing not.

This claim is also completely false. Go over to http://climateaudit.org/and read the complete history of the Warmists' conspiracy to deny rightful FOIA [and the UK counterpart laws] over many years, to many different petitioners.

From Climate Audit's own FAQ: Earlier, Mann et al. made public the address for the data actually used in MBH98, rather than the address which they had previously provided us. The present articles reflect detailed study of this new material. In particular, we are now able to precisely diagnose the problems with the principal component series in MBH98, which previously were simply noted as being incorrect.

The public address for the data actually used in MBH98 is the link I posted previously. McIntyre fully agrees that this is the complete data set used by Mann in MBH98 and that it is complete. You can check this for yourself in previous articles on Climate Audit. I will go so far as to email McIntyre myself for verification and screenshot his reply. Do you require me to do that? I have absolutely no problem doing so.

Untrue. It wasn't true when Popehat first claimed and posted it 5 weeks ago, and it obviously isn't true now.

Steyn went pro se on January 24th. Several conservative and libertarian attorneys specializing in free speech issues offered their services pro bono between January 24th and March 24th, when he ren-engaged counsel according to his own documents. He refused all of those offers of help from other attorneys, before engaging Kornstein, Platt, et al., on his own. Those are matters of fact.

They are involved in a conspiracy, which is what the East Anglia email scandals were all about.

As I've said previously, East Anglia has nothing to do with MBH98. Separate issues, separate nations.

This isn't Daily Kos, DU, or some other dump website where you're used to posting, where you can just post crap. Keep up to date with the facts, or don't post at all. And Welcome to FreeRepublic, N00b.

My, such Christian behavior. Your greeting is noted and taken in the vitriolic spirit that it was intended. I turn the other cheek, as I am instructed to by God.

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@Swordmaker:

Scientific proof is NOT required to "stand up in court," GAFreedom, it merely has to falsify the thesis

So long as it is rigorously tested, peer-reviewed, and has repeated experimentation, I certainly agree. But any proof that DOES undergo that process WILL stand up in court, simply by virtue of having been tested and forged in the fires of scientific inquiry.

Many question if tree ring data are even good proxies for temperature changes. . . and since the data for twentieth century tree rings DO NOT correspond to temperature variation, why should it be assumed that it does for any previous era???

Well, with this question what you are essentially doing is stating that the science of dendrochronology is not accurate and cannot be relied upon, specifically the Uniformitarian Principle.

What???? That has nothing to do with this issue. The issue has to do with the comparable WIDTH of the rings on the same tree—and using the widths to claim greater width as a proxy greater temperature—but it is well known that rings from near the roots grow considerably wider than do rings higher up the bole given similar conditions. . . but Mann did not adjust for the discrepancy, assuming the later sampled root rings, with their greater widths, meant warmer, than the earlier sampled, but narrower rings from higher in the same tree.

Replication WOULD take care of this, as it involves sampling more than one stem radius per tree, and more than one tree per site. Obtaining more than one increment core per tree reduces the amount of "intra-tree variability", in other words, the amount of non-desirable environmental signal peculiar to only tree. Obtaining numerous trees from one site, and perhaps several sites in a region, ensures that the amount of "noise" (such as variations from where the sample is selected) is minimized.

This is also assisted by using the formula for Aggregate Tree Growth, in which any individual tree-growth series can be divided into an aggregate of environmental factors that affected the patterns of tree growth over time. This obviates the differential between selection in various locations of the tree.

One other issue that archaeologists are well aware of is that dendrochronological data is basically about merely counting rings of growing seasons. . . But the rings' thicknesses represent a relationship to Draughts, no necessarily temperature. That is a leap of logic that is hard to make.

...that would be very incorrect. It's more than counting rings. Specifically, it's R(t) = A(t) + C(t) + ϬD1(t) + ϬD2(t) +E(t), where A is the age-related growth trend due to normal aging processes, C is the climate that occurred during that year, D1 is the occurrence of disturbance factors within the forest stand, D2 is the occurrence of disturbance factors outside the forest stand, and E accoints for random processes not accounted for by the other variables. Ϭ indicates either a "0" or absence or "1" for presence fo the disturbance signal.

Say what?! Let's see, since the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice age—both of which occurred during the last 600 years—are "regional" and not "Global" affecting only the North American Continent and much of Europe, then they should be excluded from a data set and graph representing temperature claiming to show "global" temperature increases over 600 plus years using data COMPILED ONLY from the NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT and EUROPE??? You want to run that one by me again???? Do you realize how completely nutty that is?

If you look at the link to the MBH98 data that I posted, you will see the data was not compiled only from North America and Europe, but included data from all continents. And as I stated to FredZarguna, McIntyre states that the complete data set. Would you please provide your sources that the data set only covers North America and Europe, please?

Re: Liberal... Fine you be hot. But we have a LOT of experience with trolls who write and claim to be conservative exactly as you are. . . They were trolls. Time will tell. so far I see no difference between them and you. I would prefer to be wrong. . . But, frankly GAFreedom, the odds don't trend well for you.

Your insinuations and threats have been noted, sir. Etiquette and God forbid me response aside from denial of your claims on that matter.

I didn't miss any of Popehat's blogs. They aren't any more pertinent than the nonsense you've posted, since they are based on nothing more than speculations about Steyn's legal circumstances, which were nothing more than self-congratulatory bloviating, and in the event, not true.

As I've said previously, East Anglia has nothing to do with MBH98. Separate issues, separate nations.

More lies and distraction.

The Climategate emails proved that "The Team" engaged in a systematic conspiracy to deny publication to AGW skeptics, and to thwart the law with respect to FOIA requests, a pattern of behavior in which Mann himself participated. Your attempts to claim otherwise is typical of your leftist ilk, and interesting in light of your defense [by way of a supposed "non-defense"] of Mann, who himself has actually claimed that the East Anglia Whitewashes were in fact instances of commissions that "cleared" his name.

No such thing: "I am in the process of writing a post showing that Mann’s claim that he had personally been exonerated by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (report here) of a wide range of counts was also untrue. It’s so untrue that it’s hard to even make an interesting post of it."

href=http://climateaudit.org/2014/02/25/mann-misrepresents-the-uk-department-of-energy-and-climate-change/

http://climateaudit.org/2014/02/24/mann-misrepresents-the-uk-commons-committee/

http://climateaudit.org/2014/02/22/the-source-of-manns-doctored-quote/

As for the 2005 FAQ you think is dispositive of "something." Interestingly, it is: "Since then, and largely because of the effect of the original article, a great deal of new information about MBH98 has been made available. In July 2004, at the direction of Nature, Mann et al. published a Corrigendum, which included a voluminous archive on data and methods used in MBH98.

So Mann's methods and data were not "available for years." They were made available under pressure from Nature as a direct result of AGW skeptics and the force of FOIA requests, and not out of any scientific ethos.

Nice try, lefty.

Just randomly cherry-picking a very well-written comment, as I'm way over my head on this, BUT, here goes (emphasis mine):

"...the "Nature trick" was to augment the tree ring proxy data with real and reliable instrumental data in order to reconstruct the end series of the time averaging...

Reading this in plain every day English language, I just want to say I'm instinctively suspicious of "augmenting proxy data in order to reconstruct the end averaging".

Of course, I don't understand the nuances of these words in the scientific community, but a plain reading using commonly understood English words suggests that you can't "reconstruct" something that hasn't happened yet (?), "proxy" data means "stand-in evidence", and "augmenting" said data with some other measure predictions which might be deemed reliable but are not actual things adds something that is not there in fact...

Then throw in "the end averaging"...

So, why do they (or at least this scientist) talk this way? It makes me very suspicious that "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance (in plain language), then baffle them with B. S."...and by all means, let's swerve the national and global energy policy to accomodate the postulated coming warming...GO GREEN!! Windmills (never mind any birds, wildlife and domestic creatures), algae fuel (non-renewable and expensive), no more "dirty coal" (no more coal fired power plants - Obama did warn us), natural gas power plants and fuel, except not if fracking is involved, and by ALL means, more corn ethanol (despite it will ruin older car engines, costs a lot to process for refineries and at the pump, and critically reduces the available food crop)...and etc.!

Maybe this is all on the up-and-up, but it doesn't look that way to me, in "fly-over country"...I'm just saying we shouldn't be setting binding stringent policies on hypothesis (sic). YES, the climate is changing, yet again. So what else is new? LOL!

Excuse me, SIR! Dendrochronological studies, until Mann stuck his nose into it, did not assume your lovely formula as so important, especially the primacy of climate. That is an example of begging the question! petitio principii The ring pattern in a tree are created EVERY growing season. . . and the issue of how robust the ring is in any given season has more to do with the availability of water than temperature. Mann's confabulated the variation of tree rings widths with temperature variation due to climatological, I.e. TEMPERATURE variations, were NOT born out in studies of modern tree ring cores where KNOWN temperature variations had occurred! It was not even close to a significant correlation. Irrigation, snow pack, humidity, number of sunny days, length of the rainy season had far more impact on the width of the tree rings than any fluctuations in temperatures. The minor temperature changes that possibly could have been noted were lost in the noise of the other environmental inputs!

The deliberate exclusion of data from trees from the same areas and ages that DID NOT show the same results, and NOT including that exclusion, or the reasons for omitting these data, is still unexplained. . . and the cover-up and efforts to hide it. . . Unexcusable. The impermissible fabrication of data to extend it backwards to reach the 1400 AD target date he needed to make data set "more robust" . . . Reprehensible. The addition of "real instrument temperature" to "adjust" modern tree core data when they didn't fit his theory. . . Unheard of fudging of data! Why should we believe this fraud who had the gall to claim a Nobel Peace prize for himself?

Great to see you in fine form, Swordmaker.

If you didn’t know anything else about AGW but the fact that advocates of the theory demand cessation of the use of coal in the US - but are mute about the frenetic rate of construction of coal-fired plants in China (and elsewhere in Asia) - you would know that it is a political ploy intended to damage liberalism.
By “liberalism” I of course mean what F.A. Hayek, writing in Britain during WWII, meant by the term. I.e., precisely the opposite of the fraudulent post-1930 American usage in which the term is a synonym for socialism.
Theodore Roosevelt was articulating liberalism, circa 1910, in his famous speech at the Sarbonne:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds
IMHO post-1930 “liberalism” is accurately defined by the perfect inversion of TR’s meaning:
It is the critic ; the man who points out how others could have done things better; who counts. The credit does not belong to the individual, who “didn’t do that,” and who falsely claims the credit implied in the status of ownership.
When put that way, it is should be obvious that the contempt which 1910 liberals (we) feel for “the MSM” derives from the fact that
It is journalists who “didn’t do that” - they have never even tried to, and can’t actually relate to anyone who ever actually even did try to, do anything. But what defines their nature - and what they therefore obsessively do - is criticize.
Having located the reason for the fact that journalism = socialism, we turn to the reason why the effect of the socialistic tendency inherent in journalism is and must be as homogenous and powerful as it is:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Hence we are reliably informed not only that the mere fact that journalists, as “people of the same trade," read each other’s output is a serious and fundamental problem for us, but that every organization of journalists must exacerbate that problem. All of which compounds the (as shown above, inherent) tendency of journalists to promote socialism. To promote, that is, an ideology whose inherent nature is a conspiracy against the (pre-1920 liberal) order which the Constitution defines as the public interest.
There are organizations, and then there are organizations. There is a “National Press Club,” and there is “The Committee to Protect Journalists,” and no doubt there are numerous other journalism organizations with high-sounding titles. But the true root of all organization of modern journalism is the wire service. Any and every wire service, without exception. But the granddaddy of them all is the Associated Press.

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
describes the aggressively monopolistic rise of the AP. And I have seen it credibly mentioned on the Internet that in 1945 the AP was found guilty of violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by SCOTUS. But it wouldn’t matter if none of that were true - it is the mere fact that it is an organization of journalists - an intimate association capable of instantaneously communicating with all of major journalism, and of giving direction to them all in a “stylebook” as to how things are to be expressed, what expressions are taboo, and what makes a good story - which makes it a mortal threat to the order (everywhere but America, and in America as well before 1920, called liberalism) which is the public interest.
In 1945 when the AP was held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, it was “too big to fail” due to the value then inherent in the conservation of transmission bandwidth, which was the legitimate mission of any wire service, in the communication of the news. But this is 2014, deep into the Internet era. This era is defined by technologies which practically eliminate the cost of the bandwidth which the transmission of the news requires - with or without the AP et. al.
It is one thing to speak, in frustration, of the homogeneous negativity of “the MSM,” and it is quite another to have the wit to finger “The Associated Press and its membership” as a single entity which is responsible for the industrial production of libel against any target it can “fix and freeze” as representative of the (pre-1920 liberal) order which is constitutionally mandated and which history has confirmed to be the public interest. IMHO the next person, or any recent person (e.g., George Zimmerman) or group (e.g., the Duke Lacrosse Team defendants) should launch a massive suit against "the Associated Press et. al” - alleging antitrust violation and RICO treble damages in the pattern of corrupt libel of themselves and of the constitutional order as a whole. And calling for damages sufficient to ruin the AP.
The Internet can disseminate the news, thank you very much. Claims of objectivity - not commendable efforts toward objectivity, but claims actually to be objective - are actually admissions of lack of objectivity about one’s own self. Such claims rebut themselves.

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