RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wind-scam-of-wind-turbines/

Media personality and former Trump campaign operative Steve Cortes has released a video exposing the flaws of using wind turbines as an energy source, which he calls the “wind scam.” Filmed in New Mexico, which generates 38% of its electricity from wind, he revealed how wind turbines still need petroleum to function, and they’re bad for the environment, especially animals. Studies estimate 140,000 to 679,000 birds die annually in the U.S. due to them.

“They are one gigantic, expensive scam,” Cortes said. “There’s nothing clean about this,” they stated, as they cause pollution.

He showed a clip from the show Landman that went viral, featuring actor Billy Bob Thornton going off on a rant about wind turbines. Oil companies own them, Thornton said. He said they need a lot of oil for lubrication and winterizing. Additionally, “In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.” Thornton listed off multiple items in society that need oil, from everyday products to roads.

Cortes said the only thing Thornton got wrong was stating that we’ll run out of fossil fuels before we are capable of switching fully to clean energy.

Paul Gessing of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation spoke to Cortes about the dilemma. He said the Navajo Nation makes money from their natural gas reserves, but unfortunately lawmakers are trying to end this profitable venture for them. Gessing said wind turbines have a “devastating environmental impact” and leave “a huge footprint.”

Cortes criticized “oligarchs like Al Gore, who grew generationally rich off of selling us this giant myth.” He explained that “wind is by definition unreliable, even in the windiest places on the planet,” which “tend to be geographically very far away from the biggest energy consuming needs.” Cortes said wind cannot serve as a sole source of energy or even a primary source, it always comes down to coal or natural gas for the default system.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21664/war-planet-humanity-nature-wildlife

The system that many global elites and governments are planning for us is the totalitarian Communist system of China: The government and the globalist elites — while they continue flying on their private jets between their various mansions — will decide your means of transport, how much energy you are allowed to consume to heat your home, drive your car, and even how much you will be allowed to eat and drink — not to mention going on holiday or other “leisure.” Oh, and you will not be allowed to complain about it, because that would be “hate speech.”

In 2013, Sir David Attenborough, the renowned nature expert and one of the greatest filmmakers ever, famously declared humanity a pestilence.

“We are a plague on the Earth,” he postulated. “It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so.” His recommendation was that the world needed a smaller population. “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde [of people].”

The idea that humanity itself is the problem has only been reinforced by a mainstream media that can tend to overheat (such as here and here).

Humanity requires the growing of food and livestock; it needs energy to make necessary consumer goods and cars, and to heat homes, which must be built in the first place. The World Economic Forum (WEF), however, would prefer you to “own nothing and be happy.” Whatever you need, it added reassuringly, can be delivered by drone.

“We need to eat less meat,” said Jane Goodall, famous anthropologist and UN “messenger of peace,” in an interview with climate high priest Al Gore at a WEF meeting in 2020. “We need to stop land being used for cattle and for growing grain for the billions of animals that we keep in our intensive farms.” She stressed that if only the world was less populous and instead had the population of 500 years ago, none of that would have been a problem.

As humanity does not seem to have plans to disappear voluntarily, the unelected UN, its Agenda 21, and agencies such as the WEF and other global “elites,” have apparently decided that, by 2030, life should be dismal and dystopian. After depriving you of the right to ownership, they will tell you what to eat. Meat will become “an occasional treat, not a staple, for the good of the environment and our health.” In addition, as a result of “climate change,” the West will have to accept taking in up to a billion migrants. There will be “a global price on carbon” to “help make fossil fuels history.”

https://quadrant.org.au/

When coffeeing with a group of conservative friends as I do on Fridays, one of our number, Professor Emeritus Ivan Kennedy, said something to the effect that there were no scientific alternative theories to the IPCC’s explanation of global warming except for his.

I was taken aback. Surely, even within my limited knowledge, William Happer (Princeton) and Richard Lindzen (MIT) hypothesise that the effect of CO2 on warming progressively declines. Nobel Prize winner Dr John Clauser hypothesises that reflective cumulus clouds created by water vapour, engendered by modest warming, act as a thermostat to keep global temperatures down. You can read about it here if you wish. So what is going on?

Let me start by dismissing the canard that global warming is an invention. Sure, maybe the so-called ‘homogenisation’ of past land and sea temperature data has artificially steepened the warming record since the 1940s. But, for all that, the NOAA satellite data since the end of 1979 shows that the temperature in the sub-troposphere has trended up by about 0.7⁰C between December 1979 and December 2024. As this data has been compiled by Roy Spencer and John Christie (sceptical scientists) at the University of Alamba in Huntsville, we can safely assume it is trustworthy.

So the climate has warmed. Now should come the scientific fun. Competing theories jostling to best explain the data. No such fun. Blaming exploitative Western man has proved to be a sacrosanct hypothesis.

Sacrosanctity and science don’t mix. Many past theories propounded by scientific giants have eventually failed the test: Ptolemy’s geocentric theory of the solar system; Aristotle’s theory of gravity, even Newton’s. Yet a tenuous theory of the climate concocted by relative mediocrities, which hasn’t come close to accurately predicting global temperatures, is holy writ. Risible, except that political and celebrity buy-in is undoing progress wherever it results in the replacement of reliable with unreliable energy.  Think of Australia as a quintessential case study.

Happily, despite powerful and well-funded forces out to cancel dissenters, maverick scientists keep on stirring the pot. Which brings me back to Prof. Kennedy and his collaborators. Their hypothesis can be found here. In lay terms it goes like this:

The increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since the 1960s has been caused by warming not the reverse. Other things equal, emissions by mankind of CO2 are all absorbed by the land (hence the greening) and by the oceans. Thus, on this account, there is no material net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuel emissions. Ergo, such emissions cannot be the cause of warming. It is true that warming has occurred, and that atmospheric CO2 has risen. The underlying chain of events is as follows.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/18/what-if-the-foundation-of-the-climate-scare-was-a-calculated-lie/

Carbon dioxide, we’ve been told over and again, is the enemy that must be subdued if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. It is, however, a faulty premise. Physics, not politics, tells us that man’s CO2 emissions will not cause catastrophic climate change nor an increase in extreme weather.

“The common belief that CO2 is the main driver of climate change and the EPA Endangerment Finding assertion that ‘elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated’ to endanger the public health and welfare are scientifically false,” conclude the authors of a new paper.

Richard Lindzen and William Happer are not political hacks. They are serious researchers with extensive experience and robust academic backgrounds. Lindzen is emeritus professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Happer a Princeton University emeritus physics professor. What they have to say is important in a world that is sodden with climate-related myths and folk tales.

While Democrats and their leftist counterparts in other advanced nations have gone to war on carbon dioxide, Lindzen and Happer argue that cutting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and eliminating fossil fuel use “will have a trivial effect on temperature.”

How can they say this? After all, don’t 97% of scientists agree that humanity’s use of fossil fuels is causing our world to overheat? (They don’t, more on that later.)

Lindzen and Happer confidently make those statements because “unscientific evidence is the fundamental basis” behind the rush to net zero GHG emissions as well as the EPA’s claim that “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.”

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/net-zero-is-a-net-loser-for-democrats
It may be starting to dawn on at least some Democrats that their heavy bet on renewable energy and “net-zero” emissions has been a huge political loser.

Early last month, 35 House Democrats voted alongside their Republican colleagues to kill a law in California—a version of which has been adopted by 11 other states—mandating that all new car and truck models sold in the state would have to be “electric or otherwise nonpolluting” by 2035. The Senate later followed suit, with Michigan Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin breaking ranks to join the GOP in ending the mandate.

The Democratic response, at least outside California, was relatively muted. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer’s complaints about ending the EV mandate were mostly grounded in dull, procedural complaints about whether Congress had overstepped its powers. There wasn’t a lot of the screeching we’ve heard in recent years about how, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in 2019, the “climate crisis” was “the existential threat of our time.”

What a difference a few years makes. The “Green New Deal,” that much-ballyhooed proposal to essentially restructure the entire economy around renewable energy, is dead and buried. President Donald Trump is deregulating the energy sector, eliminating renewable energy subsidies as fast as he can, promoting fossil fuel production, and withdrawing from international energy agreements. And he’s doing so with little attention from the media or protests from Democrats.

So what gives? Why are Democrats retreating on an issue that was, until very recently, so central to their agenda?

I’ll tell you why: It’s because Americans, in poll after poll, and now election after election, have shown that their views on a rapid renewable energy transition oscillate between indifference and outright hostility.

Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37 percent of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19 percent thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.

These views are especially pronounced among the working-class (non-college) voters that Democrats are desperate to claw back from Trump. Given the four choices posed, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together, that’s a whopping 76 percent of the working class prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy over effects on the climate.

In a separate question, voters were most worried, by far, about the effects on energy prices from reductions in fossil fuels and increased use of renewables. And again, these concerns were more intense among working-class voters.

Unsurprisingly, given this pattern, it turns out that voters just don’t care very much about climate change, at least as a political issue. As part of that 2024 YouGov survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 15th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, and racial issues.

In fact, voters are deeply reluctant to put up with even minor changes to their energy bills to fight climate change.

When asked if they would be willing to pay $1 more to protect the climate, only 47 percent said yes, with a solid majority of the working class opposed to even paying that much. Raise the price to $20 and just 26 percent (21 percent among the working class) are willing to pony up the extra cash. Support keeps dropping as the price tag gets higher: Only 19 percent of voters said they were willing to spend an extra $40 a month, and a mere 11 percent said they’d be willing to pay another $100.

Consistent with these results, a September 2024 New York Times/Siena poll found that two-thirds of likely voters supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” And similarly, support for increasing fossil fuel production was particularly strong among working-class voters: 72 percent of these voters backed such a policy. Support was even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent).

And remarkably, the poll found support for fossil fuels was also strong among liberal-leaning constituencies: 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall.

In fact, the Times survey found substantial majority support for more fossil fuel production across every demographic group they measured: among all racial groups, in every region of the country, in cities and suburbs and rural areas, and regardless of education levels.

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So what have the Democrats gotten from their fervent embrace of climate catastrophism and renewable energy over the last decade? Not much.

Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries. But the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption increased only very modestly under Biden, from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent, just as it does in the world as a whole.

It’s just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed climate change commitments, energy realities forced it to preside over record levels of oil production, record natural gas production, and record liquid-natural gas exports. (The YouGov survey found that most voters were not aware that this actually happened during the Biden administration but, when informed that it did, there was a strongly favorable reaction.)

Democrats have not yet fully absorbed the implications of these shifts and how the tide has decisively turned against their energy policies. Sure, there is a modest cohort in the party that has bowed to political reality and supports scrapping EV mandates, but the overwhelming proportion of the party remains committed to the unrealistic and unpopular net-zero goals that drive its energy policy agenda. Blue-state governors continue to roll out ambitious renewable energy plans, along with lawsuits and legislation to recover “climate change damages” from fossil fuel companies.

This is madness. As the great Vaclav Smil has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

What is really needed is a program for energy abundance that prizes cost and reliability over maximalist climate change goals. Yet most Democrats still seem blithely unaware of the fundamental lack of support from voters for their current approach. You’d think the massive April 28 blackout of Spain and Portugal’s renewables-dependent electricity grid would encourage them to hit the pause button on those plans before such a disaster hits the United States, which would completely discredit the renewable energy push.

There is, however, a politically sound way for Democrats to fight climate change. And it involves taking a page from the Obama administration, which adopted the “All-of-the-Above” energy strategy, aimed at achieving “a sustainable energy-independent future” through “developing America’s many energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas.”

The YouGov survey shows that 71 percent of voters still approve of this approach, strongly favoring the U.S. using a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and renewable energy. Only 29 percent preferred a strategy that looks to phase out fossil fuels completely.

What voters want—and need—is abundant, cheap, reliable energy. So when Democrats advocate for something that seemingly runs counter to that, they will lose elections. No amount of effort to tie every natural disaster to climate change is likely to generate the support needed for what is sure to be a lengthy energy transition.

Climate change is a serious problem, but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an all-of-the-above strategy, energy must continue to flow into American homes. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

Democrats, hopefully, are starting to get the message: that it’s time to cast off the party’s delusions and meet energy realities—and voters—where they are.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-6-4-can-anyone-save-new-york-from-its-coming-self-inflicted-climate-and-energy-disaster

New York State has officially ordained the destruction of its electricity system and its economy with a mad dash to energy utopia, as prescribed by a 2019 statute called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The Climate Act mandates a completely unachievable 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, with even more draconian mandates following in quick succession thereafter. New York City has piled on with its own fantasy energy statute called Local Law 97, mandating, among other things, forced conversion to electric heat by 2030 of most residential buildings over 25,000 square feet. A so-called “Scoping Plan” on how to do all this, issued by the State in 2022, contains no bona fide feasibility analysis, and equally no bona fide cost analysis. Everybody with over a sixth-grade education who has taken any time to look at this knows that it can’t possibly work. The only question is how much destruction will befall us before the whole thing crashes to the ground.

Can anyone save New York from the coming self-inflicted climate and energy disaster?

In the category of people making futile efforts to try to save New York from its own folly, or at least from some portion of it, we have none other than yours truly, the Manhattan Contrarian. As reported here back on February 23, I had just filed, along with co-counsel Cameron Macdonald, an amicus curiae brief at the New York Court of Appeals in support of the plaintiffs in a case called Glen Oaks Village Owners, Inc. v. City of New York. In this case, owners of a large group of co-op buildings in Queens had sued seeking to have the City’s Local Law 97 declared invalid as pre-empted by the State’s Climate Act. Note that victory by these plaintiffs would not have ended the folly of the State’s Climate Act and its associated destruction of our electricity system; but their victory would have eliminated the mandate to convert to electric heat without sufficient electricity, and therefore would at least have made it possible for residents of large buildings to avoid freezing in the winter when they have converted to electric heat and there is no electricity.

In the Glen Oaks case, the trial court had dismissed the plaintiffs’ complaint, finding that it had no basis in law. But an interim appellate court, known as the Appellate Division, had reversed, and said the the plaintiffs should have a chance to prove their case. New York City appealed that ruling to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, asking to have the trial court’s dismissal re-instated.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21663/war-on-city-dwellers

The ostensible goal of the climate change project is to get to “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. To do that, global leaders, led by the WEF and the UN, are apparently planning to radically transform the lives of everyone on the planet except their own.

Their plan, officially launched as the UN “Agenda 21” in 1992, during the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and now renamed “Agenda 2030,” — still under the pretext of saving the planet — sets in motion initiatives aimed at controlling every detail of people’s lives.

“On the surface, these 15-minute neigbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys. Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70,” according to the UK website Spiked. Furious residents went out to protest the measures — to no avail.

Popular demand, democratic inclusion and the free market play no role whatsoever. It reminds one of China — which is no coincidence. The idea embedded within the concept of the 15-minute city is not a new one – it has been practiced in Communist China since 1949. Tracking people’s mobility is – and remains – a way for self-appointed “elites” to efficiently control what they seem to regard as the “great unwashed (and incapable of making important decisions) masses.”

“The means of control [in China] have greatly evolved [into unparalleled surveillance]…. No one pays with money anymore: over there, they pay with WeChat or Alipay, through their phone, which is very easily to control…. The Party’s goal of controlling people hasn’t changed, it’s been updated.” — Jean-Philippe Béja, Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences-Po, forumviesmobiles.org, November 13, 2019.

China…is using biometric scanners as checkpoints, meaning that neighborhoods can turn into prisons by only being accessible through facial scans. If the social credit score is too low, you may not be able to enter or leave. China increasingly… dependent on biometric scans…. Updates… the movements of its citizens, so that it knows where they are at all times. Similarly, the “City Brain” knows what they buy – cash is no longer used – when they take public transport and so on. Anonymity and the right to privacy has been completely abolished.

[A]dding the magic words “carbon neutrality” keeps assuring many Westerners that they are saving the planet. So they keep on buying cheap China’s goods and enriching China’s military — enabling it to replace the United States even faster as the world’s leading superpower and at last to fulfill Chinese President Xi Jinping’s dream of finally ruling the planet.

Despite President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and UN executives and bureaucrats doubled down this year at the poorly attended WEF gathering in Davos — could world leaders possibly be starting to catch on? — and proclaimed that nothing can stop their radical transformation of the world in the name of “climate change.”

“We are already collaborating at a scale where no one can stop; not one country, not one leader making a decision, because it’s just the right thing to do globally,” announced Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/03/the-world-shuns-renewable-energy/

The net-zero zealots want to force a worldwide renewable energy transition. But they don’t always get their way. Their fanciful projects have been blocked more than 1,000 times globally. In a world seemingly gone mad, this is welcome news.

“The total number of alt-energy rejections or restrictions now exceeds 1,000 — it’s 1,011 to be exact,” says energy author Robert Bryce, who operates a database that shows 814 U.S rejections of solar, wind and battery projects. Add those to others across the world and the total exceeds a grand.

“The rejections keep coming,” says Bryce. “Since the beginning of May, a provincial government in Queensland has rejected an enormous wind project, a county board in Illinois spiked a solar project, and a district council in East Devon (England) vetoed a battery project.”

When officials asked residents for comments on the proposed $1 billion, 450-megawatt project wind project included battery storage in Queensland, Australia, 142 responded, reports Bryce, and 88% opposed it.

Local Illinois officials by a margin of more than 3-to-1 rejected plans for a solar project in the New Lenox Township about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, while the East Devon District Council said no to a lithium battery storage farm.

“These rejections don’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly promoted by climate activists and their myriad allies in the legacy media about ‘green’ energy,” says Bryce. “But the numbers are real, the numbers are growing, and they provide irrefutable evidence that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the growth of alt-energy.”

Though it’s hyped as an eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuel and nuclear energy, renewable energy doesn’t have a harmonious relationship with nature. Wind and solar projects destroy animal habitats, require deforestation, and convert farms and pristine open fields into industrial zones. When solar farms are sited in the desert, far from population centers and human activity, they break up the crust that binds soil and absorbs carbon dioxide. Offshore wind developments disturb coastal marine ecosystems.

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/05/27/when-antarctica-grows-ice-and-science-gets-cold-feet-n4940187

The Ice That Wasn’t Supposed to Be

Imagine your mechanic swearing your engine would seize up in July, only to call you a year later, embarrassed, to say your truck is somehow running better than ever. 

That’s the climate science community this month after NASA revealed a stunning twist: Antarctica has gained ice, yes, gained between 2021 and 2023, despite what every climate model said would happen.

This wasn’t a whisper. 

It was a satellite-verified admission. 

NASA reported that Antarctica experienced a net gain in ice mass because of unexpected and sustained snowfall, even as global temperatures continued to rise. 

The scientists were stunned. Their models didn’t predict it. 

They couldn’t explain it right away. 

Their conclusion? A short-term fluke that doesn’t mean much.

Settled Science or Sinking Ship?

For years, we’ve been told the models are settled science. That every click of the thermostat was heading us toward glacial collapse. 

Politicians invoked these predictions to regulate industries, tax carbon, and lecture us on our thermostats and SUVs. 

But now, with ice forming where melt was prophesied, it’s suddenly a “statistical hiccup.”

This is where the analogy ends and the reckoning begins.

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/05/24/when-the-ice-cracks-michael-manns-legal-defeat-and-the-climate-of-accountability-n4940123

There was a time, not so long ago, when climate scientist Michael Mann could bully critics into silence with the mere threat of a lawsuit. He was the face behind the infamous “hockey stick” graph, a man lauded by progressives, featured in Al Gore’s documentary, and embraced by a media eager to label skeptics as dangerous deniers. But the courtroom, as it turns out, is no place for manufactured myths or moral grandstanding.

A Washington, D.C. court just handed Mann a bruising legal defeat. After more than a decade of litigation, he has been ordered to pay over $1 million in attorney’s fees to the very people he accused of defamation: National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and writer Rand Simberg, a former PJM contributor.

Even more humiliating, the court revealed that Mann grossly misrepresented his financial damages. Once celebrated as a martyr for the climate cause, he now stands exposed as a fabricator, not just of projections, but of personal injury.

The Graph That Launched a Thousand Grants

Mann’s rise to prominence began with a temperature reconstruction graph published in 1998. It erased historical warming periods such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in favor of a dramatic 20th-century spike. To the casual observer, it looked like mankind had shoved the planet off a climate cliff.

The media ran with it. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) elevated the hockey stick to icon status. Schools taught it. Politicians cited it. Al Gore plastered it in “An Inconvenient Truth,” like a gospel.

But critics soon noticed that something wasn’t right. Canadian researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered glaring flaws in Mann’s methodology, showing that his algorithm could produce a hockey stick shape even when fed with random data. This wasn’t just bad science; it was political theater dressed in lab coats.

From Researcher to Legal Enforcer

Rather than engage in honest debate, Mann chose litigation as his cudgel. In 2012, he sued National Review and CEI after their writers criticized his work and compared how Penn State handled their investigations of Mann after the East Anglia emails leak, and of Penn State’s disgraced football coach, Jerry Sandusky.

This was not a matter of protecting one’s reputation from slander. This was a climate scientist declaring war on dissent. And for a while, it worked. The lawsuits dragged on for over ten years. Many media outlets pulled back from covering the criticisms, not out of agreement, but out of fear.

The recent rulings, however, dismantle Mann’s claims. The D.C. court awarded National Review $530,820.21 in legal fees. CEI and Simberg will receive $472,000. These were not sympathy payouts. They were direct rebukes of a man who tried to game the legal system as thoroughly as he gamed climate projections.

A Courtroom Beatdown

In one of the ruling’s most scathing parts, the court found that Mann and his attorneys misled the jury about the damages he suffered. He testified he lost grants, suffered financially, and had speaking engagements canceled because of the defamation.

But evidence showed the opposite. Mann’s career flourished during the litigation. His speaking fees increased, and his public profile soared. His hardship claim was a mirage, and the court wasn’t buying it.