RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/d-c-jury-awards-1m-in-damages-to-suppress-climate-denialism/

It’s hard to believe, but this Mann case has been wending through the courts for over a decade. It’s the Jarndyce case of the conservative vs. environmentalist movement whose purpose was to silence dissent.

That was explicitly the point all along.

The two also had a heated exchange over a private email Mann wrote in 2012, in which he said it was his “hope” that through the lawsuit he could “ruin this pathetic excuse for a human being,” referring to Steyn.

Back in 2012, this whole thing seemed like a ridiculous joke. And back then it was. But with enough money and lawyers, the case kept going because it also tracked the descent of the American Left into lawless totalitarianism which abused the legal system in order to silence political opponents.

The judicial wrangle began in 2012, when climatologist Michael E. Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and climate-change activist, sued National Review and pundits Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, claiming that they had libeled him in a series of blog posts. On National Review’s website, Steyn commented on an article by Simberg, published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Simberg likened Mann’s research on global warming to Penn State’s cover-up in the case of Jerry Sandusky, Penn State’s former assistant football coach and a convicted child molester. Simberg called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” except that instead of molesting children, Mann had “molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” Though Steyn distanced himself from the Sandusky analogy, he noted that Mann was the scientist behind the controversial “hockey-stick” graph, which purports to depict a sharp rise in global temperatures in recent years. Steyn called the graph “fraudulent.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/09/the-invasive-species-that-is-renewable-energy/

The ruling class’ obsession with building a carbon dioxide-free world has blinded it to material facts. The Al Gores and Gavin Newsoms and John Kerrys of the West believe they only have to bark orders and seize other people’s money and their green dreams will be realized. When are they going to understand their wishes are not everyone else’s command?

There are many examples of the ruling class’ failure to recognize its limitations in regard to energy. The electric vehicle backlash comes to mind. So do the many green “investments” that have turned out to be financial holes of a different color.

For this commentary, though, we’re focusing on the breakdown of the renewable infrastructure buildout. The hard truth is that people don’t want wind and solar farms overtaking their communities and chewing up rural land. The resistance is so forceful that a number of counties have banned the projects inside their borders.

“Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they’re being built,” says the USA Today headline from last week.

After the obligatory nonsense about how green energy is necessary because humans are setting the planet on fire, which is found daily across the hysterical mainstream media, the reporters note that “at least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both.” Through its nationwide analysis, USA Today learned that “limits come through outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build.” 

And it’s not just local governments. Three states, ​​Connecticut, Tennessee and Vermont, have “implemented near-statewide restrictions,” according to USA Today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/after-12-years-michael-manns-defamation-case-against-mark-steyn-finally-goes-to-the-jury/

A Washington, D.C., jury on Thursday ordered conservative pundit Mark Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages to climate scientist Michael Mann, determining that he was defamed in a 2012 blog post on National Review’s website.

The jury also ordered science writer Rand Simberg to pay Mann $1,000 in punitive damages for defaming him in a blog post on the website of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Mann also won $1 from each writer in compensatory damages from the six-person jury after a trial that started in mid-January and lasted three weeks.

The jury’s decision for Mann could have important implications for the free-speech rights of critics to comment on controversial matters without fear of legal reprisals. In a statement before the jury’s verdict Simberg said the case was about “the ability of myself and others to speak freely about the most important issues of our day, whether climate change or another issue,” according to the Associated Press. “If others are faced with over a decade of litigation for giving their opinions, we will all suffer.”

The case involved blog posts that Simberg and Steyn made over a decade ago criticizing Mann’s science and his “hockey stick” graph, which shows global temperature spiking over the last century or so. In his post on CEI’s website, Simberg accused Mann of molesting and torturing his data, and made a crude analogy between Penn State University’s investigation of Mann and its investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s former football coach convicted of child molestation.

In his post on the Corner section of National Review‘s website, Steyn distanced himself from the Sandusky analogy, but added that “he has a point.” He wrote that “Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus,” a reference to climate data obtained through the analysis of tree rings.

The jury found that both Simberg and Steyn had defamed Mann, that they had asserted or relied on provably false statements, that they had a high degree of awareness that their statements were probably false, and acted with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance, or deliberate intent” to harm Mann. The jury also found that Mann suffered actual injuries because of the blog posts.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/after-12-years-michael-manns-defamation-case-against-mark-steyn-finally-goes-to-the-jury/

After nearly 12 years, a jury will finally decide whether conservative pundit Mark Steyn and science writer Rand Simberg defamed climate scientist Michael Mann in blog posts that accused him of misconduct and compared Penn State University’s investigation of him to its investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s child-molesting former football coach.

The case has important implications for the free-speech rights of critics to comment freely on controversial matters without fear of legal reprisals.

The jury began deliberating around 4 p.m.

During closing arguments on Wednesday, Mann’s attorney, John Williams told the jury that the statements against his client were “clearly” defamatory, the comparison to Sandusky was direct, and it “implied that he was the moral

He said that Mann was “horrified” by the comparison to Sandusky, felt like a “pariah,” and “it still affects him emotionally.” He said that the blog posts on the websites of National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute led to a drop in Mann’s grant funding.

He said Simberg’s conduct was “reckless” because he “never, ever took the time to read the actual studies he was attacking.” He called Mann’s hockey stick graph, which shows spiking global temperatures over the last century, a “brick house.”

“People huff and they puff, and they have not been able to blow it down,” he said.

But Victoria Weatherford, Simberg’s attorney, said that her client “truly believed in his heart” that what he wrote was true, and his blog post was protected by the First Amendment.

“Professor Mann is a public figure, and our First Amendment makes sure that each of us is free to comment on the most important issues of public concern without fear of being censored or silenced or bullied into submission,” she said.

“Rand is just a guy, just a blogger voicing his truly-held opinions on a topic that he believes is important,” she said, “and that is an inconvenient truth for Michael Mann.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-6-trial-of-mann-v-steyn-part-iv-the-defense-case

The trial of Michael Mann versus Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg is nearing its conclusion in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

The court’s livestream feed makes it possible for people like me to observe the proceedings from home. However, they only show to the home viewers the same things that the jury gets to see and hear, and not necessarily all of that either. For example, some exhibits that are shown to the jury on an easel in the courtroom are not visible on the video feed. Also, many things happen in the courtroom that the jury is not allowed to watch or hear — the general idea being that the jury is supposed to base its decision only on evidence that gets “admitted” by the judge, and therefore anything that is not evidence is not something they can participate in. So when the lawyers argue legal issues before the judge — mostly about what can be admitted into evidence — the jury can’t hear it, and they also mute the video feed to home viewers. Other colloquy between the judge and the lawyers, often on administrative matters, is generally muted. Of about 5 1/2 hours of trial time each day, often an hour or more has been muted.

And thus it is not entirely clear to me that tomorrow is the last day of trial. But there was a stray unmuted remark from the judge on Monday that he hoped the jury would “get the case” on Wednesday. That means that closing arguments are likely to be tomorrow.

The last two days, Monday and Tuesday, have seen the presentation of the guts of the defense case. These were the main witnesses: Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, authors of a series of papers in the early 2000s that dissected Mann’s work and discovered several serious flaws; two members of the Penn State “Inquiry” Committee, that investigated Mann after the release of the ClimateGate emails in late 2009, and made no adverse finding against Mann (Mann has claimed that he was “exonerated”); and Eugene Wahl, a climate scientist and collaborator of Mann who had deleted certain emails that were subject to FOIA requests after Mann forwarded him a request to do so.

What follows are what I thought were some of the more significant highlights. Obviously, there is much that I have omitted. Also, I should note that I am a terrible note-taker. Also, many of the exhibits appeared quickly on the screen, without sufficient time to copy their contents accurately. So I have done my best, but I solicit any corrections from others who may have been watching.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-4-face-it-the-energy-transition-aint-happening

If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition. A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that. Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces. Wind and solar are now the least expensive ways to generate electricity! Electric vehicles are superior and are taking over the market! And the legacy fossil fuel producers who refuse to change their ways are seeing their huge investments become “stranded assets” that can no longer compete in the new world and must be written off!

Well, look to Manhattan Contrarian as your go-to source for news on how this supposed energy transition is going. The summary is that all the mandates and regulations and trillions of dollars in subsidies in the world can’t make the impossible happen. Here are a few items from the past week:

Shareholder activists demand that BP re-commit to oil and gas.

The last few years have seen many examples of shareholder activists submitting proxy proposals demanding that the major oil and gas companies reduce their carbon emissions and commit to transition out of the oil and gas business. As one significant example, in 2021 an activist investor called Engine #1 demanded that Exxon commit to this transition. In a proxy contest in May 2021, Engine #1 succeeded in electing two directors to the Exxon board over management’s opposition.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=4b9ad9bd14

Readers seem to be enjoying my posts on the Mann v. Steyn trial, so I’m going to continue with one more today. Meanwhile, the court does not hold trials on Fridays, so the proceeding has recessed for the weekend, to resume Monday morning. It’s likely that the trial will get very interesting next week, as the defendants present the heart of their case and as things wrap up. In the interim, I’ll provide some comments on the events yesterday, which was the 11th day of the trial.

My previous post on Wednesday, January 31, was devoted mostly to the issue of plaintiff Mann’s claimed damages in the case. The post described what I found to be an extremely odd back and forth during Mann’s own testimony, where it emerged that Mann during the discovery process had provided three different, inconsistent and contradictory interrogatory answers on the topic of his main theory of damages, namely that he had lost grant funding due to the defamation. After initially being confronted on cross-examination with an interrogatory answer where he had refused to provide any list of allegedly lost grants and said the whole subject was “irrelevant,” Mann then on re-direct (highly unusual) attempted to use a second interrogatory answer as a basis for quantifying his damages from lost grants; only then to be confronted with a third interrogatory answer, which he had never mentioned under questioning by his own lawyer, where he had changed most of the numbers in the second answer, in the most notable case reducing the claimed loss from over $9 million to only about $100,000.

Well, it turns out that that oddity became the subject of extensive argument before the judge, in parts of the trial that were not broadcast to the public viewers. Yesterday, in connection with Mann resting his case, Steyn filed with the court something called a “Motion for Sanctions for Bad-Faith Trial Misconduct” against Mann, addressing many issues about the claimed damages and Mann’s proof of same. Steyn made a copy of that document available via a link on his website. The document gives much history of the subject of Mann’s damages claim in the case, including events that occurred at parts of the trial that have not been broadcast publicly. The document, only 11 pages long, makes for very entertaining reading if you have the time.

But first, some background. The law of defamation is one of the more complex subjects of American law. It arises under state rather than federal law (with D.C. defamation law arising out of D.C.’s role as a state/local governing entity, rather than out of federal law), and differs substantially from state to state. And then there is an overlay of Supreme Court case law interpreting the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, thus impacting the law in every state.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

The Mann v. Steyn trial in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia is now in the middle of its third week. For more background on the case, see my post from a few days ago here. I have been watching some substantial chunks of the trial on the court’s livestream, although unfortunately several other matters have prevented me from watching the entirety. Today at the lunch break, the plaintiff Michael Mann concluded the presentation of his case. The technical term is that the plaintiff “rested.” So I thought a short update would be timely.

Because I haven’t seen the whole thing, I’ll just cover some aspects that I find interesting.

In my prior post, I devoted some space to Mann’s claim for damages, which appears to be based principally on the theory that he had lost various government research grants as a result of the allegedly defamatory blog posts of Steyn and Simberg. Last week Simberg’s lawyer Victoria Weatherford had cross-examined Mann with an interrogatory answer he had given to a question asking him to substantiate his damages by providing a list of all grants he claimed he had lost for this reason. In his answer, signed under oath, Mann had not listed any grants, and instead had objected on the ground that the whole subject was “irrelevant.” My comment was “How Mann can claim damages from lost grants after giving this answer, I have no idea.”

Well, as tends to be the case, the story proved to be much more complicated than it first appeared. On re-direct examination, Mann’s lawyer came back with a supplemental interrogatory answer that Mann had served up in 2020, which did contain a list of allegedly lost grants. That seemed like a pretty good response.

But then Ms. Weatherford got another turn on what’s called “re-cross,” and she pulled out yet another supplemental answer provided by Mann to the same interrogatory. This one was dated in 2023. In 2023 the parties were finally in the run-up to the actual trial. In the 2023 answer, there was a list of allegedly lost grants that was either the same or very similar to the list from the 2020 answer, except that the amounts of money allegedly lost as to each grant had changed in many or even most cases. (It was difficult to determine exactly everything that had changed, because they never put the two lists of grants and amounts up on the screen simultaneously for the viewers at home to compare.). Some of the changed amounts were small, but some were dramatic. In the most notable case, the “lost” grant had at first been claimed to be associated with over $9 million of lost funding; but in the amended answer the number had been changed to only about $100,000. At least as to any numbers that ever appeared on the publicly-shown screen, that $9 million amount looked to be by itself far and away the majority of the claimed lost funding.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=0ae785da5d
Way back in October 2012, climate alarmist and activist Michael Mann brought a libel suit against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg for allegedly defamatory blog posts that the two had written a few months previously. The case has gone through an incredible history of procedural twists and turns since then, a few of which I have covered in prior blog posts, for example here on March 20, 2014, and here on March 26, 2021. The trial finally started on January 16.

Probably most readers here are familiar with the case to at least some degree, and many may even be following the trial. (The court has a live feed available to the public. Follow this link at WattsUpWithThat if you want to tune in during the coming week.). I have watched some substantial chunks of the trial during its first two weeks.

Mann is best known as the creator of the famous “Hockey Stick” graph, purporting to be a world temperature reconstruction of the past thousand or so years, with essentially level temperatures until the 20th century, and then sharply rising temperatures in the 20th century era of human use of fossil fuels. Mann published versions of the figure in Nature magazine, originally in 1998; and the UN’s IPCC quickly (in 2001) seized on the Hockey Stick as its iconic demonstration that human use of fossil fuels was causing global warming. In the blog posts that are the subject of the case, Steyn and Simberg called Mann’s graph false and deceptive. (Steyn referred to Mann’s figure as “the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey stick’ graph” while Simberg called out “[Mann’s] and others’ hockey stick deceptions.”) (Note: in multiple prior blog posts, I have also called Mann’s Hockey Stick graph fraudulent, for example here in August 2019.)