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https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/02/19/the_hockey_stick_trial_science_dies_in_a_dc_courtroom_1012630.html By Rupert Darwall Excerpt: “Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.” The sub-title of Popper’s 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, in which he argued that science progresses through inspired conjectures checked by attempts to refute them through criticism, is “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.” Now, a six-person jury in Washington, DC has refuted Popper’s formulation of the uniqueness of science, finding in favor of climate scientist Michael Mann in the defamation suit he brought against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn dating back to 2012. Central to Mann’s case was his attempt to reconstruct global temperature over the previous millennium – the iconic “hockey stick” graph. The graph shows global temperatures purportedly falling for centuries and suddenly shooting upwards with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Mann’s hockey stick representation was derived principally from selected tree ring data based on the assumption that tree rings constitute accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by confounding factors such as rainfall, seasonal variability, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The results that Mann produced are also sensitive to decisions on and application of statistical techniques. There can be little doubt of the hockey stick’s historic importance in the development and propagation of what became the dominant scientific paradigm of climate change. In 2001, the hockey stick was given star billing in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, where it appeared twice in the synthesis report, twice more in a diagram combining past and future temperature change, and again on the third page of the Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers. Gerald North, a leading atmospheric physicist at Texas A&M University and one of the most cited authors in the geosciences, had no doubt as to the significance of the hockey stick. “The planet has been cooling slowly until one hundred and twenty years ago, when, bam! It jumps up,” North told Science in 2000. “We’ve been breaking our backs on [greenhouse] detection, but I found the one-thousand-year records more convincing than any of our detection studies.” For Mann, the hockey stick was his ticket to climate super-stardom. In keeping with Popper’s premise about science, however, Mann’s hockey stick aroused criticism from its first appearance. In response, Mann engaged in distinctly anti-Popperian efforts to suppress all criticism of the hockey stick and discussion of rival temperature reconstructions that might raise awkward questions about its scientific validity. A rival reconstruction by fellow paleo-climatologist Keith Briffa, for example, derived from tree ring data obtained from northern Canada and Siberia, showed a noticeable decline in temperatures over the latter part of the 20th century – opening up a divergence with the instrumental record. If tree rings suggested declining temperatures when temperatures were actually rising, then how could climate scientists put any confidence in tree rings as thermometers? Up could really mean down. Briffa then wrote a paper for Science comparing the rival reconstructions. As we know from the Climategate emails leaked in 2009, Mann contacted the editor of Science. “Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us,” he wrote, copying in one of his co-authors, Raymond Bradley. After Science published Briffa’s paper, Mann tried to patch things up. “Thanks for all the hard work,” he emailed colleagues. The sentiment didn’t go down well with Bradley. “Excuse me while I puke,” Bradley emailed Briffa. Such shenanigans are small beer compared to the surgery undertaken on the graphs of proxy reconstructions showcased in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. To deal with Briffa’s question-inducing temperature decline, Mann, as lead chapter author, and a tight-knit team resorted to the simple expedient of truncating adverse data that could serve as a “potential distraction/detraction,” Mann explained to his colleagues, and thereby hiding the temperature decline shown by Briffa’s proxies when temperatures were rising. The gambit also involved using actual temperature data to smooth the proxy curves in what became known as “Mike’s Nature trick,” something Mann had done previously in a paper submitted to that journal. There was a more fundamental problem with the construction of the hockey stick. Analysis conducted by Canadians Steve McIntyre, a former mining engineer with a strong grounding in mathematics, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick using an algorithm based on a fragment of Mann’s computer code, found that running statistically trendless “red noise” produced hockey stick shapes 99 percent of the time. In other words, you could get hockey sticks from random junk data if you had enough of it. Mann included in his proxy data set a series of bristlecone and foxtail pines from the western United States that had been selected by researcher Donald Graybill to study the possible effects of carbon dioxide fertilization on tree growth. To get the hockey stick from the data, Mann needed both the algorithm and Graybill’s tree ring data. Did Mann know what he was doing? Inside his directory of North American proxy data, Mann had a folder which he had labelled BACKTO_1400-CENSORED containing the North American data except all sixteen of the Graybill series. When the numbers from the CENSORED folder were run, the blade of the hockey stick disappeared. While the blade of the hockey stick showed a sharp, anomalous rise in global temperature coinciding with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, its shaft also performed a critical function in radically revising the previously accepted climatological record by showing a steady decline in temperatures from the end of the first millennium. What previous generations of climatologists called the Medieval Warm Period had disappeared. The Medieval Warm Period presented a twofold problem to the new climate change orthodoxy. It implied a much greater amplitude of natural variability beyond the bounds posited by the new scientific consensus of human-driven climate change, and it challenged the catastrophist narrative of global warming. If the prosperity of the Middle Ages and Viking settlement of Greenland occurred during an extended period of unusual warmth, then modern societies, too, could survive and prosper in a period of rising temperature. In written congressional testimony in 2011, the climate scientist John Christy recalled discussions on the preparation of the Third Assessment Report when he pressed for inclusion of the findings of a 1998 paper in which Greenland ice-borehole temperatures provide a 20,000-year reconstruction. “Their result indicated a clear 500-year period of temperatures, warmer than the present, centered about 900 AD,” Christy testified. Despite – or, perhaps, because – of the importance of the paper in contradicting the hockey stick, the Third Assessment Report ignored the paper altogether. Mann went further in a 2008 paper that presented a 2,000-year temperature reconstruction. The reconstruction was derived from sediments from Lake Korttajarvi in Iceland analyzed in a paper by the Finnish geologist Mia Tiljander. But Mann’s reconstruction inverted the Tiljander proxies, so warming became cooling and cooling became warming. According to Matti Saarnisto, one of Tiljander’s co-authors, the Medieval Warm Period was shown in a mirror image. In an email he’d received from Bradley, who despite his previous experience was still one of Mann’s co-authors, a large group of researchers had been handling extensive material and “at some point it happened that this graph was turned upside down.” Was this done on purpose or by mistake? “It has been turned upside down twice in Science, and now I doubt if it can be a mistake any more,” Saarnisto said, adding that the authors belong to a group “skeptical about this Medieval Warm Period and have tried to hide it to some extent.” *** Mann’s defamation suit revolved around two issues. The first relates to Simberg and Steyn linking the investigation of Mann at Penn State, where he was professor of meteorology, to the university’s investigation and cover-up involving football coach and convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky. Penn State president Graham Spanier was later convicted of child endangerment for his role in the Sandusky cover-up. As Steyn told the court in his opening statement: the same scoundrel who protected Sandusky also protected Michael Mann. So, we’re not comparing Mann with Sandusky; we’re comparing the investigation of Mann with the investigation of Sandusky – because both investigations were controlled by the same chap: a corrupt convicted criminal called Graham Spanier. Of the two defendants, Simberg’s language was the less delicate and more direct. As Steyn told the jury, quoting directly from his original piece, “I’m not sure I would have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point,” distancing himself from Simberg’s statement that Mann could be regarded as the Jerry Sandusky of climate science. The second issue relates to Simberg and Steyn describing Mann’s hockey stick as fraudulent. Though this was less inflammatory than the linkage made between Mann and Sandusky via Penn State’s respective investigations into their conduct, the jury believed that it was the greater offense. It imposed just $1,000 in punitive damages on Simberg but $1 million – one thousand times more – on Steyn. (The jury awarded Mann a dollar each from Simberg and Steyn to compensate him for damage to his reputation.) The massive differential in punishments the jury meted out to the two defendants can only be explained by the jury’s political bias. Steyn has a high profile as one of the most accomplished of conservative commentators. Evidently, the DC jury decided to make an example of Steyn and discourage any public questioning of today’s consensus of human-caused climate change. In his opening statement, Steyn argued that it is not for the courts to adjudicate science. “A scientific theorem that requires validation by a courtroom verdict is not science at all,” Steyn argued. In principle, a court should be able to assess whether evidence used to make a scientific claim has been knowingly distorted, omitted, concealed or, in some other way, manipulated to produce a desired result. After all, fraud is not limited to theft but includes the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation. Mann’s lawsuit demonstrates that the courts – at least, a court in the nation’s capital with politically biased jurors – are not capable of objective evaluation. Such cases also involve federal rules on the admissibility of evidence proffered by expert witnesses and the Daubert standard for scientific evidence. In a 39-page report, climate scientist Judith Curry gave her opinion that it is “reasonable” to have referred to the hockey stick in 2012 as “fraudulent” in the sense that “aspects of it are deceptive and misleading.” …. As Popper argued, free argument and debate are not only essential for the advance of scientific knowledge. They also constitute the fundamental requirement for the maintenance of a constitutional republic. Full article here: https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/02/19/the_hockey_stick_trial_science_dies_in_a_dc_courtroom_1012630.html Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of  Green Tyranny.

Re the Mann v. Simberg/Steyn trial, I've posted the text of my Expert Report prepared at the request of Steyn's lawyers. While this wasn't admitted into evidence, it provides some much need context for the trial.https://t.co/tZwfcmhKli — Judith Curry (@curryja) February 8, 2024 JC’s expert report by Judith Curry Here is the text of the expert report on Mann v. Simberg/Steyn in 2020 that I prepared at the request of Mark Steyn’s counsel.   My report, along with all other expert reports from both sides except for Abraham Wyner, were not admitted into evidence. In my opinion, my report provides some much needed context for the trial.  Here is a formatted pdf of my complete expert report [Curry Steyn Mann] Report of Judith Curry, Ph. D.  I submit this report under D.C. Superior Court Civil Rule 26(a)(2)(B) & (C) as both fact and expert witness to address the subject matter on which I expect to present evidence and to summarize the facts and opinions on which I expect to testify. This report includes my observations and opinions as a lay and expert witness concerning three principal topics: (I) the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick graph; (II) whether the Hockey Stick graph can be regarded as ‘fraudulent’; and (III) Michael Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse. I present sections (I) and (III) mostly in my capacity as a fact/lay opinion witness and section (II) in my capacity as an expert witness. SUMMARY This report addresses the issue of whether it is reasonable to refer to the Hockey Stick graph as ‘fraudulent’ in the course of the public debate on climate change. What is the nature of the scientific and public controversy concerning the Hockey Stick? It is my opinion that the Hockey Stick has generated a dynamic and heated debate about its significance and its flaws. Since its publication, Mann’s Hockey Stick has been the subject of intense and often polemical comment and argument in: (a) peer-reviewed, scientific publications critical of the Hockey Stick; (b) analyses of the science behind the Hockey Stick on technical climate blogs;  (c) published books on the Hockey Stick controversy; (d) articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media; (e) online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’; (f) Congressional hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick; and (e) the personal controversy surrounding Michael Mann in his efforts to defend the Hockey Stick and to thwart his critics. 2. Is it reasonable to regard the Hockey Stick as ‘fraudulent’? It is my opinion that it is reasonable to have referred to the Hockey Stick in 2012 as ‘fraudulent,’ in the sense that aspects of it are deceptive and misleading: Image falsification: Mann’s efforts to conceal the so-called “divergence problem” by deleting downward-trending post-1960 data and also by splicing earlier proxy data with later instrumental data is consistent with most standards of image fraud. Cherry picking: Evidence shows that Mann engaged in selective data cherry picking to create the Hockey Stick, and that this cherry picking contributes to the perception of a “fraudulent” Hockey Stick by journalists, the public and scientists from other fields. Data falsification (the ‘upside-down’ Tiljander proxy): Substantial evidence shows that Mann inverted data from the Tiljander proxies in a version of the Hockey Stick published in 2008. Mann did not acknowledge his mistaken interpretation of data. Even after published identification of the mistake, this mistake has propagated through subsequent literature including the IPCC 4th Assessment Report. 3. What is Mann’s role in the downward spiral of climate science discourse? It is my opinion that the scientific discourse surrounding climate change in general, and the Hockey Stick in particular, has deteriorated in civility and professionalism, and that Mann has played a significant and active role in this corrosion and unprofessional degradation of tone. Mann’s approach to public discourse about his work and broader topics in climate change has contributed much to the hostility and animosity that characterize and mark these exchanges. My opinionis based on: (a) the norms of science and scientific discourse; (b) Mann’s withholding of data from his peers; (c) Mann’s efforts to stifle skepticism; and (d) Mann’s attacks on scientists who disagree with him. THE SCIENTIFIC AND PUBLIC CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING THE HOCKEY STICK The Hockey Stick is a graph of global temperatures for the last 600 to 1000 years, reconstructed from tree rings and other so-called proxy data.  Its name comes from its shape – a long flat ‘handle’ representing comparatively stable temperatures in earlier centuries, followed by a dramatic uptick – the ‘blade’. The Hockey Stick graph was originally published in two papers co-authored by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (MBH98, MBH99)[1].  MBH98 included a 600-year reconstruction and MBH99 included a 1000-year reconstruction. Although Mann had only recently received his Ph.D., he was named as a lead author for a chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR), published in 2001. The Hockey Stick graph appeared seven times in the IPCC TAR, and appeared as the backdrop in the IPCC press conference announcing the findings of the report.  Rather than displaying all of the long-term temperature reconstructions considered by the IPCC TAR, the opening figure of the Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers highlighted a graph of temperature reconstructions based only on the MBH99 paper. Following the public release of the IPCC TAR, the Hockey Stick was regarded as central to the IPCC’s case for global warming.  The Hockey Stick was, for a time, arguably the most important graph in the world. Its message of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century was a vital part of the campaign to persuade the public that mankind had changed the world’s climate. Since publication of the Hockey Stick in Mann’s paleoclimate reconstructions of temperatures (MBH98/99) and its prominence in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR; 2001)[2], there has been substantial scientific controversy over the methods that Mann and his co-authors used in this research.  The controversy extends to the results of their analysis, which contradicted existing geological and historical knowledge of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Of particular note are two papers published by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2005 that challenged the MBH98/99 analyses (section IIA).  These papers motivated two Congressional investigations and hearings in 2006 (section IIE). In November 2009, the unauthorized release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK) (“Climategate”) revealed that several scientists (including Mann) had evaded Freedom of Information Act requests for data, manipulated the peer review process, downplayed uncertainty about their research and attempted to squash disagreement and dissent from ‘skeptics.’  The publicity surrounding Climategate (Sections IIB, IIC) brought the Hockey Stick controversy back into the public debate on climate change, largely vindicating a range of concerns that had been raised by McIntyre and McKitrick. The analysis presented in this section documents the controversy surrounding the Hockey Stick, without passing judgment on the merits (or not) of the original research or the criticisms. As an active participant in the debate over climate change and the Hockey Stick, I recall the development of this debate. I summarize this controversy by considering the following sources: Scientific journal publications critical of the Hockey Stick Critical analyses in technical climate blogs Published books on the Hockey Stick controversy Articles by leading science journalists in the mainstream media Online encyclopedia entries on the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’ Congressional Hearings and investigations related to the Hockey Stick Controversy surrounding Michael Mann

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/31/steyn-v-mann-the-infamous-climate-hockey-stick-goes-on-trial/ BY CHRIS MORRISON Fifteen years on from the notorious Climategate scandal, and the widely debunked temperature ‘hockey stick’ is centre stage in a libel trial in a Washington D.C. court. In the widely-billed climate trial of the century, the fake Nobel laureate Michael Mann is suing the journalist Mark Steyn for claiming that his infamous hockey stick graph is fraudulent. The case has enormous ramifications since it can be argued that the hockey stick removed the concept of natural climate variability for an entire generation. It is fraudulent, claims Steyn, both in its construction and in the uses to which it has been put by Al Gore, the IPCC, every school and most governments throughout the Western world. The hockey stick first appeared in 1998 and purported to show that global temperatures had slowly declined for around 1,000 years before shooting up suddenly in recent years under the impact of humans burning hydrocarbons and increasing the supply of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was widely quoted by activists and was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To this day, many activists argue that the small recent rises in global temperature are exceptional and have not been witnessed in the past going back 125,000 years. Widespread and convincing proxy evidence, along with historical observations, suggest otherwise. It is generally accepted that a medieval warming period saw similar rises to those witnessed today. But proxy evidence can work both ways. According to Steyn, the Mann graph abolished warming in medieval times using two clumps of trees – some California bristlecones and just one cedar from the Gaspe Peninsula for the years up to 1421. “Tree rings are absolutely brilliant at telling you the temperature in 1432”, Steyn has observed sarcastically, and if you criticise that on Twitter, Mann says you are funded by the Koch Brothers. In 2012 Mann sued Steyn in the District of Columbia Superior Court for “defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient”. Mann has since withdrawn the false Nobel claim but not the defamation charge. In court hearings it has been revealed that if Mann loses he will not pay a cent. As always, there is interest in who funds a great deal of climate activism and ‘lawfare’ around the world. The hockey stick featured in the Climategate scandal in 2009 when leaked emails, possibly from an internal whistleblower, showed the process by which Mann and a number of colleagues working out of the University of East Anglia had used proxy evidence to arrive at the graph. It was said that a reference in the emails to “Mike’s Nature Trick” referred to the practice of using the most convenient proxy or temperature measurements to fit the desired narrative. The emails showed how competing climate claims were kept out of science journals and requests for information about the methodology these activists were using were denied. At the time, Professor Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University noted that within two months the East Anglian scientists and the IPCC “were discredited”. Even if only a fraction of their scientific claims were eventually refuted, added Ravetz, “their credibility as trustworthy scientists was lost”. Even George Monbiot in the Guardian was appalled, noting that pretending the climate email leak wasn’t a crisis wouldn’t make it go away. In fact, there was a massive pretence that the emails were not a crisis and interest faded. Internal inquiries whitewashed the affair, ‘denier’ abuse rapidly took away any perceived need to debate sceptics, the leaks were blamed on bad players (probably funded by the Koch Brothers), and a general air of “move along please, nothing to see here” descended on the tame, mainstream media. Michael Mann continued his career, rising up the climate activist ranks, and is currently a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He still seems keen on supressing climate information that doesn’t follow the ‘settled’ narrative. Last year he was part of a successful attempt to get a published science paper by four scientists retracted in a Springer Nature journal. The scientists, including three professors of physics, argued that a climate ‘emergency’ was not supported by the available weather data. Mann told the Guardian that “either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong”. Mann is no stranger to abuse, referring to Steyn at one point as an “odious excuse for a human being”. The stakes could not be higher for Mann, and the reputation of ‘climate science’ more widely. Mann may well find his abuse and false claims of Nobel honours do not play well in a court room before a judge and a jury. He is up against an opponent of considerable intelligence and sharp, quick wit. Mark Steyn has been a regular on U.S. broadcast media, and U.K. viewers will remember him from a stint on GB News. A stint, it might be noted, that was required viewing if only for speculation as to how long Ofcom would allow it to continue. Not long, as it turned out. It is difficult to second guess a court trial, even one held these days in a solid Democrat city. But Mann, who can come across as an attention-seeking and vicious science nerd, is up against a skilled showman. This was evidenced by the following opening exchange when Mann complained that Steyn’s writings had led to him receiving a “mean look” in a supermarket. Having elicited precise details of where Mann received his mean look, Steyn observed: Excellent. Excellent. Truly excellent answer there… I thought that was a good answer. Let’s say for the sake of argument you were in the pet food aisle and you were standing there. How do you know the mean look was not because you were blocking the guy because you were dithering between the Fancy Feast Gourmet Tuna and the Fancy Feast Salmon Delight? Steyn in fine form, subtly tutoring Mann in the pitfalls of causation. The trial is expected to continue for up to another week. You can listen to a podcast in which actors re-enact key moments from the trial hosted by Phelim McAleer here. Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.