https://stephenmcintyre.substack.com/p/manns-dc-trick
A year ago, I was a witness in the Mann v Steyn-Simberg libel trial. It was an extremely frustrating experience. Mann’s lawyers tried to block McKitrick and I from giving evidence against Mann. The judge ruled against them, saying that our evidence was relevant to the defense. However, the judge then prevented either of us from presenting evidence on Mann’s concealment of failed verification statistics or even on the verification failure of Mann’s statistical model. The judge didn’t even allow the presentation of a table published in Geophysical Research Letters. In mid-trial, the judge also reduced the time available for the defense by about 40% from the original allocation; the time available for McKitrick and myself was almost chewed up by defense objections.
Because Steyn was so weak, nearly all of the defense was taken up by Simberg’s lawyers. They were highly professional, but their strategy was focused almost entirely on the lack of damages to Mann, and, in particular, to Mann’s claims about lost grants. In my opinion, the issues about, for example, Mann’s concealment of adverse verification statistics were issues that ought to have been raised in cross-examination of Mann (rather than late in the day in direct examination of McKitrick or me), but none of this took place. Instead, the cross-examination went on and on about Mann’s grants – an issue which seemed far less important to me than putting Mann on the spot about his concealment of adverse verification statistics,
However, the defense focus on Mann’s grants was vindicated by the scathing comments of the judge in his recent sanctions order against Mann and his lawyers (link; link), including the following:
“Dr. Mann’s assertion that there was no falsehood or misrepresentation in his testimony or his counsel’s conduct borders on frivolity.”
“the record plainly shows the deliberate and knowing misconduct of Dr. Mann’s counsel in eliciting false testimony from Dr. Mann and misrepresenting his grant funding.”
“Dr. Mann’s counsel’s bad faith misconduct is an affront to the Court’s authority and an attack on the integrity of the proceedings warranting sanctions.”
The judge focused on two components of Mann’s testimony on supposedly lost grants following the blog articles: overstatement of non-funded grants; and under-statement of funded grants.
But neither the judge nor the defense lawyers had deep background in Mann’s “statistical” techniques and, as a result, the judge’s disparagement of the conduct of Mann and his lawyers, scathing as it was, merely scratched the surface. For today’s article, I’ve done a fresh analysis of Mann’s presentation and shown that there was much more to “Mann’s DC Trick” than discussed in the sanctions order. (I’ll do a separate article elucidating the sanctions order, but, in this article, will focus on issues that were overlooked in the trial and order.)
The centerpiece of Mann’s claim for lost damages was his assertion that his grant successes went from “just under a million a year” in the four years ($3.3 million total) prior to the Simberg-Steyn blogs to “a little more than 100,000 a year” in the four years after ($500,000 total). They illustrated this claim with the “demonstrative” shown below right. This claim was asserted in the opening statement, in Mann’s direct evidence and the closing statement. An excerpt from Mann’s direct is below left. In the sanctions order, J Irving observed a significant exaggeration in the statements and demonstrative: according to Mann’s own data, the total value of grants after the blogs was $895,000, not $500,000; and reduced the before-and-after “disparity” from $2.8 million to $2.4 million. The judge was very troubled by this exaggeration.
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