Law suits to keep climate change skeptics quiet are failing
IPCC scientists refuse to divulge metadata they used
Had to get this from Australia even though I live in the province where the suit was filed
‘Hockey Stick’ goes down.
Bret Harte, Australia
Remember Michael Mann?
Who doesn’t? He produced the ‘hockey stick’ graph which demonstrated that ancient temperatures were never as high as they are now – that today’s temperatures were the hottest since mankind first appeared on earth.
He was the man who Al Gore, the IPCC, Greenpeace, every green organisation relied on as absolute proof that mankind is in for a hell of a hiding unless we stop burning coal and oil for cheap energy. At once. Within 5 years at most.
Remember him?
Well, he is now being sued for millions of bucks. And the reason is that he has just sensationally failed in his three-year case, suing a Canadian septuagenarian climatologist skeptic, Dr Tim Ball.
And Mann is now open to be investigated for the Climategate conspiracy. If you do something naughty like fudging figures and make money out of doing something naughty you sometimes find that the courts whack you with a conviction.
What happened was that Mann sued Tim Ball for defamation when Ball claimed Mann belonged in the state pen rather than Penn State (university)for his shoddy science. Ball defended it, and as part of his defence that Mann was a shonk required Mann to disclose his ‘hockey stick’ graph metadata in the British Columbia Supreme Court, as he is required to do not only under the Canadian civil rules of procedure, but under common law and rules of fairness in courts everywhere.
The idiot Mann turned and twisted, and even claimed in his case that he was a Nobel Prize winner and therefore his reputation was trebly sullied by that scoundrel Ball. Ball retaliated by pointing out that Mann was no more a Nobel winner than Pinto the Wonder Horse and continued to demand to see that data that the Hockey stick graph was based on.
Mann refuses to disclose Hockey Stick metadata
The innuendo claimed by Mann in his defamation suit was that Ball was implying that Mann faked his 1000 years of tree ring proxy data for the past 1,000 years. But Mann’s refusal to produce the data in court, where it could be examined by experts – even court appointed experts – was fatal. The court gave him more and more time to produce it, then dismissed Mann’s case when he kept refusing.
The dramatic downfall of the very heart of the global warming scam affects the wankers in the IPCC. They will now have to come up with some sort of statement that they didn’t rely solely on Mann – that there is still heaps of evidence – but the fact that they thanked him for his contribution when they got their own Nobel will come back to terrorise them.
At the time Mann sued Ball, it was thought that Mann’s suit was basically what is known as a SLAPP suit – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation suit – a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
[SLAPP suits are common in Australia. For example, a homosexual may complain about someone and force him before a Tribunal. The defendant must then pay a lawyer and waste years of his life defending. The complainer need not even show up to the hearing. The damage has been done even if it is dismissed. The complainer loses nothing. Thank your government for making it easy for SLAPP suits]
But Dr Ball has now sued Mann back claiming zillions for what he says was not a true defamation suit but a SLAPP.
And everybody else who was hit by Mann’s SLAPP suits is joining in the fun, they have countered too. You see, intoxicated by the smell of his own bullshit, Mann sued a number of others who supported Dr Ball to shut them up – at least that it is the claim – and now that Mann’s case is gone it is a strong claim because Mann’s prevarications and procrastination, all his countless fudging and evasiveness in the matter and blowhard self-puffery establishes compelling evidence that Mann’s motive was not to prove Ball had defamed him, but more likely a cynical attempt to silence fair and honest public criticism on a pressing and contentious government policy issue. Mann is virtually a sitting duck.
What happens next?
Apart from the side issue that anyone may now freely dismiss Mann in the harshest terms as a junk scientist who shilled for a failed global warming cabal, there is the outcome of the counter suits.
If they succeed, then the same civil remedies will be open to Australians who are hit with crazy allegations. The complainers will have to establish on the balance of probabilities that they really were insulted and God knows what else when a baker refused to bake a cake for their homosexual wedding for instance. The fact that they seek out the victim in the first place will have a huge bearing on the case.
And if the Belfast Baker gets up in his appeal in May the complainer in that case may find that the law cuts both ways, and cuts bloody deep.
And SLAPP cases may end up just being Oscar Wilde cases.
[Oscar Wilde sued for defamation when the defendant said Wilde was posing as a sodomite. Wilde had to drop the case half way through and ended in jail.]
Then there is brother Weaver
Ball’s victory over Mann, sensational though it is, is equalled if not beaten by Ball’s coming victory against Weaver.
Weaver is Professor Andrew Weaver, “climate scientist” at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Deputy Leader of the Green Party there, member of the Legislative Assembly and an IPCC’s lead climate modeller.
And intoxicated by the same bullshit that undid Mann, Weaver also sued Ball for defamation. My, wasn’t there crowing then in the ABC and similar. David Suzuki was the largest of the roosters crowing. Feather dusters now.
Weaver won't disclose metadata either
And why? Because Weaver’s case against Ball has also now been rendered dormant due to the self-same failure to come good and disclose his metadata.
This is an epic double whammy for Ball. As an inadvertent courtroom martyr for climate skeptics he has destroyed the credibility of both the IPPC paleoclimate record (Mann’s ‘hockey stick’) and all those IPCC computer model ‘projections’ of a dangerously warming climate (Weaver’s ‘science’). As such, the alarmist (false) claims of a cooler past climate presented by Mann, and doomsaying computer model projections of a dangerously warming future climate, presented by Weaver, would not stand up in court.
Ball’s triumph is even more resonant than the Scope’s Monkey Trial of 1925.
And it isn’t over. Ball seems to have gone on the front foot and is claiming that the “evidence” for global warming was intentionally and illegally concocted. If he is wrong he will be sued. If he is right, he will not. But if he is right the onus is then on the government to prosecute – conspiracy is still a crime.
Meanwhile, Suzuki, who underwrote the legal costs in the cases against Ball, has gone into sackcloth and ashes. Stand by for an appeal for money.
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