Climate Collapse

https://www.sgtreport.com/2019/08/climate-collapse/

August 26, 2019

by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Well now this is amusing….

Supreme Court of British Columbia dismisses Dr Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit versus Canadian skeptic climatologist, Dr Tim Ball. Full legal costs are awarded to Dr Ball, the defendant in the case.

The Canadian court issued it’s final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball’s libel lawyers.

The plaintiff Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, first published in 1998, was featured prominently in the U.N. 2001 climate report. The graph showed an “unprecedented” spike in global average temperature in the 20th Century after about 500 years of stability.

Skeptics have long claimed Mann’s graph was fraudulent.

As I have pointed out repeatedly in this column Mann’s alleged “hockey stick” couldn’t be reproduced without data and formulas he refused to hand over. Mann sued Ball claiming that Ball had libeled him.

That appears to have been a grave error, as once in court Ball had every right to prove that his statement was not false and defamatory, with one of the defenses, of course, being that what he said was true.

So he filed for discovery and demanded Mann’s data and formulas.

Mann refused to comply.

In fact, Mann refused to comply for eight years. That’s right — this lawsuit has been going on for a long time. Mann allegedly agreed to comply in 2017 and didn’t. Eventually the BC court (Canada) got tired of the games and entered a dismissal awarding fees and costs to Ball.

So let’s recap this.

Mann has never turned over his data and formulas.

Mann has been asked for them repeatedly, and has refused.

Ball repeatedly called Mann out on this to a degree that Mann believed he had been libeled (defamed in writing) and sued.

This entitled Ball to Mann’s source data and formulas, because the entirety of Mann’s claim rested on Ball making a false and defamatory statement. Truth is, in nearly all cases, an absolute defense to a libel suit. The court agreed, and ordered Mann to turn it over. He failed to do so, repeatedly, but to forestall a summary judgement agreed to turn the data over in 2017. He again failed to do so and this time the court ran out of patience and told him to go suck eggs, not only dismissing his lawsuit but awarding fees and costs to the defense, which is not typically done unless the court finds that the suit was originally filed under vexatious or otherwise fraudulent pretense.

Mann has claimed he will appeal and that he didn’t “really lose.” Losing a libel case and being ordered to pay the defendant’s fees and costs is usually considered losing by most people, especially when the other side asserts truth as a defense to your suit, subpoenas your data which, if it indeed showed that you were libeled you would happily turn over as it would assure you of a win in court and you refuse to comply with the subpoena.

But, whether that’s actually losing or not is something for you to decide.

The better question is why we have someone employed at a major US University who thinks they can thumb their nose at legal process and remain employed. Further, one has to wonder whether the University is complicit or worse.

Note that there is no question of jurisdiction (despite the court being in Canada) because Mann was the one who sued originally and by doing so he consented to jurisdiction.

Why is the University open to question as to their complicity? Because everywhere I’ve ever worked for other people all my work product is not solely mine; at best I have a joint interest with said employer if I negotiated that in advance of my employment and in most cases the employer owns it entirely because that is the state of employment law by default in the United States.

That is, if you employ me to write computer software to do “X” and I do, the entirety of the work product is yours, not mine. I have no rights to it whatsoever unless, before I do the writing of the code, I negotiate something specifically covering that instance.

So tell me once again why the University didn’t order Mann to comply or simply turn over the material itself? Is there some “side agreement” here that the public doesn’t know about?

I’ve pointed out multiple times that unlike Mann’s “hockey stick” data, which he won’t release nor will he release the formulas he used, there are other openly available data sets going back 50 or so years from satellite observations, and multiple other reconstructions going back much longer. By definition all the other data sets are reconstructions of one sort or another simply because until the age of satellites we did not have 100% coverage of the planet on a consistent basis.

Further, as I pointed out here (and many previous times in these pages) while CO2 levels have increased materially since 1950 or thereabouts the rate of increase in temperature has not tracked same. The “predictions” in the IPCC “reports” have not verified. Therefore the projections are wrong — period.

In addition it doesn’t matter if I’m right or Mann is right. That’s because America, and indeed the entire western world, is not where the CO2 emission growth is coming from nor where it will come from in the future absent a genocidal wipe-out of people on a scale never before contemplated in the history of the planet.

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