Free Republic

Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious. “Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing.

Mann, a 25-year-old originally from Colorado, was found half naked in apartment in the Austrian city of Vienna last month. An autopsy showed she died from suffocation and officials said a "considerable" amount of blood was found at the scene. A spokesperson for the Swiss Federal Ministry of Justice told NBC News that a man from the Gambia was arrested Thursday at a refugee center in the town of Kreuzlingen, around 20 miles from the Austrian border.

Dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups are calling for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers. A letter released on Tuesday asserts that such money is tainted by these donors’ efforts to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. “When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge,” the letter states. “This corporate philanthropy...

Here is an exclusive and detailed account of the UCLA Hammer Museum event featuring hokey stick inventor Michael Mann.This event was notable even before this report for: UCLA taking away Michael Mann’s false Nobel prize; andWeather Channel Founder John Coleman’s letter to UCLA denouncing warmism and demanding equal time for skeptics. Report on Octber 23, 2014 UCLA Hammer Museum Event “Tackling Climate Change Nationally and Globally” By Michael Greer (@thetalentscout) October 24, 2014Last night I went to the Hammer Museum to hear Michael Mann of Penn State and Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists speak about global warming....

WASHINGTON – News outlets, advocacy groups and fellow think tanks are jumping to the defense of a conservative-leaning D.C. policy center and publication being sued for libel by a scientist who didn't like what they had to say about his work on global warming. Michael Mann, a prominent professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, has long been a target of climate change skeptics for his work claiming temperatures have risen dramatically in recent decades, and has sued before when groups tried to debunk his data. But this time, Mann is being accused of going too far with his case...

Guest-hosting for Rush a few days ago, I said if your kid is graduating from high school this week there has been no global warming his entire life. And immediately the usual drama queens emailed that I was a know-nothing denialist. But, just to nail it down, there has been no global warming for 17 years and nine months. That's since September 1996. The High School Class of 2014 has been blessed to have lived its entire life in a warming-free world.We're supposed to ignore this nigh-on-two-decade warming "pause" because the "97 per cent scientific consensus" tell us to. But,...

Virginia’s highest court has denied a conservative group’s effort to force the University of Virginia to turn over emails from a controversial climate scientist who worked at the school. The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday held that the public university wasn’t obligated under the state’s freedom of information law to release thousands of emails that Penn State researcher Michael Mann wrote while he was a UVA professor several years ago. Mr. Mann in 2009 came under scrutiny among global warming skeptics after hackers leaked thousands of email exchanges between the professor and other researchers that suggested that the scientists sought...

Every side in the political debate has a natural tendency to appeal to freedom of speech when they feel threatened—but to ignore (or initiate) threats to the free speech of the other side. My favorite example is from the early 1990s, when the Yeltsin government dispossessed Russia's Communist Party of the vast holdings it had amassed in the decades when it controlled the state. The Communist Party screamed in protest, denouncing the supposed attack on its "property rights and freedom of speech." Which was pretty rich, considering that the Communists had just spent 70 years ruthlessly stamping out everyone else's...

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

These are all reasons that the lawsuit should have been summarily thrown out. It goes beyond the legitimate scope of libel and defamation laws and constitutes an attempt to suppress opinions that are considered politically correct. But it gets worse. Consider the specific argument Mann is making, as summed up in the report I linked to above. "In the articles, Mann says in his lawsuit, the think tank and the publication ignored more than half a dozen investigations that found no scientific wrongdoing, focusing almost exclusively on the Penn State inquiry in order to call him a fraud. CEI also...

As ugly as this was, it is worse than it seems. Briffa’s trees did match Hansen, 1981. The next graph overlays Briffa on Hansen, 1981 northern latitude temperatures. The match was almost perfect.

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

Speaking of "befuddled effete new-male eunuchs", "Climate Science Is For Sissies Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Well, okay, not quite. The actual headline is "Climate Science Is For Second-Raters Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Our old pal James Delingpole is referring to MIT prof Richard Lindzen's testimony to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster this week. This exchange with the ghastly, condescending Tim Yeo was especially choice:

On Tuesday morning, January 21st, I filed a motion with respect to Dr Michael Mann's defamation suit against me, National Review, Rand Simberg, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I did so because I felt the procedural fiasco the case has been reduced to since last July 10th thanks to the incompetence of the previous judge, Natalia Combs Greene, required what I called "an act of jurisprudential hygiene" from the new judge, Frederick Weisberg. Unfortunately, the DC Superior Court seems disinclined to clean up its act. I appreciate that, to those who followed the fun and frolics of my free speech...

A propos the big campaign here to fight off Michael Mann’s assault on free speech, several readers have asked me directly and also inquired in comments on NR’s fundraising post below what the appeals court judges’ ruling actually means in English. I agree that it’s helpful, when one is soliciting donations for a legal campaign, to provide an update on how the battle’s going, so I don’t know why one of NR’s editorial staff could not have posted the court order with an accompanying explanation. But what it means is this: Dr Michael Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, filed a fraudulent...

The collapsed global warming scare certainly has some odd characters coming to its defense in this paper. Michael Mann (Aug. 25), whom the Attorney General of Virginia investigated under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act 2000 after some statistical peculiarities in Mann’s failed attempt to abolish the medieval warm period, now bloops another blooper. He tries to deny the embarrassing near-17-year pause in global warming because “NASA found the warming continues unabated, with the past decade the warmest on record”. As an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel, let me correct his latest gaffe. The...

Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was not over the fact that Galileo was a "peer-reviewed" researcher, and therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the representatives of official orthodoxy and authority, ought to be regarded as beyond question. In the Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review, it is the "award-winning researcher" who is joining the fight for Church orthodoxy, while the defendants are the...

It's interesting that over the years the skeptics who didn't believe "the science was settled" on man-made global warming were raked over the coals. They were called heretics and compared to 9/11 twoofers. But now they don't seem so crazy. OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. ...The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean...

A federal judge orders an investigation of DOJ's "skullduggery" and "perfidy" during a Katrina shooting case. Along with former Department of Justice lawyer and PJ Media Legal Editor J. Christian Adams, I have written a lot over the past several years about the misbehavior, unprofessionalism, and unethical conduct of lawyers at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. We have also written of the bias and incompetence of the lawyers in DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is supposed to investigate misconduct by Justice lawyers. But now there’s a new author writing about the “skullduggery” and “perfidy” of...

So, as you might have heard, Michael Mann of Climategate infamy is threatening to sue us. Mann is upset — very, very upset — with this Mark Steyn Corner post, which had the temerity to call Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” The Steyn post was mild compared with other things that have been said about the notorious hockey stick, and, in fact, it fell considerably short of an item about Mann published elsewhere that Steyn quoted in his post. So why threaten to sue us? I rather suspect it is because the Steyn post was savagely witty and stung poor Michael....