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The Hockey Stick Trial: Science Dies in a DC Courtroom

Rupert Darwall wrote an excellent article about the hockey stick trial. Science is a process where theories are subjected to criticism. Climate scientist Michael Mann is the lead author of the hockey stick graph which is a temperature reconstruction over the previous millennium using selected tree ring data. The graph purportedly shows slightly falling temperatures for many centuries then suddenly shooting upwards with the advent of the Industrial Revolution based on the assumption that tree ring are accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by factors such as rainfall and levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. “What previous generations of climatologists called the Medieval Warm Period had disappeared.” A rival temperature reconstruction by Keith Briffa also using tree ring data showed a significant decline in temperatures over the latter part of the 20th century opening up a divergence with the instrumental record. This divergence implies that tree rings are not a reliable indicator of temperatures. Analysis by Canadians Steve McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick found that running statistically trendless “red noise” on Mann’s computer code produced hockey stick shapes 99% of the time. Mann used tree types that were particularly sensitive to CO2 fertilization. Darwall describes how Mann hid the decline of the Briffa data and the use of a proxy data series upside-down.

Michael Mann brought a defamation suit against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn in 2012. They had described Mann’s hockey stick as fraudulent. Now, 12 years later, a jury in Washington, DC has ruled in favor of Michael Mann, imposing $1,000 in punitive damages on Simberg but $1 million on Steyn. Darwall wrote “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.”

jury's are bought

1patriot 7 Feb 21
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1

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2

Your fear of facts is Breathtaking...not in a good way.

2

Problems with the post:

  1. "Science is a process where theories are subjected to criticism."

This is a very narrow, stilted view of science. The author seems not to even understand that a scientific theory is an an explanation that unifies and make sense of many disparate FACTS. The facts were determined to indeed be facts through rigorous testing of hypotheses and a process of peer review. A theory is a something that is formulated in a later stage of the process, after much examination and testing. None of this implies that a theory cannot be modified or even discarded. On the contrary: science always leaves that possibility open (unlike dogmatic religion).

  1. The author seems obsessed with only tree rings, and completely unaware that the temperature data from antiquity comes from many other sources as well, including varves (lake bottom deposits), changes in sea level, and written records going back thousands of years, recording the days when the first cherry blossoms bloomed, when when the first swallows appeared, when the first snow fell, when the river first froze and when the ice broke up and the river became navigable again. It turns out that these very different sources of data are mutually supporting, and together paint a very detailed portrait of the past climate.

  2. The difference in damages assessed on the two defendants was based on the difference in their levels if malice and the amounts of harm they caused. That's the way it works. Also note that Steyn did not retain a lawyer, but represented himself in court. And he exhibited hostility to the American judicial system, continued malice towards the plaintiff, and was unrepentant for his defamation.

  3. "Jury's [sic] are bought"

To blithely accuse the jury, without evidence, of corruption is grossly irresponsible. Given the source of this calumny, we are, sadly, not surprised by it.

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