Inside The Litigious World Of Climate Hockey Sticks

Written by Terence Corcoran on February 6, 2024. Posted in Current News

While Donald Trump’s embarrassing and costly defamation quagmire received all the headlines last week, a more significant libel trial was grinding on in another Washington courtroom.

In a case initiated in 2012, climate scientist Michael E. Mann is alleging he was defamed by journalist Mark Steyn in a commentary in National Review in July of that year titled “Football and Hockey.”

But rest assured that this trial is not a sports case.

Reports from the courthouse show Steyn, a Canadian and former National Post columnist, arriving in a wheelchair following heart attacks, to conduct his own defense in a case that has been dragged through a decade of legal wrangling.

The trial is before a jury burdened with what looks like tens of thousands of pages of evidence filled with some of the most contentious libel and science issues.

The hockey part of Steyn’s 2012 commentary refers to Mann’s best-known achievement: a graph published in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that allegedly represents global temperatures dating back 1,000 years.

The trend line in the graph shows relatively stable temperatures over hundreds of years but then shoots almost straight up in the 20th century. With its sharp upward surge angled toward 2000, the graph instantly became known as “The Hockey Stick Curve.”

The graph soon became a powerful and effective piece of supposed evidence for makers of climate policy and a near-religious icon that activists continue to revere.

Coverage of the Mann-Steyn trial has been minimal in major media, except to raise the hockey stick even higher up the totem of policy worship.

When the trial opened last month, The Guardian said Mann was an “esteemed” and “renowned” climate scientist whom Steyn had attacked as part of a “network of climate skeptics” that continues to produce “online abuse of climate scientists” funded by ‘fossil fuel’ industries.

Anyone interested in a different perspective on the trial can turn to non-media reports from the Heartland Institute and on Steyn’s website, where trial sessions are dramatized by actors and narrators.

Mann appeared as a witness on Monday under questioning from Steyn, who asked about the time Mann spread a story about climate scientist Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mann, upset with her climate science, once claimed in emails that Curry as a student had an affair with a married man named Webster.

“Judy Curry was a graduate student. Affairs, ugly divorce, et cetera, yada, yada. Webster and Curry left together … to the relief of everyone I know here who was around then.” Mann signed the email “mike.”

But Curry was not, in fact, a student at the time, and the story actually involved another woman.

Mann on Tuesday admitted the affair stories were “rumors I was passing along” and that his “facts could be wrong.”

Curry was expected to testify later this week, despite having been described by Mann as “a serial misinformer when it comes to science.”

When it comes to science, Mann claims supreme authority and eagerly portrays his hockey stick as an icon that has helped drive climate policy.

In his self-congratulatory 2021 book, The New Climate War, he said the hockey stick “was far more compelling to a layperson than the other abstract statistical work behind the key findings of the previous (IPCC) reports.”

But was the layperson’s instant guide to ‘climate change’ solid science? It certainly looks authoritative.

But from the beginning, a number of scientists and experts severely criticized the data and methods behind its formulation.

Among the leading critics were two Canadians: Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick and retired mining analyst Steve McIntyre.

One of McIntyre’s first published criticisms of the Mann hockey stick appeared on this page in 2005.

Under the headline “Revisiting the stick”, McIntyre argued that the science behind the influential graph needed to be re-examined.

The diagram, said McIntyre, was adopted by the IPCC as evidence that the “1990s were the warmest decade in the millennium and 1998 the warmest year” — language soon incorporated into sound bites and speeches everywhere.

The government of Canada, he wrote, “promoted the hockey stick interpretation of temperature history on its website and sent it to schools across the country and quoted its conclusion in pamphlets mailed out to all Canadians.”

McIntyre questioned the validity of such campaigns, which have been a keystone of ‘global warming’ agitprop.

He referred to peer-reviewed articles he and McKitrick had just published showing “there had been no due diligence on the hockey stick calculations by the IPCC and … there were serious problems in the calculations.”

Their paper in Geophysical Research Letters was titled “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance.”

In an invited special presentation to a conference in Australia in 2003, McKitrick reviewed the “key flaws in the methodology” in Mann’s hockey stick graph, arguing that “the conclusions are unsupported by the data.”

Both McKitrick and McIntyre are scheduled to appear as witnesses at the Mann-Steyn trial, despite a move by Mann’s legal team to exclude their testimony.

That’s a thumbnail outline of the hockey-stick science aspect of Steyn’s 2012 commentary — and the best any outsider can do in the face of hundreds of papers filled with dense climate jargon and complex statistical measurement issues.

Good luck to the jury that tries to sort it all out into the work of either good guys or bad guys.

It’s a football link, however, not a hockey one, in Steyn’s 2012 commentary that contains much of the libel end of the case.

It originated in part with a Steyn commentary based on a commentary by another writer (also sued by Mann) who wrote that officials at Penn State University (where Mann was based at the time) had “covered up wrongdoing” by Mann in the hockey stick research — just as it had covered up child rape charges against Jerry Sandusky, a longtime assistant football coach for the university’s famed Nittany Lions.

“If an institution is prepared to cover up the systemic statutory rape of minors,” Steyn wrote, “what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s ‘the Jerry Sandusky of climate change,’ he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt [Penn State] administration was a joke.”

Steyn also repeated another writer’s comment that Mann had “molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”

Good luck, as well, to the Washington jury with the football side of the Mann-Steyn legal faceoff. It’s a fascinating bit of logical and linguistic commentary, but is it libel?

When does the right to free speech stop? How much of the case will turn on tricky precedents surrounding U.S. libel law? What exactly is defamation? Since Mann’s reputation appears to be intact (as per The Guardian), what is his problem aside from sensitivity to criticism?

In 2011 Mann had initiated another libel allegation, this one against the late Dr Tim Ball, also a Canadian climate scientist, in a case eventually heard by the British Columbia Supreme Court.

Though Mann’s legal team dragged the case through the court for half a decade, Mann himself never came to court.

Frustrated with Mann, the judge ultimately dismissed the charge, saying Mann had unduly delayed proceedings while filing “grossly excessive” volumes of evidence.

In dismissing the case, the judge ordered Mann to pay Ball’s $1 million in legal fees.

Mann, who ran up major legal costs of his own to stall the trial, never payed a penny to Ball, who died in 2022. In the current trial, Mann says he has not personally had to pay his own legal costs.

The Mann/Steyn trial is set to end next week. But there’s another hockey stick that should figure in the background — maybe even in the foreground — of the Washington courtroom hockey stick showdown.

Just as the trial was beginning in Washington, that other hockey stick was raised in evidence by Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, in testimony before the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

In a speech defending capitalism, free trade, and free markets, Milei drew attention to a frequently cited economic graph:

“If you look at a graph of the evolution of economic growth throughout the history of humanity, you would see a hockey stick graph, an exponential function that remained constant for 90 percent of the time and which was exponentially triggered starting in the 19th century.”

Mann’s temperature hockey stick follows the same timeline as Milei’s GDP growth hockey stick, back 1,000 years.

Is this sheer coincidence? Or could there be a causal relationship between the discovery and expansion of ‘fossil fuel’ energy and the exponential growth in economic development and human well-being?

As Milei put it, “When you look at per capita GDP since the year 1800 until today, what you will see is that after the Industrial Revolution, global per capita GDP multiplied by over 15 times, which meant a boom in growth that lifted 90 percent of the global population out of poverty.”

The reason for the hockey stick growth boom, said Milei, is “free trade capitalism.” Never in our species’ long history, he said, has there been a time of greater prosperity than today.

Milei did not mention ‘climate change’ or ‘fossil fuels’ in his comments. And no doubt Michael Mann would dismiss the GDP hockey stick as the warped product of serial misinformation created by peons of the ‘fossil fuel’ industry. But he would be wrong.

What if the speculative climate hockey stick that Mann claims is a convincing populist icon were paired with the factual GDP hockey stick?

Would policymakers and the public become convinced that, in fact, ‘fossil fuels’ have produced major improvements in economic well-being for billions of people, a solid, measurable benefit that overshadows the speculative risks suggested by Mann’s climate hockey stick?

Maybe we should take that case to trial once the Mann-Steyn showdown is done.

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