February 15, 2024

In 1925, John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution. He lost. It was called the trial of the century and captured the nation’s attention. For Americans, assaults on free speech are intolerable. Speech is the lifeblood of freedom. It is the hill we will die on because, instinctively, we know that without it, it would also mean death. At least, we used to know.

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Last week, the 21st century’s trial of the century came to a similarly ignoble end, but nearly without coverage, without interest, without outrage. Polymath Mark Steyn, appearing pro se, lost a defamation suit (ironically) defending against Michael Mann when a DC jury ordered Steyn to pay damages of $1 but imposed staggering punitive damages of $1 million.

Some background: Michael Mann co-wrote a paper in 1999 using tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature (thicker rings, warmer temperatures) to show that over the last 1000 years, temperatures declined slightly until 1960 when they dramatically spiked up—the shape of what would infamously be called the “Hockey Stick.”

The IPCC featured Mann’s work prominently in their 2001 report. It catapulted Mann to stardom and ignited the radical climate-industrial-political complex. The resulting Green agenda has consumed trillions and turned everyone’s life upside down.

Image: Mark Steyn. YouTube screen grab.

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The problem was that hundreds of scientists were highly critical of Mann’s work. Stephen McIntyre, for one, an Oxford-educated PhD in mathematics, published several papers, one in the same journal that published Mann’s original paper, concluding Mann’s result “lacks statistically significance,” and worse, he showed that Mann’s data manipulation “is so strong that a hockey-stick … is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise.”

For McIntyre’s efforts, Mann called him “a professional liar,” a “denier-for-hire,” a “heinous climate villain,” “a barely perceptible $hitstain,” “a horrible, horrible person,” and a “white supremacist.” Comments like this were not isolated: Professor Emeritus Judith Curry, whom Mann called a climate denier, testified that Mann “violated norms of science and codes of professional conduct repeatedly and egregiously.” (The testimony can be found at 16:35 at the link.)

A few years later, emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia. One email read, “Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” Mann’s data “trick” would come to be known as Climategate. The tree-ring data showed decreasing temperatures after 1960, not increasing temperatures. Mann had removed the post-1960 tree-ring data, replacing it with temperature data, and smoothed the curve to give the appearance of a Hockey Stick. The backlash was immediate and devastating (don’t miss the music video).

Berkeley professor Richard Muller presented a lecture to his students rebuking Mann’s work:

They deceived the scientists, they deceived the public… The justification [for inserting temperature data] would not have survived peer review in any journal I’m willing to publish in… You’re not allowed to do this in science.

The Climategate scandal prompted Penn State, Mann’s employer, to launch an “independent” investigation that ultimately cleared Mann of “manipulating data,” “deleting records,” and “hampering…scientific discourse.”