Global warming scientist loses lawsuit against climate skeptic

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” which shows how global temperatures are rising fast.

The graph was first published in 1998, prominently featured in the 2001 UN Climate Report, and it has underpinned US Senator Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth about global warming.

But the graph’s methodology and accuracy continue to be hotly contested. Mann has meanwhile sued two of his most prominent critics for defamation. One case, against Mark Steyn will likely to end up in the US Supreme Court.

But another case, against Dr Tim Ball has not gone well for Mann. The Supreme Court of British Columbia, in Canada, has thrown out Mann’s case and has ordered him to pay the defendant’s legal costs, which will no doubt be a large sum of money.

The Canadian court issued it’s final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Ball’s libel lawyers. The court granted Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, while taking the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball.

News of Mann’s defeat first broke on the blog Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watt. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including some details on the hockey stick theory.

“This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the US and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are ‘unprecedented’,” the scientific publication noted.

Mann actually lost his case because he refused to show in open court the R2 regression numbers behind the world-famous “hockey stick” graph.

The “consensus” version of science does not requires open access to data, making it impossible for skeptics – those who invariably play a key role in advancing science – to test if results are reproducible.

This is seen as an important victory in the process of debunking the warmist scare as Mann’s humiliation and defeat will likely lead to a criminal investigation in the US.

The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist Ball, is expected to instruct his British Columbia attorneys to trigger mandatory punitive court sanctions, including a ruling that Mann did act with criminal intent when using public funds to commit climate data fraud.

Mann had filed what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six years ago.

Legal experts were taken by surprise when Mann thus refused to comply with the court direction to hand over all his disputed graph’s data. Mann’s iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of “man-made global warming”.

The negative and unresponsive actions of both Mann and his lawyer, Roger McConchie, infuriated the judge.

“Michael Mann moved for an adjournment of the trial scheduled for February 20, 2017. We had little choice because Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable. We agreed to an adjournment with conditions. The major one was that he [Mann] produce all documents including computer codes by February 20th, 2017. He failed to meet the deadline,” Ball explained.

Under Canada’s unique notion of “Truth Defense”, Mann was proven to have wilfully hidden his data.