I am going to steer clear of the legal aspects here.
But what stood out to me was that there was a destruction of the Hockey Stick and the ignorance of the way the weather works in coming to the conclusions that led to the hockey stick.
There was a powerful graphic that showed 22 different scenarios that could have played out. Only 2 of them supported Mann Hockey Stick.
This is an excellent read on the matter:
https://heartland.org/opinion/mann-vs-steyn-proxy-wars/
The irony of Ironies, it was a University of Pa statistician, where Mann currently is “employed”, that took it apart.
….In the case of Mann v Steyn, the defendants brought a statistician to the stand, Abraham J. Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania. Wyner, along with Blakely B. McShane of Northwestern University (“M&W”), wrote an article questioning Michael Mann’s hockey stick theory of global temperature…
Now, let me say this. With 10% of the possibilities supporting his findings, perhaps Mann simply threaded the needle and made the correct ASSUMPTIONS at every single fork in the road and did what needed to be done to get the right answer. There is always a question when dealing with an issue like this, “Is this the right answer or my answer?” In the weather, because you forecast, you get answers. The reconstruction of past temperatures that becomes a keystone for an agenda to destroy our way of life, if that is your goal, has to have bias. But the main problem is if you look and study the weather for the love of it, his conclusions make no sense.
Obviously, they make sense if the conclusion can be used for another purpose. But in terms of weather… nope.
He claims that the medieval warm period was regionalized. So, there was no warm period globally. This means the end of the hockey stick away from his blade, which, btw is not using the same tree ring data that he derived the rest of the graphic from (he uses actual temperates, not tree ring proxies for the blade), would not be warm, but flat. So you would have a hockey stick look. But assuming the medieval warm period was indicative of global warmth, you would get what is the classic look that we all know to likely be correct, the cyclical nature of the climate, which is inherent to a system that by design creates imbalances and then seeks to correct them, naturally.
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The close-up of the last 1000 years is not a hockey stick but more like a river between 2 hills.
So you would have to get rid of the warmth and get rid of the cold, which Mann did. But in the real world, that does not make sense given the entire design of the planet which can not be sustained due to the design, just one size fits all. There has to be ebb and flow, back and forth.
Now, keep in mind the Hockey Stick is far beyond a source of criticism for only Michael Mann. IT HAS CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF THE PUBLIC AND POLICY MAKERS THAT WANT TO BUY INTO THIS AND HAS LED TO WHAT IS A DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS OF SOME ALMOST OTHER-WORDLY ANTI-HUMAN, ANTI-PROGRESS, ANTI-GOD AGENDA HELL BENT ON LIMITING, IF NOT DESTROYING, MAN’S FREE WILL. That is the real problem here.
But could Mann be right?
Yes, he could be, but it’s very, very unlikely.
Why?
He displays a lack of knowledge of how the weather works in the real world. He argues that the medieval warm period was just in Europe and Greenland.
Any long-range forecaster knows that it is almost impossible to sustain for a week, let alone a century, that kind of pattern.
Why? Because if Greenland is warm, it’s a sign the ridge of high pressure aloft is over Greenland. So what happens in Europe? On the east side of that ridge, it gets cold. They can rarely coexist UNLESS THE ENTIRE PLANET OVERALL WAS WARM. The reason the planet is warm. Well, I have spent much time explaining that cyclically, we may be in a similar period to those days. But even now, cold is going to show up somewhere.
Another problem, and I can only speculate because no one knows how he weighted his tree ring data, is that even in a warmer world, it is likely to still be cool to cold in other places. It just so happens that when Europe is warm, it’s liable to be cold in the Polar Urals where Briffa Cones abound. And in the western US. So, how do we know, unless he allows critics to look at his work, whether he is making decisions based on logical, physical conclusions?
There is a chance, though Mann is right. I say that because I have been right in situations where everyone is convinced I am wrong. I am seeing it right now: people hammering me on social media for believing winter’s worst is in the end game. I may not be right, but as I wrote in a previous blog, I show all my work. But I have some tolerance for Mann here. Because I do the same thing, I use a method that involves creating a string of ideas and then deciding which one is right. It is similar to what was pointed out in the trial. You come to forks in the road. But the huge difference is my mandate is the future, not the past. My mandate is to nail forecasts for clients, not to change or save the planet. But he could be right if, in every one of the decision forks he had to use, he had no bias and made the right move.
I would say the chance, based on temperature records, is one in 10 ( 2 out of 22). If we add in common sense about the weather, it is even less, but not 0.
But it is highly, highly unlikely, and that is revealed because, sorry, he doesn’t know and understand forecasting. How could he? He only uses the weather when he wants to push his message. You would hire Michael Mann to speak at a conference, but would you hire him to make forecasts that involve energy and retail? Or having to buy de-icing fluid a month in advance? Or letting water Companies on the West Coast know the agenda-driven 1 in a thousand-year drought, as it was called two years ago, was going to break. You have to look hard at the weather. And your hypothesis would be tested constantly. If wrong, you get fired. So if he looked at the weather with something other than using it to advance his agenda, it would have raised red flags about Europe and Greenland being warm together at the same time for one, and for two, if that is the case, it is just there and nowhere else.
In fact, we have a wonderful example now. Notice Greenland and Polar Urals are cold while Europe is warm.
Watch this. Jan 10-25
There Greenland is warm, while Western Europe is cold.
It is real-life watching of the weather (I have been doing it almost all my life) out of love of the weather, not love of an agenda to save the planet that would let me know that.
So, for me, what came out of this, and of course was ignored by the media, was that Mann’s conclusions are at the very least highly questionable and most likely wrong.
The real damage here is what the idea of the hockey stick and the attempts to justify it are doing to the advancement of the human condition. That is what was truly exposed.
But you would not know that unless you do what you do for the Love of the Weather.