The temperature has changed repeatedly without any evidence of human involvement over those longer time periods we can observe.
And the levels of CO2 etc. have changed as well, during time periods when it could not possibly have been blamed on humans.
I grew up in Canada, in an area with lots of farms... and I remember the high school trips to different geographical features such as moraines which are the residue of glaciers from long ago.
What caused those mile-thick glaciers to melt, given the low levels of human population and the low levels of human technology?
I don't think you understand what you are arguing.
Yes, the average temperature of earth has chaged vastly over its history, giving different levels of habitability.
At this time, we're in a really good spot for habitability, and we are seeing that we are slipping out of it.
There is evidence that some of the temperature change could very well be human made, and thus easy to stop (compared to, say, the emissions of volcanoes).
For some reason you argue that nothing should be done, because nothing was done in past massive climate changes, which resolved in mass extinctions.
Climate has changed in big ways without mass extinctions. The medieval warm period, the little ice age, mid-20th-century cooling. Just three examples. The idea the climate has been stable since the dinosaurs isn't supported by the evidence.
I mean have you looked at the charts showing the little ice age and the warm medieval period? The variation of temperature is orders of magnitude different to what we are experiencing now - I don't think that it's very relevant, is it?
While climate hasn't been "stable" as in "hasn't changed", it has remained in a very narrow band of t°, of which we are slipping out of it at a much faster rate than all your examples.
I'd argue it's quite clear we are on the way to an extinction class climate change, are you saying we are not? The hockey stick graph is pretty alarming to me.
Hockey stick graphs are indeed alarming, but also fraudulent, and the IPCC has even accepted that in the past! Look into the history of these graphs, the Mann lawsuit, the work McIntyre did on showing how these graphs were manufactured etc. After it was shown how Mann did it the NAS investigated and hockey sticks vanished from IPCC reports for around 15 years. Then one snuck back in to the latest report but only in the summary! The graph doesn't appear in the actual scientific review part at all! That's the state the IPCC has degraded to: the summaries for policymakers are completely different to the actual content for scientists and introduce new claims unsupported by the cited research. The graph is still wrong and the techniques that lead to them are blatantly fraudulent (lots of cherry picking, truncating, splicing, even tipping raw data upside down to make it go up instead of down, really horrific stuff).
For anyone having read this far:
- "the mann lawsuit" is climategate, where some people found a single sentence out of context that sounded off out of years of emails. Mann sued the people that accused him of skewing the facts, and won a defamation suit.
- while you write about things around the hockey stick graph, you dance around describing what they show. You can't "manufacture" a global rise in average t° of over 1°C.
- I'm not even certain you are a real human being! Why argue all this, when you can just look at the graph?
That's backwards! Michael Mann filed a defamation lawsuit against a skeptic and then lost it nine years later. The court awarded the defendant full costs:
Not only did the B.C. Supreme Court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball.
The case was about whether Mann was engaged in knowing scientific fraud when he made his false hockey stick graph. Tim Ball said he did, and Mann sued, but in the end he preferred to lose the case rather than reveal his data and working, which says a lot:
In the pre-trial Discovery Process, the parties must give up key evidence in a reasonable fashion, that proves or disproves the Claim. Dr. Mann lost his case because he abused Discovery by refusing to honor the “concessions” he made to Ball in 2018 to finally show in open court his R2 regression numbers (Mann’s math ‘working out’) for his graph (see ‘update’ at foot of article).
Mann v competitive enterprise institute recognizes that a jury would find their comments as deragatory, false and damaging, and the suit was dropped because Mann delayed the proceedings as he was "busy with other things".
No where was his data found fraudulent - the court recognized that Mr.Ball's statements are derogatory. The delay is a technicality that has nothing to do with science.
The article you linked is very inflamatory and makes this seem much more of a big deal than it is - nowhere do they discuss the court decision itseld, but they bring up more than 3 scientists from the 90's shitting on climate change.
He didn't spend 9 years fighting a very expensive lawsuit and then, when he finally had a chance to prove that his work wasn't fraudulent in front of a judge, decide he was busy with other things lol! He refused to present the relevant evidence because his goal from the start was an ideologically motivated litigation war, in his own words:
thanks Phil. there is a possibility that I can ruin National Review over this. Going to talk w/ some big time libel lawyers to see if there is the potential for a major lawsuit here that will bring this filthy organization down for good.
But then National Review was removed from the case and so there was no chance for him to achieve his goal via abusive litigation anymore.
Mann is unquestionably a fraud even in the eyes of his colleagues. He deliberately deleted data that disproved his reconstruction because he knew that if he was honest "skeptics would have a field day":
As lead author, Mann decided to omit the Briffa data without the input of his other lead authors.. . . Mann’s own collaborators cautioned him against the deletion. IPCC TAR Coordinating Lead Author Chris Folland wrote to Mann that Briffa’s data “contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly.”. . . Briffa himself urged Mann not to succumb to “pressure to present a nice tidy story” by “ignor[ing]” his post-1960 results. . . . Mann agreed with them on the merits but bemoaned the data’s political impact: “[I]f we show Keith’s series . . . skeptics [will] have a field day.”
"Technicalities" like Mann filing a lawsuit and then never actually doing anything to move it forward? The judge is extremely harsh towards Mann in the Mann v Ball case dismissal, stating in plain language that Mann has engaged in abusive behavior. He also clearly tried to BS the court about the reasons for delay.
That sort of behavior is consistent with abusing the legal system so he could say he was suing for defamation without ever having to actually win - for a decade! Dismissing such a case isn't a technicality. As the judge points out, Ball got witnesses lined up in his defense and Mann delayed so long that Ball's witnesses actually died of old age.
Honestly, I hadn't read the dismissals before. But it's laughable to call this dismissed on technicalities. Mann comes across as an abusive, manipulative and extraordinarily untrustworthy person in all of this. A clearer case of abusive litigation is hard to find.
But you agree that all the judgment also recognize that the jury would've edit: been able to recognize the comments as defamatory, and that, factually, in reality, the cases were - black on white - dissmissed on technicalities instead of from an actual judgment of anything scientific?
The whole point is that you bringing this up has nothing to do with the subject of this conversation.
And that you were blatantly wrong and misguiding in saying that he "lost the case" as the case was not argued
> But you agree that all the judgment also recognize that the jury would’ve recognized the comments as defamatory
The Mann v. Ball judgement [0] does no such thing (as is common for a procedural dismissal of this kind, it doesn’t address the merits at all.) I’m not going to track down the rest when the first one I check shows that you are wrong on the blanket claim, but if you’d like to point to any specific judgement that meets your description, feel free.
Edit: here it is
When looking at the bottom of the climate change litigation database on Mann v Competitive enterprise, if you go read the second to last summary, it states what I was meaning to say. I think I read it a bit quickly - it states that Mann met the burden of proving that a jury could find actual malice...etc. The to me is enough to indicate that the courts were supporting the suits as having some degree of validity. I think I was a little heavy worded in my prior comment.
What I meant to say was that all courts recognized some degree of validity to his claims of derogatory comments, by not dismissing his suits on those grounds, but on technicalities. So the whole thing is simply inconclusive, while the other commenter keeps arguing that it proves Mann is the antichrist.
So this whole tangent feels unnecessary and goal-post moving, as it has nothing to do with science.
> if you go read the second to last summary, it states what I was meaning to say. I think I read it a bit quickly - it states that Mann met the burden of proving that a jury could find actual malice…etc. The to me is enough to indicate that the courts were supporting the suits as having some degree of validity. I think I was a little heavy worded in my prior comment.
Assuming you mean the third to last document in the reverse chronological listing (the second to last is the plaintiff’s amended complaint, not a finding of the court), this is a ruling on a very early motion to dismiss, and what it actually found is that it was too early to determine whether or not there was, as a matter of law, sufficient evidence for a jury to find “actual malice” to the required standard of proof. [0] The first (most recent) document in that list (the one I linked upthread) is on a later motion for summary judgement, and, on the same issue, the court found explicitly against Mann on “actual malice” from CEI, finding that there was not evidence on which a reasonable jury could find that, which is why they dismissed his claim against CEI. That earlier ruling is not the court endorsing any degree of validity of any of Mann's claims, it is simply stating it is too early to address whether or not those claims were material disputes of fact for the jury, much less whether they had validity (which is mostly what the jury decides, though the court can resolve it when it reaches the level where there is no basis for a jury to find one way or the other.)
> What I meant to say was that all courts recognized some degree of validity to his claims of derogatory comments,
That’s simply false; some found that there would be triable issue of fact on falsity, but that’s not recognizing any merit of the claim, and others simply did not address the question at all.
> What I meant to say was that all courts recognized some degree of validity to his claims of derogatory comments, by not dismissing his suits on those grounds, but on technicalities.
Dismissing claims because of failure to provide sufficient evidence to meet required elements of the claim (like “actual malice” against CEI) is not a “technicality” (which is a bad name for procedural misconduct resulting in a dismissal with prejudice, anyway) but a ruling on the merits of the claim.
> So the whole thing is simply inconclusive, while the other commenter keeps arguing that it proves Mann is the antichrist.
I don’t see anyone claiming that Mann is the antichrist. He is a serial abuser of the legal systems of multiple jurisdictions, however, that is clear, and his claims on this issue have either been dismissed on the merits or because of his culpable failure to pursue them.
[0] “At this stage, the evidence before the Court does not amount to a showing of clear and convincing as to ‘actual malice,’ however there is sufficient evidence to find that further discovery may uncover evidence of ‘actual malice.’ It is therefore premature to make a determination as to whether the CEI Defendants did not act with ‘actual malice.’” http://climatecasechart.com/case/mann-v-competitive-enterpri...
Thanks for taking time to write this up, I was sloppy in my reading - as I said, I lost interest in these suits quite quickly. Sorry if I mislead anyone, not my intention.
On the topic of Mann's science itself, I don't find anything in these suits to affect our view of it. Do you?
No, the jury would not have found it defamatory if it were true, which it was.
The cases were dismissed without evaluating the science because of Mann's behavior. The people he sued wanted to just get on with it and debate the science, but Mann literally filed suit and then never turned up to his own legal proceedings. Hence the judge's displeasure.
Apparently Mann tried to make the same argument you made about not losing the case. He lost all the cases. If the judge dismisses your case that is losing. You don't get to file a lawsuit, never turn up and then when the judge tosses you out, claim you won.
> Mann v competitive enterprise institute recognizes that a jury would find their comments as deragatory, false and damaging
No, Mann v. Competitive Enterprise Institute had Mann’s claims against CEI dismissed at summary judgement because Mann’s evidence was insufficient for any reasonable jury to conclude that the required standard (“actual malice”) was met in CEI’s conduct, irrespectice of whether the charges were false or not. [0] (“actual malice” was held to be a triable issue of fact for the jury against an individual defendant in the same case, as was the actual falsity of the charges. I believe the case against the individual defendant was abandoned because CEI was the real target, or just because of Mann’s pattern of abandoning cases because he was “too busy” to prosecute them after filing.)
I wonder if in general you are making the mistake of assuming that motions to dismiss or for summary judgement in which the court is required to assume that the jury would find for Mann in any cases where there is a material issue of fact constitute “recognition” that the jury would find for Mann, which is decidedly not the case.
That paper comes from the same group as the original MM paper (one of the authors studied under Mann even), has some of the same problems and was itself rebutted:
WA reported that reconstructions without bristlecones (their Scenario 6) lack “skill” in reconstruction and “climatological meaning”, a finding with which we concur. The NAS Panel says that bristlecones should be avoided in temperature reconstructions. Thus, MBH-type reconstructions (with PC networks) with or without bristlecones are both eliminated. So much for the “refutation” of our criticisms.
Like all the variations you mentionned are less than 0.5° average, while we are already over 1° now. I think it's almost disengenuous to use them to say that the present warming is nothing to be worried of.
No, the changes were much larger than that, but recall from the climategate emails that they spent a lot of time trying to find ways to cover up the data around that. Look into the history of "hockey stick" graphs to see just how far they go. Historical evidence from outside their field shows there must have been changes of many degrees in the relatively recent past, e.g. bison fossils at altitudes indicating 5-6 degrees warmer than today with no runaway feedback loops and obviously, subsequent cooling.
How large were they? With a source please, you say a lot of garbage that I'd like not to have to sift through. Every source I see shows clearly that both your events were much less than 1°.
Bison fossils? What about ree rings and ice core samples? How are bones a possible indiction of anything?
Climate gate had a single sentence that seemed off to someone who has never done statistical analysis, if taken out of contexy.
ClimateGate had numerous emails that in context showed serious malfeasance. They were literally saying they were going to exclude any scientific work that disagreed with them "even if they had to redefine the peer reviewed literature to do so". It certainly wasn't a single sentence. Try reading them yourself and see!
But there are other lines of evidence that work in similar ways. They are based on the discovery and dating of fossils at altitudes where that form of life can't exist today because it's too cold, and then from that calculate how warm it must have been at the time (much warmer than today, even in the relatively recent past).
Re: tree rings/ice cores. These are called proxy reconstructions and they routinely conflict with each other, meaning they can't really be temperature proxies. Nonetheless, PCs are regularly discarded in a form of industrial scale cherry picking in order to create a hockey stick. An example of the problem is here, where proxies are randomly selected and plotted showing how almost none of them show any kind of hockey stick:
Easy to stop? Lol it's down right impossible and all this discussion is colossal waste of time. Humans are never going to coordinate globally to do this.
And the levels of CO2 etc. have changed as well, during time periods when it could not possibly have been blamed on humans.
I grew up in Canada, in an area with lots of farms... and I remember the high school trips to different geographical features such as moraines which are the residue of glaciers from long ago.
What caused those mile-thick glaciers to melt, given the low levels of human population and the low levels of human technology?