Mann-Steyn: Will They Miss the Point?

I am a tad pessimistic about the Mann-Steyn trial finally underway.

I read the deposition of Roger Pielke Jr^* in the Steyn-Mann trial and reached the uncomfortable conclusion that lawyers on both sides don’t quite grasp the nature of the infamous Mann Hockey Stick. Pielke made a too-clever-by-half distinction between scientific fraud and cherry-picking/bias/sloppiness/bad methodology on the other. It was as if the questioning was meant to establish whether Mann was a complete fraud. He isn’t. He is, however, an abrasive partisan whose signature product (the hockey stick in its variations incarnations) is of conspicuously poor quality.

How do we know that?

In his testimony about Mann’s use of uncentered principal component analysis to establish the link between CO2 and temperature over the last two thousand years, the National Science Foundation’s chief statistical expert Edward Wegman said the methodology was flawed. Steven McIntyre and Ross McKittrick had developed that point at great length and even used random noise data sets in the “Mannomatic” method and were still able to generate a hockey stick.

Stung by criticism of his reliance on tree ring data (factors other than temperature have effects on tree ring size) and his methodology, Mann produced a second paper using other proxies such as stalactites and lake sediments to produce a hockey stick which ran into more criticism because (a) in the same way the bristlecone tree bark series was overweighted in the original paper, a Finnish sediment study was the driver of the hockey stick in the second even though the study author said disturbances from bridge building had made layers unreliable as proxies and (b) it was the same mathematical methodology. Mann revised yet again but stuck the bristlecone bark series back in so as to generate the hockey stick shape and say “So there.”

In the “climategate” emails we learned that Mann urged his colleagues to circle the wagons and not share underlying data he relied upon. He was quick to call for the professional ruin of anyone he regarded as a critic of the CAGW narrative. Some emails between other climate scientists asked why it was in their interest or the interest of science to support Mann’s ad hominem battles. He comes across as more of a thin-skinned partisan than a paragon of scientific method.

The extraordinarily detailed critiques of Mann in the Climate Audit website (unlike Mann, Mcintyre and McKittrick show their work in detail) make it abundantly clear that the Hockey Stick is far from being a robust scientific achievement despite the prominence givenhttps://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27939/1/HartwellPaper_English_version.pdf it by the IPCC.

That was Steyn’s point in mocking Mann’s work. In most other jurisdictions, Mann’s lawsuit would have been dismissed as petulant nonsense. But in DC, the case was allowed to linger for years in the hope that the bad guys (National Review and Steyn) would tire and settle so that the court did not have to rule against an icon of The Narrative. (National Review did succumb.) Mann has been permitted endless delays and outright noncompliance with discovery orders. This is apparently to both punish Steyn and to avert legally necessary but ideologically unhappy judicial actions.

My fear is that the needed clarity of the issue may be lost down a rabbit hole about the lack of criminal fraud on Mann’s part as if that were ever the issue. The hockey stick was permisably mocked for being a really lousy piece of scholarship. Case closed--if it is decided on the merits.

*Roger Pielke Jr led a team that produced a heretical work that (a) the number and intensity of hurricanes have not increased and (b) that increased dollar losses are solely a function of more development. He is often (carefully) critical of extreme claims so many want to cancel him even though he believes there is significant human influence on climate. He was a co-author of the eminently reasonable Hartwell paper which was dismissed as climate heresy.