Michael Mann has stepped into a methane-emitting cowpile.

Mann is the Penn State climatologist famous for inventing the "hockey stick" graph promoting the notion that planetary temperatures spiked in the 20th century after a Golden Age of stasis. This graph was misleading at a minimum, the product of what Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia termed "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline." What Mann did was splice two separate data sets together to create the illusion of spiking temperatures; the graph spliced data sets together without differentiation, hiding the global temperature "decline" shown by the Briffa reconstruction set. 

Mann would use a number of statistical tricks to do away with the Medieval Warming Period, an embarrassment to the warm-mongers. He would hide data that disagreed with a sudden spike in temperature. Mann was the lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report chapter “Observed Climate Variability and Change” and his hockey stick was very influential in making governmental and international policy. Millions of dollars were affected by it.

Mann had the misfortune of being mentioned by name in the leaked CRU e-mails and so was caught. Not that he hadn't his detractors before; Ross McKitrick and Steve Macintyre eviscerated him in 2003, for example. Despite being caught red-handed (or is it green-handed in this case?) Mann continued to defend his work rather than go quietly into that good night.

He did even worse; he launched a campaign of punitive lawsuits against anyone who criticized him. He has sued Mark Steyn, National Review Online, and climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball.

Mann shot himself in the foot with that last. For several years, Mann had refused to produce his data for the court (in support of his own case), claiming that it was “proprietary.” After missing a February 20th deadline, he now finds himself in contempt. Under Canadian law, the court is now required to dismiss the suit.

John O'Sullivan goes into detail:

"The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist, Dr Tim 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’s imminent defeat is set to send shock waves worldwide within the climate science community as the outcome will be both a legal and scientific vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that climate scare stories are a “hoax.”

[...]

"Michael Mann, who chose to file what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six long years ago, has astonished legal experts by refusing 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.’

As first reported in Principia Scientific International (February 1, 2017), the defendant in the case, Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball, had won “concessions” against Mann, but at the time the details were kept confidential, pending Mann’s response.

The negative and unresponsive actions of Dr Mann and his lawyer, Roger McConchie, are expected to infuriate the judge and be the signal for the collapse of Mann’s multi-million dollar libel suit against Dr Ball. It will be music to the ears of so-called ‘climate deniers’ like President Donald Trump and his EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt."

Mann has been waging lawfare against people who have rightly called him out on his deceptive practices, practices paid for with tax dollars and subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In point of fact, the Gang Green, the radical environmental lobby promoting the global warming hysteria, has poured massive amounts of money into the effort, far more than was spent by their opposition. Couple that with the fact that national, state, and local governments have been supporting alarmism, as have charitable organizations and even businesses (when head of Exxon-Mobile Rex Tillerson moved the company to support climate change alarmism and it becomes obvious why Mann pursues a strategy of legal action; the intent is to win a war of attrition, to bankrupt "deniers" and critics so as to silence them. Having lost the battle in the court of public opinion and in the realm of facts, they now seek to bully the opposition into silence.

So let's hope the judge in this case throws the book at Mann, who amazingly still manages to suckle at the teat of William Penn and was even awarded the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communications while openly defying the Freedom of Information Act. I suppose his still being at Penn State is no surprise; this is the university that gave us Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno, after all.

A tip of the turban to Wil Wirtanen for the heads up.

Tim is a St. Louis based writer. Read more from him at www.tbirdnow.mee.nu