In response to the latest in vile and disgusting attacks on climate science and scientists, Paleo-Climate expert Mike Mann today served the once-long-ago-useful-now-ridiculous National Review with the letter demanding a retraction and apology. The letter can be viewed below, or on Mike’s Facebook page, where you may choose to spread it around.
Part of the offensive piece, which compares Dr. Mann to sexual predator Jerry Sandusky, is reproduced here.
This recent slime fest marks the latest in the long decline of what once was the brave attempt to build a respectable intellectual underpinning for modern conservatism. William F. Buckley, I’m quite sure, would puke.
The letter crafted by Dr. Mann’s attorney promises to “pursue all appropriate legal remedies”.
Get popcorn.
For anyone still not clear on the multiple exonerations of Dr. Mann and his colleagues of anything remotely resembling wrong doing in the trumped up nothing-burger called “climate gate”, video review is below.
The first video unwinds the shameful distortion of out of context email texts.
Here an interview with Mann, and review of the disastrous, error and plagiarism ridden”Wegman report”, that is still cited by internet ignoramuses as some kind of authoritative tome on climate science.
Finally, Mike’s own defense of his work, under oath, before congress.
Funnily enough, when I saw the subject of the message in my Inbox I thought it had come from WUWT 8-))
And no, I don’t condone NR’s wild allegations.
Comparing Mann to a child rapist is pretty much the definition of defamation. Absolutely despicable. It will be interesting to follow this story to see how National Review reacts. They should immediately issue an apology and retraction.
Associating the ethics of a professor in the science department with those of a football coach in the athletic department is certainly bizarrely non-humorous, but who knows if the court would call it defamatory. More clearly, the NR does falsely attack Michael Mann’s professional ethics by blatantly lying.
The Mark Steyn blog post makes more sense (loosely speaking) after reading the Rand Simberg hit piece that he was covering.
http://www.openmarket.org/2012/07/13/the-other-scandal-in-unhappy-valley/
I might send Mann a few more bucks.
The National Review, the WSJ , FOX & Forbes Magazine are all cut from the same cloth. Right wing garbage. I love it that Mann has gone after them. The bullies are now getting payback- and its going to be a bitch.
Absolute barefaced lies. Mark Steyn and his accessory in Libel, the National Review need to be taken to the cleaners.
I wouldn’t bother asking for a retraction and apology. Go for the throat I say, make an example of them and set a precedent. That way, all the idiots out there will be on notice in one fell swoop.
Chance of winning in court is enhanced if the publisher is put on notice and declines to take action.
good point ch1
It does give them a chance to slither back into their hole and get away with inflicting some damage and that to me just seems wrong.
climatehawk1 is correct.
I had occasion to look into libel issues in late 2009, with some notes recorded in PDF @Q Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony, p.1, 34, 184, ending with:
‘Defamation is complex, especially Internet & international
This is complex to a legal layman (like me) and of course in the USA, defamation law varies by state. I am
not sure exactly how that interacts with the Internet Era. Much current activity seems to me like purposeful
organized defamation, often using the Internet as an amplifier. … Of course, in many cases, actions that might be legally ruled defamation never get
pursued, due to time or financial limitations. From much personal experience, scientists really want to do
science, not spend their time in court, and few are wealthy enough to do it anyway.
Rand Simberg is an Adjunct Scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (a think tank that wants to let big business do whatever it wants, and therefore is quite well-funded by big business). Attacking Mann is not ignorance, or even stupidity – it is deliberate calculation. And unfortunately, it’s quite effective – whole groups of people actually think the science behind AGW theory was completely discredited with Climategate (I hate to dignify it by using its title – the name itself implies that the allegations were true, another deliberate tactic).
It’s pretty darn frustrating to read some of the comments under Mark Steyn’s article: a commenter will say something untrue, then back it up with a series of other unfounded statements. There are some really ‘sophisticated’ untruths out there, that use meticulously sculpted detail to seem plausible if the reader of such doesn’t spend days, weeks or months of research to understand fact from fiction.
I think the motivations for denial are also more complex than what has been conspicuously published on the matter. Sure, the manipulators are motivated by the usual ideological, political, and financial factors. Some psuedo-scientists seem to be dually intellectually and narcissistically motivated to find some hole in the science, to show how much ‘smarter’ they are than those ‘bumbling’ and ‘incompetent’ climate scientists. But the manipulated seem to hold their flawed beliefs secondary to more social, behavioral, and instinctual factors, which interplay with those i mentioned thus far. Some of these guys in the Steyn article comments section seem liked they’ve picked a team, and are willing to fight for that team, no matter what. I speculate that they find it honorable to ‘go down with their ship’, honorable to never have ‘flip-flopped’ on the ‘debate’, and consider themselves brave, unwavering soldiers in the face of adversity. Some, I gather, have become emotionally or habitually attached to being a denier, and are ‘set in their ways’. Some just like to argue for sport; they enjoy confounding a competitor. Some hate to loose an argument, and thus continue to spew falsity, hoping they can win by being the ‘last man standing’ in a battle of endurance, where points are awarded for the number and veracity of counter attacks, regardless of their quality. Well, I could go on……. None are motivated by wanting to know, and trying to understand, what is real, what is probable, and what is not.
and some are just batshit crazy
> and now withdrawn, “Wegman report”,
Must have been asleep. When did that happen?
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/06/journal-retracts-disputed-network.html
Retraction notice
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor in Chief and co‑Editors, as it contain portions of other authors’ writings on the same topic in other publications, without sufficient attribution to these earlier works being given.
The principal authors of the paper acknowledged that text from background sources was mistakenly used in the Introduction without proper reference to the original source.
Specifically, the first page and a half of the article (pp. 2177‑2178) contain together excerpts from Wikipedia (first paragraph), Wasserman and Faust’s “Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications” (pp. 17‑20) ISBN 10: 0521387078 / 0‑521‑38707‑8 ISBN 13: 9780521387071 Publication Date: 1994, and W. de Nooy, A. Mrvar, and V. Bategelj’s “Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek” (pp. 31, 36, 123, and 133) ISBN 10: 0521602629 / 0‑521‑ 60262‑ ISBN 13: 9780521602624 Publication Date: 2005.
The scientific community takes a strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. The re‑use of material, without appropriate reference, even if not known to the authors at the time of submission, breaches our publishing policies.
The Wegman Report has not been withdrawn, that was the CSDA article that came later.
George Mason University managed to claim that:
1) The 1.5-page plagiarism in CSDA was indeed plagiarism, probably because Elsevier had already forced a retraction over pleases by Wegman to be allowed to add an erratum and resistance from Editor Stanley Azen.
2) But the 5.5-page superset of that same text, and the obvious plagiarism of 2.5 pages of Bradley(1999), were *not* plagiarism.
GMU also managed to ignore a raft of other well-documented complaints. … bu there is more to come to this story. Stay tuned.
See See No Evil at George Mason University, including some of the interesting funding and Board relationships that might hint at reasons for bizarre behavior.
I don’t follow right-wing blogs very closely, but I suspect that National Review is only a milder version of what we see regularly on other right wing blogs. The difference of course is that National Review is a commercial enterprise, but sites like Watts Up with that seem basically noncommercial. Justified or not as the charge of defamation is, I would have a hard time with blogs being threatened to stop opinionating.
There is a difference between opinionating and defamation/libel. A line is crossed when an opinion becomes a lie intended to slander. Simberg/Steyn claim that Mann “molested data” and produced “fraudulent” results. This is a false claim that has been repeated over and over. I’m guessing Mann is rather tired of dealing with it, and it is a great insult to a scientist to charge them with falsifying data.
Say I was an employee with the Huffington Post, and say I wrote an article stating that Mitt Romney liked to drink the blood of puppies when he was in his college fraternity. Now say both the Huffington Post and I knew this was a false claim, but we published it anyway. (Obviously, this is false. Please don’t sue me!)
It was published with the full knowledge that it was a lie and that it would cause personal harm to the person accused (and the positions they hold). Say it was picked up by the public in general and it spread like the Gere/guinea pig meme.
Simberg and Steyn know quite well what they’re doing – it’s not a mistake. Steyn works for a national publication – so I guess this is why Mann is pressing him. But the originator of this was Simberg, who does run a blog. He’s not being legally threatened.
A guy like Simberg gets paid (money goes from industry to CEI to Simberg) to produce stuff like this that can be filtered to sources like the National Review. A guy like Steyn passes it on to his readers to bolster their own political views.
It’s not “fighting fair” – it’s using lies presented as truth to deceive the public and cause harm to a person and their positions. We have this myth that just because it’s the internet, people can do whatever they want. This is just as harmful societally as restricting freedom of speech.