Canadian Court Limits Effort of Climate Alarmists to Silence Critics by Demanding Alarmist Climate Data

The infamous "hockey stick" alarmist Prof. Michael Mann, condoned by Pennsylvania State University, tried to shut down the criticism of Dr. Tim Ball, a Canadian climatologist, by claiming that Dr. Ball had defamed him.  Dr. Ball had backed up his criticism with publicly available science and challenged Dr. Mann to make his government-funded research data available for public examination.

Many of you will remember that the ClimateGate e-mails had given rational readers good reason to suspect that Dr. Mann had cherry-picked data to create his hockey stick chart of historic temperatures. He had ignored such well-known warm periods as the Medieval Warm Period in order to claim that temperatures were flat and stable prior to the most recent decades and switched his method of determining temperatures to "hide the decline" that method yielded for more recent times.  This was referred to in the ClimateGate e-mails as Mann's Nature Trick.  For a long time, the climate alarmists used the fiction of a 1000 years of temperature stability to point a finger of guilt at mankind for the temperature increase post 1979.

This same Mann hockey stick temperature plot had played a prominent role in the UN IPCC AR3 report of 2001.  The latest UN IPCC AR5 report no longer dares to wipe out the entire Medieval Warm Period in its bloated, alarmist claims.  Even the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have had to back away from the Mann hockey stick temperature plot. One wonders that the data, used in such a highly touted UN IPCC report as AR3 was, has been sequestered from general examination by scientists.

Dr. Mann was required to make his climate data on which the "hockey stick" temperature plot was based available to the Canadian court.  Now Mann, despite his initiating a legal challenge against Dr. Ball, has not only not succeeded in the British Columbia courts, but is in contempt of a court order to provide the court with his publicly-funded data and research results.  Apparently, there are limits on the usefulness to CAGW alarmists in using the courts as a tool to silence challenges from other scientists.

In the U.S., the Trump administration is acting to make scientific data and research funded by the government more available for examination by other scientists.  As this data comes to be examined, we are going to find that much more scientific fraud has been committed than we now know about and that many government policies have been based on this fraudulent science.

For more on the outcome of the Dr. Mann vs. Dr. Ball court case, see this article.

Thank you Merlin for drawing my attention to this article.