Month: March 2021

From the Manhattan Contrarian.

March 29, 2021 / Francis Menton

In my last post a few days ago, I cited Michael Mann’s libel lawsuit against Mark Steyn as an example of an abusive litigation attempting to use the cost of legal proceedings to suppress public debate on an important issue. The lawsuit was originally filed in October 2012. Other defendants in the case include National Review (where Steyn published the blog post that is the subject of the lawsuit), Competitive Enterprise Insititute (who published another blog post that Steyn used as the basis for his own post), and Rand Simberg (Author of the CEI blog post).

The tortured story of this case shows very well how difficult it is to strike a good balance between, on the one hand, the law of defamation as a mechanism for people to defend themselves against false statements that could ruin their reputation, and, on the other hand, an extremely expensive process that can be used as a weapon by those in power to threaten bankrupt political opponents and thereby silence the debate on important issues of public interest.

To refresh your memory, here is the key quote from the Steyn 2012 blog post that the man claims is defamatory:

Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent “hockey stick” diagram of climate change, the ringmaster of the tree ring circus. And when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt it was necessary to “investigate” Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State who was forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same bay that Mann was investigating. And as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find any of its stars guilty. If an institution is willing to cover up systematic rape of minors, what will it not cover up? Regardless of whether he is “Jerry Sandusky of Climate Change” or not, he remains the Michael Man of Climate Change, partly because his “investigation” by a deeply corrupt government was a joke.

Mann’s central claim in his case against Steyn is that this passage is defamatory because the graphic “hockey stick” is not “fraudulent”; and therefore Steyn’s statement that the graph is “fraudulent” is wrong.

Notably, it is not until eight and a half years after this case that the truth or falsity of the claim that the “hockey stick” graphic is fraudulent is addressed. The issue was finally addressed in a motion filed by Steyn on January 22 for a summary of the judgment – albeit almost incidentally, in a motion that dealt with many other issues; and then the problem was addressed in much greater detail in a response from Steyn to a motion for a summary judgment by Mann filed by Steyn on March 3rd. I received a copy of the March 3rd submission but couldn’t find a link to do it online.

The Steyn Motion Papers show three ways the hockey stick diagram is fraudulent. Most convincing is Mann’s deletion of certain adverse data that would have destroyed the clean shape of the “hockey stick” of the chart. The graph shows a reconstruction of world atmospheric temperatures from around 1050 to 2000, with temperatures being flat or slightly declining over the first 900 years, followed by a strong upward movement over the past 50 years. The 900 year flat period was derived from several tree ring data collections, one of which was provided by a fellow Mann named Keith Briffa. However, in recent years (after 1960) the Briffa series has shown a drop in temperature – an uncomfortable fact that would have severely undermined the intended visual impact of the graphic. Mann then simply decided to delete the portion of the Briffa data after 1960 while the rest was still in use. From the Steyn filing of March 3rd:

The [Hockey Stick graph as published in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, in a portion written by lead author Mann] Omitted Baumring proxy data by climate researcher Keith Briffa showing a drop in temperature after 1960, a message inconsistent with the hockey stick’s cherished shape. . . . The IPCC TAR has not announced the deletion of this data. . . . As the lead author, Mann decided to leave out the Briffa data without input from his other lead authors. . Mann’s own staff warned him about the deletion. Chris Folland, co-coordinator of the IPCC TAR coordination, wrote to Mann that Briffa’s data “contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message quite severely”. . . Briffa herself urged Mann not to “succumb to the” pressure to present a nice, tidy story “through” ignorance “[ing]Its results after 1960.. . . Mann agreed with them on the matter, but complained about the political implications of the data: “[I]f we show Keith’s series. . . Skeptics [will] I wish you a nice day. “. . . To prevent a “skeptic field day”, he decided to delete the data.

You’d think this is as clear a demonstration of scientific fraud as it gets. And as already mentioned, this is only one of three cases of fraud in the hockey stick graphic detailed in Steyn’s filing on March 3rd. The other two relate to: (1) “cherry picking” data in choosing proxy data series to indicate a flat to decreasing temperature trend from 1050 to 1950 simply by not using any of the many available series that indicate the existence of a ” Medieval Warm Period “which is warmer than the present; and (2) a misinterpretation of a series to use the results upside down and then, when the error has been pointed out, continue to use the series in this way for the sake of the desired supports visual presentation.

Anyway, you can throw at least one more letter into this mix and then we’ll wait for the court’s decision. As clearly as this emerges from the extract I have provided, the court’s decision could only become known at the end of the year. If the summary judgment is rejected, a trial takes place. Another possibility is for the court to give a summary judgment to Mann as the plaintiff. I find this possibility almost too ridiculous to consider, but the fact is that the human mind loses almost all rational faculties when things become politicized like “climate change”.

And then there is another question: where has this case been in the past eight years? The answer is that the National Review and CEI (but not Steyn) tried to sack it under the District of Columbia “anti-SLAPP” statute. (“SLAPP” stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.) Readers may be interested to know what this is and how it could distract such a case for so long without ever resolving anything.

Anti-SLAPP statutes are a state-level response to the perceived abuse of libel disputes by those in power to suppress public debate. 28 states have them, including all major states; and of course the District of Columbia. The DC statute wasn’t enacted until 2012, just months before Mann made his claim. Although the anti-SLAPP statutes vary widely from state to state, the DC statute is fairly typical of protecting the “right to advocate on matters of public interest”. Here is the relevant text:

A party may make a specific motion to dismiss a claim arising out of an act to promote the right to legal counsel on matters of public interest. . . . If a party filing a specific dismissal motion under this section proves, at first glance, that the claim in question resulted from an act to promote the right to advocacy in matters of public interest, the motion will be granted, provided that the responding party this does not demonstrate that the claim is likely to be successful on the merits; in this case the application will be rejected.

It is clear from the text that this statute should block exactly what Mann is trying to achieve in this case. And yet the applications from NR and CEI were unsuccessful. The court denied the motions and the DC appeals court upheld it. There was then an attempt by NR and CEI to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, but this was also denied because Justice Alito disagreed. When that motion was denied it was in 2019. The explanation – if you want to put it that way – why the SLAPP filings were lost is in the 2016 DC Court of Appeal ruling. The Opinion goes on and on (and on and on) but mostly gets tangled in knots trying to differentiate between expressions of opinion (which are unworkable) and statements of fact (which may be workable) and mixed expressions of opinion and fact, and trying to figure out with which category we are dealing with here. It’s all extremely inexplicable. If your hypothesis was that this was just the DC Court of Appeals providing cover for a really full political decision, I couldn’t prove you wrong.

Read the full article here.

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A person suffering from arachnophobia might think that a trip to Mars would fuel their fear. However, there is such a thing colloquially known as a Mars spider. It’s far more harmless than the eight-legged animal that scares millions of people, but its origins were only theorized until recently. Now a team led by a group at Trinity College Dublin has discovered that these “spiders” are, in fact, topological troughs that result when dry ice sublimates directly into a gas.

The “spiders” or, to give them their real name, “araneiforms” have been known for some time. These features of the spider life of the Martian terrain form in the spring, but they are not known to form on Earth. Araneiforms have been recorded by various satellites orbiting Mars over the past 20 years. Their transitory nature makes them particularly interesting to scientists who want to better understand Mars’ seasonality and weather patterns.

Araneiforms can be seen on Mars’ South Pole Cap in two high-resolution MOC images that were taken in the southern spring. Each picture is approximately 2 miles wide.
Photo credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS

There has long been a theory about where araneiforms came from. This theory, known as Keiffer’s Hypothesis, named after Hugh Kieffer, formerly the US Geological Survey, centered on the idea that the sun would warm the ground beneath blocks of dry ice and eventually sublimate the dry ice it was in contact with. Then pressure would build up in the block of ice, which would eventually break open and allow the gas to escape. The rapid escape of the gas then forms the dendritic pattern in the dust on the surface of Mars, which is characteristic of Araneiforms.

The only problem with this theory, which has been widely accepted in the scientific community, is that it has never been demonstrated experimentally. The coverage of the surface of Mars is not continuous enough to be able to catch a block of ice when it sublimates. Hence, although widely accepted, the theory has never really been proven.

YouTube video describing the Mars simulation chamber.
Credit – Europlanet’s YouTube Channel

This is where the team from Trinity College Dublin comes in. They teamed up with other scientists like Durham University and the Open University who conveniently had an important part of the kit known as the Mars Simulation Chamber. With this experimental set-up, environments with pressures and temperatures similar to those on the surface of Mars can be restored.

The Mars simulation chamber wasn’t the only interesting experimental device the team used, however. They took a note from the amusement arcades and used a claw similar to the one in the frustratingly designed games where children don’t regularly pick up toys. After drilling holes in blocks of dry ice, the team hung them with their claws just above a granular bed. They varied the size of the grains in the granulate beds in order to adapt them to certain surface conditions on Mars.

The research team was inspired by a classic arcade game.
Photo credit: Wikipedia User Nlan86

Using another well-understood technique, the Leidenfrost effect, the team was able to sublimate some of the dry ice directly when it came into contact with the granular surface that was being heated. The gas thus generated quickly escaped through a central hole the team drilled in each block of ice to simulate the rupture believed to occur in the dry ice blocks on the Martian surface.

After each experiment, a very recognizable araniform pattern was visible in the granular bed as soon as the dry ice block was lifted. This provided the first experimental evidence for the creation of these patterns resulting from the sublimation process described in Kieffer’s original theory.

This finding is likely that the best scientists will be able not to observe the actual process directly on Mars. Even if they finally do, arachnophobes can rest assured that all Mars spiders are most likely just terrain patterns caused by the noise of CO2 gas. At least as far as we can tell here.

Learn more:
Trinity College Dublin – Trinity researchers fight the spiders from Mars
Scientific Reports – The formation of araneiforms from carbon dioxide ventilation and powerful sublimation dynamics under Martian atmospheric pressure
SciTechDaily – Researchers fight the enigmatic “spiders” from Mars
The Independent – Scientists Breakthrough in Finding Explanations for “Spiders From Mars”

Mission statement:
This image by MRO, captured in May 2018, shows spiders beginning to form during the Martian spring.
Photo credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

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NATIONAL INSTITUTES FOR NATURAL SCIENCES

Research news

PICTURE: GAS MOVING TO US BECOMES BLUE AND GAS MOVING FROM US IS DISPLAYED IN RED. View More CREDIT: ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO), LU ET AL.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers found a number of star eggs with baby stars in the center of the Milky Way. Previous studies had shown that the environment there was too harsh for stars to form. These results show that star formation is more resilient than researchers believe.

Stars form in star eggs, cosmic clouds of gas and dust that collapse due to gravity. If something interferes with the contraction caused by gravity, star formation is suppressed. There are many potential sources of interference near the Galactic Center. Strong turbulence can stir up the clouds and prevent them from contracting, or strong magnetic fields can help the gas against the collapse of self-gravity. Previous observations showed that star formation near the Galactic Center is much less efficient.

To investigate the secrets of suppressed star formation, a team led by Xing Lu, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used ALMA to observe regions near the Galactic Center that contain abundant gas but no known star formation. Surprisingly, the team discovered more than 800 dense cores made of gas and dust.

“The discovery raises the question of whether or not they are actually ‘star eggs’.” explains Lu. To answer this question, the team again looked with ALMA for energetic gas outflows that indicate the formation of stars in star eggs. Thanks to the high sensitivity and the high spatial resolution of ALMA, 43 small and weak runoffs could be detected in the clouds. Lu comments: “Our observations show that baby stars are still forming in the severely disturbed areas around the Galactic Center.”

The research team is now analyzing the higher-resolution observational data from ALMA to better understand the processes that drive gas outflow and star formation near the Galactic Center.

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From EurekAlert!

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