Reflections on Climategate

Mark Steyn's unsuccessful case against Michael E.Mann

I have just republished an article that I wrote about a year ago reconsidering my 30 years of assumptions about global warming/climate change.

Climate change: a reasessment in the context of the last 3 years

Going back a few years I was invited to do an interview with a pretty toxic journalist in New Zealand. He kept me waiting so long and the longer I waited the more unwell I felt and so scratched the whole thing.

His response was to block me on all social media.

It is probably just as well as I was going to talk about what I knew about what was happening in the Arctic (methane clathrates and the like) but he was going to hit me with ClimateGate of which I was totally ignorant at the time.

Reading the full background to ClimateGate and the degree of intellectual dishonesty and fraud on the part of Michael Mann was a terrible revelation to me.

How could I ever accept anything that was coming out of conventional climate change science after that?

Earlier in the year I followed with rapt attention the case taken by journalist Mark Steyn against Michael Mann.

By the end, it was obvious who was telling the truth and who was not.

A corrupt Washington DC found Mann whiter than the driven snow and even the judge.

Nothing could be more indicative of the times we live in.

I am providing links to articles about the trial and the article I wrote at the end of the end.

It’s all very important information for people who want information and not just their own prejudices (on BOTH sides).

This was the article that I wrote at the end of the trial

Mea Culpa

I have had to amend my outlook based on a defamation case in Washington DC

ROBIN WESTENRA

FEB 11, 2024

Seemorerocks

For 30 odd years, since I read an article in the Bangkok Post on what was then called the Greenhouse Effect I have been living under a set of assumptions. This was reinforced by my own reading of what was happening in the environment as well as by a graph produced in the early 1990’s, which became known as the hockey stick which showed a stable climate until the onset of the industrial revolution when global temperatures increased rapidly in a way, we were told, was unprecedented in earth’s history.

All of this made complete logical sense, especially seen in the light of the exponential function (It’s just arithmetic’). Despite an early period of influence from Al Gore during which I read his book Earth in the Balance, and later his movie, An Inconvenient Truth,

I never came under the sway of the concensus but became a climate alarmist, especially after being influenced by Guy McPherson, Paul Beckwith and Sam Carana, author of the Arctic News blog and the theory presented as fact, of abrupt climate change. 

According to the above, the planet had already passed the 1.5C global temperature increase by the time of the 2016 Paris COP-16 meeting and we could see within the next year an Blue Ocean Event in the Arctic followed by a rapid set of events that would lead to melting and  a release of methane clathrates from the depths of the Arctic Ocean and extinction of humans by 2030 - this according to Guy McPherson.

By about 2018 I was noticing strange phenomena in the sky that could not be explained by ‘more cloud’ and so I posed questions on social media about what I was seeing (those were the days before the Great Censorship). Everything pointed to geoengineering and ‘chemtrails’. No other explanation was ever forthcoming.

For that sin I was unceremoniously cast out of the McPherson cult and I was free to follow my own investigation and thought processes. The first conclusion I came to was that what the abrupt climate change people took as fact was in fact a theory but continued, in conjunction with a researcher, Margo, to look at the Arctic ice during the melt season which, indeed, was in a parlous state. Just a thin slush really. 

Mainstream science was in full denial about the data which supported a rapid melting of the ice and it stood in the face of what climate change deniers were saying about Arctic ice being in fine shape and the melt just being another lie put out by the climate change scamsters.

Then along came the 2020 Covid-19 plandemic and the gradual realisation that we were being lied to about just about everything including climate change and the ‘solutions’ being forced down our throats by the World Economic Forum, right down to governments and every public institution, including the mass media.

The Great Reset and Agenda-2030 were never referred to (they were called a ‘conspiracy theory’) but they underlie every action by governments everywhere, at every level. It doesn’t take a genius mind to see this is all bullshit being forced down the throat of a credulous public that had already swallowed covid and the ‘solution’, the mRNA gene therapy shots sold as “vaccines”.

Almost to a man McPherson and all the abrupt climate change people swallowed the whole narrative and dutifully lined up to be injected.  Then Sam Carana, whose word I had by-and-large accepted, called for ‘climate change deniers’ to be put in concentration camps.

I was freed to come to try and make sense of all this and make my own tentative conclusions without too much external influence. I had already seen that much of what we were being spoon fed was surrounded by so many lies and so so much fraud that it was, at least, subject to question.

So much comes back to one graph, the hockey stick put forward by climate scientist, Michael Mann. 

What if this was largely fraudulent and subject to data manipulation?

Then came along what could be the trial-of-the decade - a 12 year old defamation case taken by Mann against journalist and broadcaster, Mark Steyn, and scientist, Rand Sinberg over comments they had allegedly made comparing Mann to a convicted pedophile, Jerry Sanduski.

Finally, it was possible to hear all the arguments of plaintiff and defendant alike, not in blogs or (in Mann’s case), social media posts but under oath in a court of law.

For the past few weeks I have been following the trial every day and I have to say what I have heard has turned my life upside down and challenged what I had  been taking for granted for 30 years. 

Twelve years ago, author and broadcaster, Mark Steyn, wrote comments in a blog post in which he compared the coverup of the activities of pedophile, Jerry Sanduski by Penn State University with the cover-up of Michael Mann by university president Graham Spanier. Mann decided to take this as he, Mann being compared with a pedophile and sued for defamation.

This has hung over Steyn for the whole of this period and has cost him a huge amount of money in lawyers fees. In the meantime, he has had three heart attacks and is now in a wheelchair. A similar case against Tim Ball in Canada was dismissed; Michael Mann refused to pay costs so Ball was bankrupted and died in penury a year or so ago and had to have his funeral crowdfunded.

This is what Mann does. 

He uses lawfare in an effort to bankrupt those he regards as enemies as well as to destroy their reputations. He described the mild-natured Tim Ball as a “human piece of shit” and compared another critic, statistician Stephen McIntyre to a “white supremacist”.

When it comes to defamation whatever the thin-skinned Mann accuses others of many times over. Here are just a few examples.

I have written about this in some detail

The fraud of Dr. Michael E Mann revealed

ROBIN WESTENRA

JAN 28

Seemorerocks This graph, from the late 1990’s forms of the basis of all the assumptions of the IPCC and al the governments of the world. It was also something that I have taken for granted for quarter-of-a century. The last four year of the covid “plandemic” have given me cause to questions many of my own assumptions.

Read full story

Michael Mann has claimed in all his literature to be a Nobel Prize laureat.

He is not and in fact the Nobel committee had to provide a letter to this effect. Under cross examination he had to admit this was a “mistake”.

In one of the great shocks of the trial, when asked under oath how much he was paying to his lawyers Mann had to admit that unlike the defendants he had not had to pay a single penny for the last 12 years and would have no legal debts from the case regardless of whether he won or lost.

Mann: Thus far, I don't believe that I have made payments, but I'm not sure. I don't think I have.

Question: So, you don't think you've paid any money in 12 years for your lawyers in this case, is that right?

Mann: As of yet, not to my knowledge.

Question: And you don't have a financial debt to any of these lawyers or their law firms for legal fees that you will have to pay, win or lose, after this trial?

Mann: I'm not sure about that. I don't think I do

That is a sure indication that there were powerful forces behind him.

It was up to Michael Mann to prove his case and that he had suffered from the defamation. 

He totally failed to do that. 

In one amusing exchange with Steyn Mann told how he had met someone in a supermarket aisle who gave him a “mean stare”.

He and his lawyers also misled the court by amending figures for the purported decline in grant monies he had received down from $9.7 million in 2020 to $100 thousand in 2023 but despite that gave the original, higher figure to the court.

There was also testimony from numerous witnesses such as Judith Curry that Michael Mann had not suffered but gained, financially as well as in reputation after the 2012 articles by Simberg and Steyn.

There were many indications, listening to reenactments, that the judge was sympathetic to the Steyn/Simberg case; he indicated in his summing-up that the onus was on the plaintiff to prove his case. 

However, he did not have the backbone to dismiss the case.

Throughout the case the media was conspicuous by its absence and there was no coverage. However, on the last day of the trial some media turned up and the Washington Post published an article.

After waiting 12 years, this famed climate scientist fights his critics in court

Climatologist Michael Mann is suing two bloggers, part of a mounting campaign to defend scientists against attacks from right-wing critics

The jury received their instructions from the closing remarks of the plaintiff’s lawyer, John Williams and by the mouthpiece of the Deep State, the Washington Post.

Whatever the considerable merits of the defendants’ case, whatever the sympathies of the judge the outcome was predetermined. 

No matter what the reality the ‘embattled’, ‘famed’ climate scientist had to have his victory against ‘right wing’ ‘climate change deniers’ - truth be damned.

The Deep State had to win.

Instead of Michael Mann’s case being thrown out or of Simberg and Steyn winning the jury decided against the defendants and awarded Mann $1 million.

Mann was able to say: “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.”

The following is a reaction to the verdict

And -

With a trillion dollar industry at stake and depending on Michael Mann’s hockey stick for its justification there was no way in the world that a pesky journalist could be allowed to stand in the way.

In my opinion, none of this can be separated from the political civil war being waged in the United States, from the wars being waged around the world, from the World Economic Forum and its Great Reset or, indeed, from anything that has occurred in the last four years with covid. 

We are swimming in an ocean of lies so there should be nothing surprising about this verdict.

We are in a war.

I heard enough from this trial to convince me that the lynchpin of the entire climate change narrative, Michael Mann’s hockey stick, is based on misuse of statistics, if not an actual fraud and that is enough to make me edge towards the conclusion that I have been misled over years.

I have become convinced that Mann’s hockey stick

should look more like this.

This certainly undermines my belief in the scientific consensus in a major way. It does not mean that I have switched over to being a ‘denier’. I have just become a lot more sceptical. I am far too much of an environmentalist to accept the ‘business-as-usual’ arguments from the Right and prefer to admit that I don’t know, just like with the whole covid phenomenon.

I do know lies when I see them however.

Whereas before I saw a straight line I am now more open to seeing cycles and sometimes cycles-within-cycles and accepting that increases in temperatures may precede increases in CO2 levels. 

I have become more averse to certitude.

A lot of what we are told is along the lines of “this is what will happen if we don’t do something” - it’s all in the future and the ‘doing something’ may just be worse than doing nothing.

There are many things that can take us to the collapse of civilisation and they are in the here-and-now, not in the future.

The mass covid ‘vaccine’ is culling our population, making it sicker and less able to function properly.

Birds and insects are disappearing before our eyes.

Then there is the big “elephant in the sky”, ignored and denied by conventional climate science, the spraying of our skies. I regard the evidence for geoengineering as pretty overwhelming.

If you still believe it is a conspiracy theory you probably also believe in the efficacy of the covid “vaccine” or the tooth fairy.

Need I go on?

It takes some courage to acknowledge the totality of what is happening. But I have long since swallowed the red pill and am obligated to change my views, sometimes radically, to accord with the evidence before my eyes.

After weeks of following the Steyn-Mann case I am doing it again.