On Climate Alarmists and Other Discarded Relics

It is with inexpressible pleasure that I reply to the attack on me this week by Dr. Michael Mann, the discredited harpy of the now almost defunct global warming movement.

Readers may recall that last week, Mann made a cameo appearance in my column about the coalition industriously cobbled together by Naomi Klein, of Marxists, eco-alarmists, native-activists, and a congeries of opinionated useful idiots rounded up in the lounges of the Toronto International Film Festival in what called itself the Leap movement. I referred to him in citing the fact that “Dr. Mann’s renowned hockey stick has been exposed as an infamous fraud.”

The “hockey stick,” the most important graphic in the entire climate debate, held that the world’s average temperature proceeded along for centuries in a straight line like the shaft of a hockey stick lying flat, but had begun a sharp 45-degree climb like the up-raised blade of the stick. Of course, as I will show, this theory has been exposed as complete bunk, and while extreme environmental vigilance and ever greater research are called for, the demand for a savage reduction of all aspects of the use of carbon-derived energy has been abandoned by all but the eco-Janissaries who went too far out on the limb to come back, in the disorderly retreat from global warming to climate change. The world’s average temperature has risen one centigrade degree in eighty years, the last 20 years of which is described by the eco-terrorists as “a pause.” But Mann, who built a world-wide cult of personality and scientific eminence on his hockey stick, has become a laughingstock.

He responded grumpily to my very short reference to him, and came snorting out of the cyber-undergrowth with a fierce little Tweet: “Climate change denial, thy name is convicted and imprisoned felon, Conrad Black; (that) is the best climate change denial has to offer these days.” He referred his beleaguered followers to my entry in Sourcewatch, a pastiche of bowdlerized, stale-dated and malicious snippets from leftist media outlets, such as the Guardian, and individual commentators in the New York Times and CBC. None of the cited authorities was more recent than my initial conviction in June 2007 on three counts of fraud and one of obstruction of justice (of 17 original charges, including, in the usual hyperactive shock and awe manner of American prosecutors, racketeering, money laundering, and embezzlement). Mann’s chosen and recommended authority implies that I was sent to prison for six-and one half years and that that was the end of a squalid story of corporate pillaging.

It is not the purpose of this column to relitigate my case. Before returning to the fleeing sniper Dr. Mann, I would just remind readers that, in fact, all counts against me were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or vacated by the Supreme Court, and that it was an honour to fight an unjust prosecution as long and successfully as I did, and to have served three years and two weeks in prison doing it. It was in some ways a rewarding experience, and I made many friends in prison (generally a more interesting group than the membership of the Toronto Club), with whom I have maintained contact, including some members of the Bureau of Prisons regime, who well know what a corrupt and evil system U.S criminal justice is. Mann’s cited source, about me, is as authoritative as Mann himself has been with his hockey stick, and neglected even a hint of events subsequent to my initial conviction, including the fact that I collected the largest libel settlement in Canadian history, $5 million, from the sponsors of the initial allegations against me.

Mann also tweeted falsely that I was “the best climate change denial has to offer.” Scientifically renowned skeptics on the subject have virtually shut down the original zealots, and Mann is clinging to his hockey stick like a passenger on the Titanic grasping a raft. I commend to readers Climate Change: the Facts, edited by Alan Moran and published by the Institute of Public Affairs of Australia, and Mark Steyn’s edited A Disgrace to the Profession (published by Stockade), exposing the hockey stick, in the words of more respected scientists than Mann, as “a brazen fraud” and a “crock of obvious drivel” and similar terms, for hundreds of pages. There is a full explanation of the long warming pause (despite massive increases in carbon emissions) and of “the growing chasm between the predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the real-world temperatures.”

These books make the point that the hockey stick theory abolished “the very concept of ‘natural variability’ and insisted that nothing happened in the global climate until the 20th century, and it did so using a handful of unreliable tree-rings processed through a (spurious) statistical method.” Mann has sued Steyn (disclosure: a good friend of many years) for defaming him, although the civil tort of defamation, as a practical matter, has not existed in the United States since the New York Times v. Sullivan case in 1964, which required proof of intent to defame in the case of a public figure. Mark didn’t write much more scornfully about Mann’s scientific impersonation of Rocket Richard and Wayne Gretzky than I did, so let me be clear that in these matters Michael Mann is a sleazy charlatan, and he is welcome to try the same legal trick on me, in Canada, where there is a civil legal sanction against defamation, for which, as for much else in this country, I am grateful.

Only in America could the asphyxiating legal cartel reduce the right to justice to such a procedural quagmire

That imbroglio began when Steyn wrote a 270-word blog, which the dysfunctional and obscene U.S. justice system, as he points out, has not been able to bring to trial in 270 weeks, although his legal bills have exceeded $1 million. Mann went jurisdiction-shopping and sued in the District of Columbia, though neither he nor Mark live in that jurisdiction. Mark invoked the statute barring “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation” (SLAPP), which is designed to prevent the muzzling of public adversaries by tangling them up in lawsuits. This drove the issue into an apparently endless series of appeals about the appealability of the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law, and whether there is a right to appeal that law. Only in America could the asphyxiating legal cartel reduce the right to justice to such a procedural quagmire. Steyn has done what he can to get this to trial and answered Mann’s discovery requests more than a year ago, but Mann has determined that Steyn’s counter-claims cannot be pursued until the anti-SLAPP issue has been resolved, and that could go right through the appellate system, a veritable high-rise honey pot for greedy American lawyers.

Rotten though the American legal system is, and despite the fact that most of these organizations do not agree with Steyn’s views on climate change (nor necessarily with Mann’s either), amicus curiae briefs supporting Mark’s position have been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters’ Committee for Press Freedom, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Associations of American Publishers and of Alternative News Media (e.g. Village Voice), NBC Universal, Bloomberg, Time, USA Today, the Washington Post, and many other publications and groups. All condemn Mann’s tactics as an assault on the free press.

As Steyn acknowledged in a blog of June 8, 2015, “I won’t deny that there are days when I wished I didn’t have my head in some interminable brief and could be working on my next book, or album, or on the lam holed up in a Swiss clinic awaiting the removal of my facial-construction bandages and the delivery of my new Azerbaijani passport. But the moment passes, and I can assure you I’ll see this thing through — and I’ll win.” I know the feeling, aggravated as it generally is by the ambivalence of counsel about everything except collecting their foaming and proliferating invoices.

All supporters of freedom of expression, including those more alarmed at the current state of the climate than Steyn and I are (though we both are certainly concerned), should hope that he does persevere and does win. And those cajoled or dragooned into Naomi Klein’s Marxist-led Leap coalition should be aware of the flimsy basis of their purported belief that the hockey stick will pastoralize and dematerialize the pecuniary society of thousands of years. Shame on Michael Mann and shame on those responsible for the tenebrous legal jungle in which he hides, and which is strangling the Sweet Land of Liberty.

First published in the National Post.