Friday, September 20, 2019

Tim Ball's Video

Tim Ball put up a video that I hadn't seen until now.

Curiously, he seems to think he won his case against Mann on merits -- that his criticisms, never expressed in scientific language, never published anywhere, were somehow meaningful and are what swung the case.

After reading the final judgement, I don't see how that can be true in any sense at all. There was nothing whatsoever in the termination judgement that said anything at all about the hockey stick or its validity. Ball is delusional. That's exactly as Mann's lawyer said, and it shows that all the denying bloggers who claimed so were flat-out wrong. I'm sure they are too cowardly to apologize, but if they had any integrity they would.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael Mann launches a lawsuit.
Michael Mann creates a delay in providing necessary information.
Michael Mann gives no evidence for why he has created this deal.
The judge throws out the lawsuit that Michael Mann instituted primarily based on hi delay.
The judge awards court costs to the defendant.

And this in any way vindicates Michael Mann?

Marco said...

Maybe Anonymous can show us the part in the court's decision where the judge stated Mann created "a delay in providing necessary information". It isn't there. One wonders why, if, according to Ball and Anonymous, this is the reason for the delay.


David in Cal said...

David - thanks very much for posting Ball's comments. I wish they had been in writing. I had to spend 23 minutes listening to the whole thing. I didn't find Ball asserting that "his criticisms...are what swung the case." On the contrary, Ball made a number of different assertions:

1. The case was a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) -- a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.

2. Mann's Hockey Stick model is worthless

3. Mann is political and biased

4. The IPCC is unreliable, because they were established to look only at man-made warming, not natural causes of warming.

I strongly agree with point #1. I think it's shameful that someone can be forced to endure many years of burdensome litigation over a silly joke. Whether or not Ball is correct scientifically, he is correct from a POV of civil liberties and Freedom of Speech.

Marco - Points #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11 and #12 explain in detail why the judge concluded that the plaintiff caused delay, which he called "inexcusable" and "inordinate". The memo doesn't specifically mention that some of those "extensive periods of delay" were caused by Mann failing to provide information, but I believe that was indeed the case.

Cheers

Marco said...

DiC, you are free to believe what you want to believe, but there is ZERO evidence that Mann failed to provide information.

David in Cal said...

Marco - what do you think Mann did to cause delays that the judge called "inexcusable" and "inordinate"? If it wasn't failure to provide information, what was it?

Cheers

Anonymous said...

Maybe Marco can tell us what this means:

approximately June 2013, there was a delay of approximately 15 months where nothing was done to move the matter ahead. There was a second extensive period of delay from July 20, 2017 until the filing of the application to dismiss on March 21, 2019, a delay of 20 months. Again, nothing was done during this period to move the matter ahead. The total time elapsed, from the filing of the notice of civil claim until the application to dismiss was filed, was eight years. It will be almost ten years by the time the matter goes to trial. There have been two periods, of approximately 35 months in total, where nothing was done. In my view, by any measure, this is an inordinate delay.
March 25, 2011, the action was commenced;
July 7, 2011, the notice of civil claim was amended;
June 5, 2012, the notice of civil claim was further amended;
From approximately June of 2013 until November of 2014, there were no steps taken in the action;
November 12, 2014, the plaintiff filed a notice of intention to proceed;
February 20, 2017, the matter was initially supposed to go to trial, but that trial date was adjourned;
July20,2017,thedateofthelastcommunicationreceivedfromMr.Mannor his counsel by the defendant. No steps were taken in the matter until March 21, 2019 when the application to dismiss was filed;
April 10, 2019, a second notice of intention to proceed was filed; and
August 9, 2019, after the first day of the hearing of this application, a new trial date was set for January 11, 2021.
There have been at least two extensive periods of delay. Commencing in
Mann v. Ball Page 4
[8] I now turn to whether the delay is excusable. In my view, it is not. There is no evidence from the plaintiff explaining the delay. Dr. Mann filed an affidavit but he provides no evidence whatsoever addressing the delay. Importantly, he does not provide any evidence saying that the delay was due to his counsel, nor does he provide evidence that he instructed his counsel to proceed diligently with the matter. He simply does not address delay at all.
[9] Counsel for Dr. Mann submits that the delay was due to his being busy on other matters, but the affidavit evidence falls far short of establishing this. The affidavit of Jocelyn Molnar, filed April 10, 2019, simply addresses what matters plaintiff's counsel was involved in at various times. The affidavit does not connect those other matters to the delay here. It does not explain the lengthy delay in 2013 and 2014 and does not adequately explain the delay from July 2017. The evidence falls far short of establishing an excuse for the delay.
[10] Even if I was satisfied that the evidence established the delay was solely due to plaintiff's counsel being busy with other matters, which I am not, I do not agree that this would be an adequate excuse. Counsel for the plaintiff was unable to provide any authority establishing that counsel's busy schedule is a valid excuse for delay.

Dano said...

Well, clearly, Mann's dithering totally means that the Hockey Stick is broken and has been refuted and NOBLE PRIZE SCAM

or something.

Best,

D

Layzej said...

"there is ZERO evidence that Mann failed to provide information."

On the contrary, the judge indicates that "the materials that have been filed on this application are grossly excessive in relation to the matters in issue."

Anonymous said...

@ Layzej:
The context of that indicates that the materials filed did not have to do with the actual claims, rather with the disposition of the suit:

"Before concluding, I wish to note that the materials that have been filed on this application are grossly excessive in relation to the matters in issue. There are four large binders of materials filed by the plaintiff on the application to dismiss, plus one additional binder from the defendant. The binders contain multiple serial affidavits, many of which are replete with completely irrelevant evidence. In my view, this application could have been done and should have been done with one or two affidavits outlining the delay, the reasons for the delay, and the prejudice."

Layzej said...

It's the only indication the judge gives with respect to materials filed. Too much. Not too little.

David in Cal said...

Layzej - these four binders were legal arguments. What Mann didn't provide was key information about his model. Here is a description of what happened:

Dr Ball’s legal team adroitly pursued the ‘truth defense’ such that the case boiled down to whether Ball’s words (“belongs in the state pen, not Penn State”) after examining the key evidence (Mann’s R2 regression numbers) fairly and accurately portrayed Mann.

The aim was to compel the plaintiff (Dr. Mann) to show his math ‘working out’ to check if he knowingly and criminally misrepresented his claims by resorting to statistical fakery (see: ‘Mike’s trick‘ below).

In the pre-trial Discovery Process the parties are required to surrender the cited key evidence in reasonable fashion, that they believe proves or disproves the Claim.

Despite Ball’s best efforts over 8 years, Mann would not agree to surrender to an open court his math ‘working out’ – those arcane R2 regression numbers for his graph (see Mann’s latest obfuscating Tweet in the ‘update’ at foot of this article).

But throughout 2017 and 2018 any reasonable observer could see through such endless delays from the plaintiff – all just attritional tactics.

The Penn State professor had persistently refused to honor the binding “concessions” agreement he made to Ball which ultimately gave his legal team the coup de grace to win the case for the defendant due to Mann’s ‘Bad Faith’


The entire article is worth reading. https://principia-scientific.org/breaking-news-dr-tim-ball-defeats-michael-manns-climate-lawsuit/

Cheers

Entropic man said...

David in Cal

Methinks Mann lost interest in the suit. It had already served its purpose.

He did the minimum necessary to keep it going, while getting on with his life.

Anonymous said...

@ Entropic Man:
Methinks Mann lost interest in the suit. It had already served its purpose.

You may be right, but what exactly was his purpose? To go to court to stop criticism of him?
Hardly an admirable position.

Entropic man said...

David in Cal

You don't have to be an AGW denier to play Climateball.

It did its job. The deniers became more reluctant to play the Mann not the ball.

Marco said...

DiC, are you seriously asking me to believe anything on the PSI site? Especially when coming from John O'Sullivan?

Ask them to provide the *documents* that support their assertions. Good luck with the evasion that follows.

Anonymous: what it means is that Mann didn't push the case forward. That simple. It's eessentially stated in point 11 in the judgment.
Of relevance here is also that Andrew Weaver *did* get to pursue his appeal against Ball, as the judge in that case *did* accept that the busy schedule of the counsel was responsible for the delay:
https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/19/02/2019BCCA0223.htm

David Appell said...

Entropic man wrote:
"The deniers became more reluctant to play the Mann not the ball."

EM, that is just beautiful...!

David Appell said...

David in Cal: First of all, that site is run by someone who denies the greenhouse effect. So he's not someone I'd be looking for truth from.

Second, Ball didn't need Mann's r2 analysis to denigrate his results. So why did he need them in court?

I highly doubt Ball was/is capable of understanding the mathematics of the MBH papers. In the video he said (3:20) about the hockey stick

"...that in fact was complete fake news, he completely rewrote the climate history, and I knew immediately as soon as I saw it and what was wrong with it."

That is, Ball was relying on the same old graph as everyone else, by Lamb, which was just a hand drawn schematic based on the Central England Temperature with no data behind it. (If you know the data file for it, please let me know.)

Ball was just badly wrong about that, even ignorant (real scientists had started questioning that idea before MBH), as the subsequent confirmation of the hockey stick (many times by now) has shown.

Ball was, and remains, a dinosaur.

David Appell said...

Anonymous Anonymous said...
"You may be right, but what exactly was his purpose? To go to court to stop criticism of him?"

To stop people libeling him.

Criticism is fine and expected. But how would you like it if someone said you should go to prison for your scientific analysis, and even that you're as bad as a pedophile? In what world is that acceptable?

Entropic man said...

David Appell

The graph was originally published in Hubert Lamb's book "Climate, history, and the modern world" in 1982, based on work done in the 1960s.

Lamb was a meteorologist and climatologist. He founder CRU in 1972. He used records from monasteries and other Medieval sources, early records of the CET and pollen analysis to estimate English temperatures.

I remember that period. I did a little research at Kings College London in the 1970s when the only way of measuring pre-thermometer temperatures was by pollen analysis of peat bogs.

A peat bog grows thicker over time and traps wind-blown pollen from the plants around it. You can count the pollen grains at each depth and reconstruct how the plant community changed over time. Since plant distributions follow temperature contours you can estimate the local temperature.

If you found species A, with a maximum average temperature tolerance of 5C and species B with a minimum tolerance of 4C, you can deduce that the local temperature at the time was between 4C and 5C. You could draw a plot of temperature over time similar to Lamb's. Uncertainty would be about +/-1C.

Lamb's graph was one of the early attempts to combine different sources. It was as good as you could do at the time, but by modern standards the uncertainties were enormous.

It is a shame to see it misused by the Denierati.

Incidentally, "Mann not the ball" is not original. It's been around since the case began. It does emphasise that ad hominem attacks do not advance the debate. In other days as a Debating Society judge I always marked down such attacks as

1) unsporting

2) indicating that the speaker had run out of useful arguments.



Layzej said...

DiC says: Dr Ball’s legal team adroitly pursued the ‘truth defense’

There's no evidence that this is true.

Anonymous said...

If Mann's purpose was to stop people "libeling" him, and libel is probably not accurate because Ball was being satiric playing on the Penn State meme, and because Mann is a public figure, then I doubt that Mann succeeded in his efforts.