So now, Professor Mann is threatening a lawsuit over the video? Good luck.
First of all, whether he likes it or not, Mann has become a public figure in an issue of public interest. Those are legal points. What he is protesting is his image and name being used in a song/video parody similar to the audios Paul Shanklin does for Rush Limbaugh. His chances of winning are next to nil.
Secondly, should he file the suit, his targets are entitled to demand disclosure of Mann's work on climate change and all his communications since they are at the center of the lawsuit. Does Mann really want to go there? I don't think so.
At any rate, a second video has now been produced by the No Cap and Trade Coalition in response to Mann's threat of a lawsuit. Here it is:
Hide The Decline II from No Cap And Trade Coalition on Vimeo.
My advice to Professor Mann is take your lumps. Hopefully, you can quickly be forgotten by the public. Sue and you will become a national laughing stock.
7 comments:
Is there any chance that you read that an independent panel cleared them of practicing bad science? It didn't get the attention that this supposed "controversy" is getting.
You can read about it here.
I'm going to guess that this won't matter to you at all though.
I also found this article that explains the whole problem rather well. Be forewarned though - it's complex and nuanced and doesn't just rely on talking points.
Lance,
"The allegations, made by skeptics of climate change, were based on e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in eastern England, including one in which a scientist wrote of using a "trick" to mask an apparent decline in recent global temperatures.
But a panel of experts tasked with examining the underlying science said it "saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work" by the university's Climatic Research
The panel was commissioned by the university."
Don't you see a contradiction in the above two paragraphs?
Oh, in particular, you might want to check out RealClimate.org's page of common arguments used by deniers. They cover quite a few that I've heard you repeat (like the myth that supposedly scientists were once trying to tell us that there was a "Global Cooling" scare.)
Crud...my other comment didn't go through (where I addressed your point). I'll try again later when I have some more time.
Okay, let me try this again.
Here's the basic problem. When climate change deniers produced this "evidence" of a supposed scandal, they were taking things out of context. Not only that, but oftentimes when scientists say things, they don't mean it the same way as people do in everyday conversations. (The word "theory" is a great example of this.)
In this case, by "trick" they weren't talking about some sort of deception. A study done by Penn State University found that "the so-called 'trick' was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field."
In addition, the whole accusation of "hide the decline" was also taken out of context, and if anybody has been being deceptive its the pundits and so-called skeptics who keep repeating this myth. How could they be hiding a decline when the year before the emails were sent was the warmest year on record? Check this link for more information.
The more I look into this, the more I realize that there was indeed a lot of lying and distorting of the facts. I was willing to concede that what we had here was a pack of bad scientists, which still didn't mean that Climate Change was the house of cards that the deniers want it to be. However, now I'm realizing that the lies and distortions are on the part of the deniers.
Fact Check covered this too.
The truth is pretty clear. People like yourself have been waiting for "proof" that this whole thing was a hoax. You've wanted it so badly that you were willing to take a few out-of-context quotes from some emails as some sort of smoking gun. The problem is, you didn't do your homework - and the average person isn't going to bother either. Once again, ignorance prevails when it comes to matters of science in this country.
Thanks for "clarifying" that, Lance. I think I got it now.
Sorry I couldn't condense it to a soundbite.
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