Speaking of lies...
If you’ve been cruising the denial highway over the past week or so, you may have come to believe that Dr. Michael Mann has
lost his defamation lawsuit--the British Columbia court
ruled in favor of Canadian Tim Ball and forced Mann to
pay Ball’s court costs. Deniers are also claiming that the hockey stick graph, which Mann supposedly
refused to release the data for, has now been
broken and
ruled a fraud...Despite the victory laps from O’Sullivan and the rest, the judge didn’t rule in favor of Ball in the Mann case. Rather, the court dismissed the case on the basis that it has dragged on and been delayed for so long...In a statement responding to the wave of false coverage,
Mann clarified that the “Court did not find that any of Ball’s defenses were valid. The Court did not find that any of my claims were *not* valid… The provision in the Court’s order relating to costs does NOT mean that I will pay Ball’s legal fees… In making his application based on delay, Ball effectively told the world he did not want a verdict on the real issues in the lawsuit.”
In reality, the court tossed the case in what appears to be an act of pity for Tim Ball. As
a statement from Mann’s lawyer explained, Ball’s request to terminate the lawsuit “relied heavily on his alleged state of health” and because, per Ball’s defense team, his claims are “given no credibility by the average, reasonable reader.” (An assessment bolstered by the fact that in a similar suit,
a judge ruled that “a reasonably thoughtful and informed person… is unlikely to place any stock in Dr. Ball’s views.”)
On the health front, the plea to toss the case notes that Ball, born in 1938, “suffered coronary heart failure” in 2017, after “quintuple bypass surgery” ten years prior, in addition to having Type 2 Diabetes. Apparently being old is a defense?
What this all means: no, the court didn’t rule that Mann’s hockey stick was a fraud. And no, it has nothing to do with Mann supposedly refusing to release the data for deniers to double check. Again, Mann
took to Twitter to explain that “The ‘Hockey Stick’ data & code are all available & have been for more than a decade,” with a link to the
FTP site that’s hosted the data since, by the looks of it, at least 2003.
And for whether or not the hockey stick, showing a rapid increase in temperatures in the modern era, has broken, Mann points out that
multiple other
teams have come to the
same general conclusion.
Far from being a clear win for the deniers, the ruling appears to be more a judgement of the state of Tim Ball: a broken down old man, who’s lucky that no one takes his conspiratorial and accusatory ramblings seriously.
And that’s what his own defense said about him!
Source:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...clares-Victory