Taking the full measure of our enemy

James Dellingpole, in the UK journal The Spectator, makes clear what's at stake in the current lawsuit by Michael Mann against Mark Steyn:

 It now looks — go to Steynonline.com for the full story — as if Steyn is going to be up there on his own, fighting and financing his case without the support of his magazine, National Review; that the outcome is not as certain as it seemed at the beginning; and that this hero deserves all the help we can give him.

Why? Well, the fact that I even have to explain this shows what a cowardly, snivelling, career-safe, intellectually feeble, morally compromised age we inhabit. By rights, Mann v Steyn should be the 21st-century equivalent of the Scopes monkey trial, with believers in free speech, proponents of the scientific method and sympathetic millionaires and billionaires all piling in to Steyn’s defence with op eds, learned papers, and lavish funds to buy the hottest of hotshot lawyers.

Instead, what do I read? Crap like, ‘Steyn’s out of order: he shouldn’t have been so rude about the judge who mishandled the initial hearing.’ (OK, maybe he shouldn’t — but what are you supposed to say about judges who mishandle your case? ‘Nice job, ma’am’?) Crap like, ‘And he’s going to take the National Review down with him.’ (No he isn’t. That’s what libel insurance is for.) Crap like, ‘Well, he shouldn’t have used such-and-such a word or written that polemic in quite so inflammatory and offensive a way.’ (Yes that’s right. Polemics should be cautious, dry, legalistic, tame. Otherwise people might read them and have their minds changed.)

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. 

There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s hockey stick in his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. The IPCC used it five times in its Third Assessment Report and promoted Mann to lead author.
But the hockey stick, on which Mann’s reputation largely rests, was and is a nonsense. It obliterates the medieval warm period; it is unduly reliant on proxy data — bristlecone pine samples — which are known to be unreliable; it is dependent on a flawed algorithm which, according to every statistical authority who has ever looked at the subject, creates the same hockey-stick data almost regardless of the information you feed into it.
Surely if you’re going to sue someone for defamation, this must involve an examination of the reputation said to be worth defending. What would this say about Mann, onlie begetter of arguably the most comprehensively discredited artefact in recent climate science history?

This is what we're up against hourly.  They leave no opportunity to squelch our freedom to state the truth and draw conclusions from it unattended.  We must be every bit as vigilant in our discovery of opportunities to defeat them.