A Win for the Climate Scientist Whom Skeptics Compared to Jerry Sandusky

In 2012—after writers for the National Review and a prominent conservative think tank accused him of fraud and compared him to serial child molester Jerry Sandusky—climate scientist Michael Mann took the bold step of filing a defamation suit. The defendants moved to have the case thrown out, citing a Washington, DC, law that shields journalists from frivolous litigation.

But on Wednesday, DC Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion, opening the way for a trial.

Although public figures like Mann have to clear a high bar to prove defamation, Judge Weisberg argued that the scientist's complaint may pass the test. And he brushed aside the defendants' claims that the fraud allegations were "pure opinion," which is protected by the First Amendment:

Accusing a scientist of conducting his research fraudulently, manipulating his data to achieve a predetermined or political outcome, or purposefully distorting the scientific truth are factual allegations. They go to the heart of scientific integrity. They can be proven true or false. If false, they are defamatory. If made with actual malice, they are actionable.

Weisberg's order is just the latest in a string of setbacks, which have left the climate-change skeptics' case in disarray. Earlier this month, Steptoe & Johnson, the law firm representing the National Review and its writer, Mark Steyn, withdrew as Steyn’s counsel. According to two sources with inside knowledge, it also plans to drop the National Review as a client.

The lawyers’ withdrawal came shortly after Steyn—a prominent conservative pundit, who regularly fills in as host of Rush Limbaugh's radio show—publicly attacked the former judge in the case, Natalia Combs Greene, accusing her of "stupidity" and "staggering" incompetence. Mann’s attorney, John B. Williams, suspects this is no coincidence. "Any lawyer would be taken aback if their client said such things about the judge," he says. "That may well be why Steptoe withdrew."

Steyn's manager, Melissa Howes, acknowledged that his commentary "did not go over well."* But Steyn maintains it was his decision to part ways with his attorneys.

The lawsuit centers on Mann's famous "hockey stick” graph. In 1999, Mann and two colleagues charted 1,000 years worth of climate data, and found a steep uptick in global temperatures beginning in the 20th century. The graph, named for its iconic shape, became a potent, easy-to-grasp symbol of global warming. And it was featured prominently in the landmark 2001 report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years." More

 

Science team identifies tipping point in climate change: 2047

If you’ve been wondering when global warming will show up on your doorstep, Camilo Mora has an answer for you.

Dr. Mora, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, leads a team that has tackled the challenging question of when the climate will shift entirely beyond what could be considered natural.

Their result: The turning point arrives in 2047 as a worldwide average if fossil fuel consumption continues unabated; as late as 2069 if carbon emissions are curbed. Broken down by city the numbers are a bit more revealing. In Montreal, for example, the new normal will arrive a year sooner. For Toronto it’s 2049 and for Vancouver not until 2056. But the real spotlight of Dr. Mora’s study is what happens in the tropics, where profound changes could be entrenched within little more than a decade.

“By looking at timing we’ve come up with an entirely new set of implications on climate change,” Dr. Mora said.

Dr. Mora is not a climate scientist but an expert in dealing with huge amounts of data to pull out hidden information – a skill he honed over six years at Dalhousie University in Halifax, working with the likes of the late Ransom Myers. It was Dr. Myers’ number crunching skills that turned the plight of the world’s fish stock into headline news in 2003.

Ten years later, Dr. Mora is following in his mentor’s footsteps with a study that seems certain to grab attention.

“I want to let the numbers do the talking,” he said.

Climate scientists have long expressed high confidence that the planet is warming as a result of the heat trapping action of greenhouse gasses. The latest assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts that confidence at 95 per cent. Where scientists have been less confident is on the timing of the change. Different models show the global temperatures rising at different rates and the hundreds of scientists behind the IPCC assessment can’t say which model will turn out to be the best predictor of what actually happens over the course of this century.

Starting with an idea that came out of a course he was teaching last spring, Dr. Mora decided to address the gap with some nuts and bolts analysis.

His team combined data from all 39 currently available global climate models and went back nearly 150 years to see what the range of normal climate variability was over that time period.

“We looked at the minimum and maximum values that occurred in that 150-year window and that’s how we set our bounds of recent historical variability,” said Ryan Longman, a doctoral student who worked on the analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Then the team tracked the combined predictions of the models forward at different points on the globe to watch how soon the predictions drifted completely out of their normal range. Once the coldest year at any given location was consistently warmer than the hottest year prior to 2005 the team considered the climate to have changed completely. The dates when this happens are different for different locations and they depend on the emissions scenario.

“I think this analysis is valuable and sheds new light on impacts,” said Jane Lubchenco, the former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an e-mail.

Dr. Lubchenco, who was not involved in the study, stepped down earlier this year to return to academic research at Oregon State University. She said “no one has gone to the immense effort they did to really look critically at the data from so many places and over the entire period of time for which records are reliable.”

The key result of the finding, Dr. Mora said, is that tropical locations will leave the range of normal climate variability much sooner because they typically experience a narrow range of temperature and precipitation levels. That’s a worry Dr. Mora said, because species there are not well adapted to living outside those ranges. Similarly, cities and nations found along Earth’s equator are among the poorest and least equipped to deal with the health and environmental burden of climate change.

“Today when people talk about climate change the images that come to mind are melting ice and polar bears,” Dr. Mora said. “People might infer from this that the tropics will be less affected.”

Instead, he said, the new analysis showed that species and ecosystems in the tropics would soon be experiencing “unprecedented climate stress.” The trend also goes for marine ecosystems where the study shows that ocean acidification has already departed from the normal range with a disastrous outlook for coral reefs.

Ken Caldeira, an expert in global ecology at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford added that while the timing and global breakdown from Dr. Mora’s analysis represent solid science, what matters more is the response.

“Whether an ecosystem goes a decade or two earlier or later doesn’t really matter that much,” Dr. Caldeira said. “We must stop using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our greenhouse-gas pollution. Everything else is nuance.” More