I spent much of today on Canadian TV and radio discussing a variety of topics, including Ukraine, the hyper-regulatory state, and the Arizona bill vetoed by Jan Brewer. Here's some quick links to the relevant audio and video:
At lunchtime, I checked in with everyone's favourite piano-playing imam from my Steynapalooza show in London, Ontario - Andrew Lawton.
At 5pm Eastern, I followed Barack Obama on CTV, joining my old colleague from the glory days of The National Post - Don Martin.
An hour later, I met up with one of the few journalists to give serious play to my battles with the "human rights" commissions - Brian Lilley - for a wide-ranging conversation on Sun News.
And I rounded out the day reading on camera some highlights from my CBC hate mail.
~Meanwhile, south of the border, the build-up to the upcoming trial of the century continues. Holman W Jenkins, Jr writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis. In coming weeks a libel trial gets under way brought by Penn State's Michael Mann, author of the famed hockey stick, against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work. The New York Times runs a cartoon of a climate "denier" being stabbed with an icicle.
These are indications of a political movement turned to defending its self-image as its cause goes down the drain. That's how thoroughly defunct, dead, expired is the idea that humanity might take charge of earth's atmosphere through some supreme triumph of the global regulatory state over democracy, sovereignty, nationalism and political self-interest, the very facts of political human nature.
The Prussian comes to a subtly different conclusion, suggesting that, if the cause doesn't want to go down the drain, it should send Michael E Mann down there on an express ticket:
Beginning with his very peculiar insistence that he is a Nobel Laureate (as I pointed out, even if he had got the peace prize, it wouldn't be anything to be proud of), the digging done by Mark Steyn and Stephen McIntyre has revealed that this guy plays fast and loose when it comes to his publicity.
In the original Nature report, I mentioned that the panel had grave concerns about Mann's graph, but didn't think it was fraudulent – and reporting that the report was an endorsement of the stick is disingenuous. It gets much, much worse. It turns out that almost all of the time when Mann is claiming to have been exonerated by a given investigative body, nothing of the sort has taken place...
Indeed. The Prussian puts it this way:
There is no way that any layperson, looking at a record like this, could not have reasonable grounds to think that Mann's distortions extended into his scientific work.
That's the point. Given the way Mann plays fast and loose with his non-Nobel prize, his amended complaints and amended quotations, his false claims to have been exonerated by investigations that have nothing to do with him, it's asking an awful lot to believe that his hockey stick is the one part of his life that doesn't follow his usual modus operandi. Like many, the Prussian is only just discovering the concerns Keith Briffa and other climate scientists had over Mann's work:
There is one final thing that has come to light – the concern of the CRU that Mann was pushing their conclusions well beyond what they knew was right. That is a very telling comment...
Perhaps Mann being tossed overboard is just the thing that climate science needs.
There's a thought.
