Weaver Seeks Unprecedented Order to Remove Stories That “Poison” the Internet

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–(Marketwire – April 21, 2010) – University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, launched a lawsuit today in BC Supreme Court against three writers at The National Post (and the newspaper as a whole), over a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.

In a statement released at the same time the suit was filed, Dr. Weaver said, “I asked The National Post to do the right thing – to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.”

Dr. Weaver’s statement of claim not only asks for a Court injunction requiring The National Post to remove all of the false allegations from its Internet websites, but also seeks an unprecedented Court order requiring the newspaper to assist Dr. Weaver in removing the defamatory National Post articles from the many other Internet sites where they have been re-posted.

“If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these libels will stay on the Internet forever. They’ll poison the factual record, misleading people who are looking for reliable scientific information about global warming,” said Weaver.

The suit names Financial Post Editor Terence Corcoran, columnist Peter Foster, reporter Kevin Libin and National Post publisher Gordon Fisher, as well as several still-unidentified editors and copy editors. It seeks general, aggravated damages, special and exemplary damages and legal costs in relation to articles by Foster on December 9, 2009 (“Weaver’s Web”), Corcoran on December 10, 2009 (“Weaver’s Web II”) and January 27, 2010 (“Climate Agency going up in flames”), and Libin on February 2, 2010 (“So much for pure science”).

The Statement of Claim was filed April 20, 2010 at the BC Supreme Court Registry at the Vancouver Courthouse: Weaver v Corcoran and others, SCBC No.102698, Vancouver Registry. Court record information and documents are publicly accessible online at Court Services Online: https://eservice.ag.gov.bc.ca/cso/index.do.

Good luck to Professor Weaver with the suit. Even if the Post is forced to remove the false allegations, they will be up against the Streisand Effect when it comes to taking down reposts on other websites. Which may be the point of the court injunction; the Sisyphean task may be onerous enough to make them think twice about defaming him.

“When I went to the school of hard knocks, we were told to be fair and balanced,” Duffy was quoted from his speech in yesterday’s issue of the Amherst Daily News. “That school doesn’t exist any more. Kids who go to King’s, or the other schools across the country, are taught from two main texts.”

According to Duffy — a former CTV News journalist appointed to the Senate last year by Prime Minister Stephen Harper — those two texts are Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky’s book on mainstream media, and books about the theory of critical thinking.

“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky, what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of 18, 19 and 20 that what we stand for, private enterprise, a system that has generated more wealth for more people because people take risks and build businesses, is bad,” Duffy is quoted as saying.

Teaching Chomsky? I don’t care about that. Teach it, don’t teach it, whatever. But boy, do journalists need to learn about critical thinking. Take the journalist’s perennial inability to identify credible sources, and the demand for ‘balance’; as Richard Dawkins put it: “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”

And it turns out Duffy is, in fact, wrong. King’s don’t teach from Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and the King’s School of Journalism makes no apologies for teaching critical thinking:

“We’re trying to teach people to have critical thinking skills, to hold accountable anyone who is in any way in authority,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the Conservatives, the NDP, the Green party, they’re all fair game in the sense that they have to be able to be transparent.”

Lorrie Goldstein in The Sun:

Ten uses of the label “warmists”, including three “global warmists” and one “Canada’s warmist media”.

More verbose:

• “…intellectual heirs of Chicken Little”.

Lorne Gunter in The Edmonton Journal:

Six uses of “alarmists”, including one “climate alarmists” and one “IPCCs alarmists”.

One use of “True Believers”.

Accusatory:

• “…key climate scientists and the United Nations IPCC have corrupted the scientific process”.
• “NASA’s climate scientists have hardly more credibility than the CRUs or IPCCs alarmists”.

Rex Murphy in the National Post:

Garrulous:

• “…the Al Gore contingent of The Science is Settled and The Himalayan Glaciers are Toast Church of Global Warming (pre-Climategate Division)”
• “…post-Climategate-desperate campaigners of the tattered global warming crusade”
• “…preening carbon-footprint eco-priests”
• “…carbon footprint heresiarchs”
• “The IPCC has less prestige now than the Golden Globes”
• “The IPCC chairman is a rude, busy man who writes erotic novels”.

This is the quality of our public discourse on climate change: name calling and flinging accusations and insults, by commenters with a wicked anti-science streak. Edifying and enlightening, it is not.

And how ridiculous that Goldstein would call the Canadian media ‘warmist’, when it prints articles like these almost every single day, in newspapers all across the country. ‘Warmist’? Not from where I’m sitting.

Here’s a question Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who could become our next PM, should ask the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To wit: How could it possibly get the amount of land in the Netherlands that’s below sea level wrong by a factor of more than 100%?

Goldstein could ask the IPCC directly. Journalists are allowed, you know. But maybe he imagines its a privileged access thing and only Harper and Ignatieff can do it, say when they next meet with the IPCC at Bohemian Grove.

Regardless, Goldstein already knows the answer:

(The inaccurate sea level data originally came from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, meaning, apparently, nobody checks this stuff.)

Which just doesn’t strike me as being a big deal. Small error, doesn’t change the science, the Dutch provided the erroneous statement in the first place, and nobody in the Netherlands has put their home on stilts because they learned from an IPCC report that they were in fact living underwater. And besides, surely this isn’t even relevant to me, here, in Canada.

The relevance for Canadians is that this is such a basic, stupid, mistake, it raises concerns about what else the IPCC has wrong.

Oh.

Go on…

Pointing out the growing list of IPCC blunders isn’t some climatic version of Trivial Pursuit, as warmists claim.

The IPCC has enormous influence on politicians poised to spend billions of our dollars, allegedly attempting to “fix” man-made global warming.

IPCC reports on climate change are a major reason Canada and the U.S. plan to set up a cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, despite the fact it’s been a disaster in Europe that has (a) raised the cost of living for ordinary people (b) funnelled undeserved profits into giant energy corporations and hedge funds (c) incubated massive frauds and (d) done nothing to help the environment.

One IPCC ‘error’ on the geography of the Netherlands, and Goldstein starts ranting about economic apocalypse?

The IPCC, assuming it ever was a scientific body, has now become a lobby group whose “science” advocates central planning run amok and massive wealth redistribution from the developed world (us) to the developing one, using schemes, like cap-and-trade, we already know don’t work.

Now that is just incoherent. The IPCC has a handful of paid, full time employees, and most of its labour is done, for free, by scientists. Who there even has time to lobby? Further, the work that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change undertakes is decided with the world’s governments, with which it is in partnership. The goal of the IPCC “is to provide policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive information on key aspects of climate change”, which is what the governments involved want; if the direction of the IPCC had been changed to lobbying, it would have to have been decided in plenary by the governments involved. It wasn’t.

But never mind all that. There’s a bigger problem here, one for which The Times of London has invented all the evidence Goldstein needs to believe:

The IPCC responded to this latest blunder, as it has all of them, by arguing: Hey, stuff happens, but the science remains “robust,” so no biggie.

Except former IPCC chairman, Robert Watson (1997-2002) says the growing list of IPCC errors is worrisome, suggesting an inherent bias.

The problem, he told the U.K. Times, is that all the errors uncovered to date exaggerate the problems of man-made climate change. If they were all innocent mistakes (as claimed by IPCC apologists), some would likely understate the problem.

“The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact,” noted Watson, now chief scientific adviser to the U.K.’s environment department.

“That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

He said the IPCC should adopt a more open position towards climate skeptics in future reports, and verify its source material.

Except Watson didn’t say that. When asked if The Times had accurately reported his views, he replied:

The article distorted my statements – I was interviewed for an hour and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.

If an error on Dutch geography and a fabricated quote in The Times is all it takes for Goldstein to fear ‘drowning in climate stupidity’, then I sincerely hope this guy always wears a lifevest when he goes outdoors in the rain.

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12°C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

The questioner already knows the answer. The warming from 1995 to the present has not been statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. It’s close to it, but not at 95%. But does that mean that there has been no warming at all? No. As Jones points out, the trend was positive over that time period (0.12°C). A positive trend is quite different to, say, a negative trend, and quite inconsistent with any statement along the lines of “global warming has stopped!” And clearly it is diametrically opposed to any notion that we are in a period of global cooling.

The last ten years have in fact been the warmest on record. Given a longer period of time, as climatologists prefer to use, rather than starting with a cherry picked interval beginning in 1995 (a start point for which no reason was given by the interviewer), the temperature trend does achieve statistical significance at the 95% level.

Damn the details. Fully qualified pontificator Lorne Gunter at the National Post took the opportunity to fling some poo around.

Consider the remarks Phil Jones, the former head of CRU, made last week to the BBC. Prof. Jones, who has stepped down from his directorship of the CRU pending official investigations into the leaks, told the Beeb there has been no “statistically significant” global warming since 1995 — that’s the past 15 years!

Well, there’s a revelation. Climate scientist Phil Jones honestly represents the statistical significance of his data over a cherry picked time interval.

It’s true, as some climate alarmist sites have pointed out, that what Prof. Jones said in full was that the warming since 1995 is almost significant, but not quite. The “trend (+0.12 C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.”

Gunter manages to choke out at least an acknowledgement that Jones said the trend was positive. What these “climate alarmist sites” may be isn’t explained, but at a guess it would be any site that for reasons truly incomprehensible to Gunter did not choose to misrepresent Phil Jones. For poor, fragile Gunter, that would be alarming.

Admittedly, that is not the same as a complete about-face by Prof. Jones, but neither is it meaningless. When was the last time you recall an alarmist such as Phil Jones admitting there was any doubt at all about warming in the last decade and a half?

Phil Jones = alarmist? Fascinating. I’d have gone with ‘scientist’, but then, I’m not as alarmed by scientists as poor, fragile Gunter here.

Haven’t we had it drummed into us ceaselessly that the past decade has been the warmest ever recorded? Prof. Jones’s admission to the BBC then is very significant.

Do you see what Gunter just did? Let me explain.

The past decade has been the warmest on record because the average global temperature for the year 2005 was the highest recorded and the years 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2009 are all “in a virtual tie” for the second warmest on record.

It is possible for the past decade to be the warmest on record and for the temperatures from 1995 to the present day to be increasing by 0.12°C per decade, and for the trend not to be statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. If the trend was being calculated over a longer time period, as climatologists do, it would be significant. If there hadn’t been a La Nina in 2008, which resulted in cooler temperatures that year, the trend could have reached 95% significance.

In fact, the past decade has been the warmest ever recorded, and poor, fragile Gunter is the last person to be talking about significance.

Gunter goes on to say:

That’s one of the ways in which Climategate matters: It has made the alarmists far more willing to admit the science isn’t settled.

Yet the only person on record as saying that “the science is settled” is climate science denier S. Fred Singer. Scientists like Phil Jones know the science isn’t settled. If it were, they would stop.

Margaret Wente, fully qualified English graduate and columnist for The Globe and Mail, manages to do worse than poor, fragile Gunter:

Unfortunately for public understanding, the climate debate is usually portrayed as a fight between two extremes – between people who think it’s all a hoax, and people who think catastrophe is imminent if we do nothing.

(Usually portrayed by whom, Margaret? Oh right, that would be by you and your friends in the press. By all means, please do something about that.)

But there’s a third position. Although it’s been largely absent from the climate debate, it’s shared by a surprising number of experts. They endorse the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor. But they also say that threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated. In fact, we don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.

Even Phil Jones, the man at the centre of Climategate, seems to take the third position. Several thousand e-mails hacked from his climatic research unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia revealed, among other things, strenuous efforts to withhold data and censor people with opposing views. Many people say that Climategate was much ado about nothing, and that Prof. Jones was the innocent victim of vicious attacks by people who want to discredit global warming. But in a weekend BBC interview, he dropped a bombshell. He acknowledged there’s been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

Phil Jones takes the third way. The way of all right thinking people, the way of the moderates, the way of reasonable, concerned individuals, like dear old Margaret here. And he does it by… acknowledging there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers.

And rightly so. When other people say that, they could also be called, ignorant, uninformed, or useful idiots. Phil Jones was answering a gotcha question honestly. If you read on you would have seen him say this: “The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”

He also said (contrary to everything we’ve been told) that the debate is not over. “I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the [distant] past as well.”

So much for the science being settled. Now what?

Now what? I don’t know. Tell Gunter that contrary to what he, in his fevered imagination, thinks scientists think, just isn’t so. Oh, and tell S. Fred Singer as well.

Next up, how about a little Twainian reportage?

The global warming movement is already reeling from a series of damaging revelations. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which set itself up as the final authority – has been caught in several embarrassing mistakes, such as the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. (One man who approved this claim admitted he did it to sex up the dossier.)

Trollumnists don’t need to check the facts. Meet the lie that travelled halfway around the world before the truth got its shoes on: David Rose, the Daily Mail journalist with a penchant for misrepresenting scientists and making stuff up, claimed Dr. Murari Lal said he left the glaciers error in place to “impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action”. Lal denies having said any such thing. Given Rose’s previous form, I wouldn’t want to repeat anything that Rose says as fact.

Go on then, Margaret. Take it home:

These days, there are two kinds of deniers – people such as Republicans, who believe it’s all a fraud, and true believers, who are in denial that they are witnessing an epic scientific and political train wreck. The good news is that, once we clear the track, perhaps we can admit Phil Jones is right. There’s a whole lot we just don’t know.

Two kinds of deniers: the kind we know so well, represented by U.S. Republicans, and true believers, no names mentioned, in denial that they are “witnessing an epic scientific and political train wreck”. Would the world were that simple, Margaret. Nonetheless I agree that we are witnessing a train wreck. Scientists are ill prepared and on the whole entirely unwilling to engage in no holds barred PR battles with people that will lie about their work, steal their emails and misrepresent their contents, hype up a few minor errors in the massive IPCC reports, and, as dear old Margaret does here, perpetuate incorrect quotes made by reporters that would prefer to make the news than report on it.

Yes, it’s a train wreck. But when the tracks are cleared, the science will still all be there, just as it was before, and perhaps then we can all admit that Phil Jones is right: there’s a whole lot we don’t know, but there’s also a whole lot that we do.