Wasting my time with trolls

There seems to be some continuing question as to whether Michael Mann was ordered to pay Tim Ball's legal fees. The answer is still no, at least not in substantial part. He was ordered to pay what the BC courts call "court costs," which is essentially automatic. The basic idea is explained here. Allowable costs are based on what's called a "tariff," which is a set amount of money for various activities associated with litigation. This is assumed to include legal fees but the amount is much less than the actual legal fees Ball incurred. The schedule is here, in case you are interested.

This seems a distinction of no importance in the overall scheme of this matter. The case was dismissed not because the court found any validity whatsoever in Ball's claims about Mann, but because a) Ball was sick and dying and b) as Ball's own lawyers argued, Ball's claims were given no credibility by the general public and so did not damage Mann's reputation.That's the point.

And here's the real point. 

Mann's scientific work is in fact, impeccable. He is right. Actually, he wasn't quite right because it's turning out to be worse than he predicted.  As Oreskes et al tell us:

Recently, the U.K. Met Office announced a revision to the Hadley Center historical analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST), suggesting that the oceans have warmed about 0.1 degree Celsius more than previously thought.  . . .[T]o develop a consistent picture of long-term trends, techniques had to be developed to compensate for the errors in the older measurements and reconcile them with the newer ones. The Hadley Centre has led this effort, and the new data set—dubbed HadSST4—is a welcome advance in our understanding of global climate change.
But that’s where the good news ends. Because the oceans cover three fifths of the globe, this correction implies that previous estimates of overall global warming have been too low. Moreover it was reported recently that in the one place where it was carefully measured, the underwater melting that is driving disintegration of ice sheets and glaciers is occurring far faster than predicted by theory—as much as two orders of magnitude faster—throwing current model projections of sea level rise further in doubt.

Carbon emissions from melting permafrost are apparently greater than previously estimated and the effect is exacerbated by increasing wildfires.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05457-1

There's a lot more and it's a lot worse. So we aren't going to engage with deniers. They are evil idiots who aren't worth our time and deserve no respect. We're going to engage with the truth, and what we need to do about it.

Climate change deniers are banned from commenting on this site.