The Right To Criticize Climate Change Has Cost Mark Steyn Almost Everything

“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.” author Michael Crichton, 2003

UPDATE: A Washington, DC jury today found the Defendants (Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg) liable for defamatory speech and reckless disregard of provable facts.

It’s a fair guess that when historians look back at the current era it will not be referred to as The Enlightenment. The purpose of our contemporary scientific inquiry, as those deceived by the Covid hustle will know, is not shedding light but shrouding and blinding honest inquiry.

If The Enlightenment was a ray of sunshine to expose truth, then the Suppression is a blow torch to destroy discussion. 

Nothing better illustrates this destruction of creative scientific debate than the current Mann v Steyn, Simberg lawsuit. Climate-science salesman Michael Mann sued Rand Simberg and Canadian Mark Steyn in 2012 for defamation after the two men publicly disparaged Mann’s “hockey stick” graph that purported to prove that the late twentieth-century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years.

Two Canadians, my friend Michael McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, then snapped the hockey stick narrative, leaving Mann vexed and his Green buddies vengeful. Steyn gleefully took up their findings. (Those familiar with Steyn will know that his facility with words is withering upon his subjects.) Mann decided to sue Steyn and Simberg in the Democratic swamp of the District of Columbia, arguing they’d ruined his reputation and devastated him financially.

Howler monkeys in Legacy Media (hello Bill Nye) sensed a kill and a chance to remove an annoying “denialst” But, like his successful 2012 defence of a free-speech case in Canada  while Steyn wrote at Macleans, Mann v Steyn, Simberg is not about science or policy. It’s about the U.S. First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, something the Left used to cherish (see: The People vs Larry Flynt.)

[The decision in the case was clearly swayed by Mann’s attempts to link the pair to Trump, not to free speech.)

For the Al Gore glee club, dissent is heresy. So, for various reasons, none of them good, the case stalled in the D.C. court system for 12 years, costing Steyn his health (he’s in a wheelchair after suffering three heart attacks) and millions in legal fees. The case finally came to court. Because D.C. juries— and D.C. media— are highly partisan to climate-change Democrats predicting an outcome based on testimony was foolhardy.

But after being raked in testimony for his case Mann— who has not paid a cent in legal costs— will likely not be advertising this as his shining moment. "Ill-advised and embarrassing” "thin-skinned and quick to attack." Seeks "conflict, seeking to pick fights” and "Mann did in fact breach the ethical standards” are snippets of the testimony he endured. So far, his powerful groupies ranging the Clintons to the Biden are staying loyal.

Steyn, too, has his wounds from his principled fight. Most would have saved their sanity. He has said many times that the process of defending himself against the insanity of WOKEdom is the punishment itself. Seeing him physically struggle in court to deliver his case is ample proof of the price he’s paid for mocking the party line on climate. 

(Note: We are unabashed fans of Steyn’s work since he began warning of a coming Dark Age brought on by unlimited immigration and Leftist overreach. This website is in no small measure a homage to his courage and vision.)

But here we are. No matter the outcome, the coordinated forces of censorship and intimidation will have a partial victory by showing what even a correct criticism of them brings. As they are doing with their legal and political mobbing of Donald Trump they are warning any future critics that they, not science, will re-write the past and create the future. 

The implications the Left has invited with its acceptance of climate change, DEI, ESG and the many other acid acronyms are widespread. As just one example, we have been preparing a book on an academic institution whose focus is on the preservation of the culture, art and significance of the Middle Ages. 

We have asked a number of the interview subjects for their predictions on why the events of a thousand years ago (or earlier) are significant. What do they tell us about our present state of anti-humanist culture? Is their hope for a new enlightenment in a WOKE world?

The urge to re-write the past to suit today’s political whims, said one subject, is fatal to academic and cultural appreciation of the time of Chaucer,  Dante and Bede. Her field of study, she said, is white Christian men in Europe a thousand years or so ago. She cannot change that description. Nor will she allow the re-writing of this period of history by ahistorical radicals seeking to bolster the present by falsifying the past. Is that the end of her funding?

That is what Mann sought in engineering the climate record of proxies in a handful of pine cone and ice core samples in eastern Russia. Like most climate diehards, he claimed to see lower temperatures in the past, thereby making today’s readings seem hotter. This allowed gormless climate wind therapists like Barack Obama to claim that 97 percent of scientists agree with Mann’s “consensus” on climate change— a claim repeated endlessly by the climate cabal. This support empowered Mann to sue anyone who disputed his conclusions.

The late author Michel Crichton saw this Ship of Fools coming in 2003 when he warned, “I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled..”

Sadly, Crichton died in 2008, and Mann and hysterics like Greta Thunberg went unchecked into the bloodstream of Western society. The bland acceptance of “the effects of climate change” commercials now being peddled by Justin Trudeau’s governments is testament to the power of this lie. (Asking a climate scientist about the impacts of global warming is like asking a bureaucrat about the benefit of larger government.)

Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg sought to mock that pretence. But the herculean struggle just to remind the public of some simple truths on free scientific speech tells you that we are in dangerous times populated by scoundrels and opportunists who will not be stopped until they dictate every aspect of society. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.