Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

This is a classic case of just how factually, scientifically, and morally bankrupt the money-backed climate denialism movement is.

Here was a huge dustup, lots of sizzle, tons and tons of examination, and the end result: it all held up! There's a looooot of stuff in all of science that could be proven to be wrong, so going after something so vigorously, and not having anything to show for it at the end is absolutely sad. Really, you couldn't find any bad analysis to go after instead?

It's quite likely that all of climate science is of much much higher quality than the typical science that makes it into the newspapers. What other body of science has something like the IPCC which works so hard to review and summarize the latest knowledge?

Reminds me of that physicist who started the BEST effort around temperature readings. He thought "I'm a physicist, and there's so much noise about sloppy climate science, I'll go clean it up and show these people how real analysis is done," and then just came up with exactly the same results that the climate scientists had done. But now, since it was from a physicist at a tier 1 institution, it was finally good work...

View on HN

It's actually a very weird verdict that makes me (far from a climate skeptic) feel very icky. Whether or not you like Steyn, he makes a valid point here:

> “We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue,” Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. “And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages.”

The jury essentially acknowledged that there was no actual damage, but then proceeded to levy an enormous punitive fine for... reasons. That feels less like the jury was persuaded by hard evidence that Mann was in the right and more that the jury was persuaded that Steyn was subjectively a bad person who needed punishing, which is a weird outcome.

Edit: not stated at all in this, but which my main point, is that the mistake was that the jury messed up on the compensatory damages, not that the punitive damages are wrong. Coffee is still kicking in...

Ok, so active harassment of a person, by a think tank, perpetuating lies and making comparisons to pedophilia is "no damages"?

This spurred on harassment including hacking of email contents.

What is possibly "icky" about a defamation result, other than the jury didn't find higher compensatory damages?

If it's OK in our society for individuals to be attacked with lies like this, with money undirected through think tanks, are you OK with your professional life and personal life being intruded in this way with lies? Really?

I think this verdict is both good and bad. We've been dragging people through the mud over nothing now for a while and celebrating it. Society is sick. It needs to stop.

At the same time, I worry about a "chilling" effect on anyone who questions "the science". Whether you like them or not, we need people who question climate science. We need people who question vaccines. Yes, they are annoying and in this case they went way, way too far.

> At the same time, I worry about a "chilling" effect on anyone who questions "the science".

In what way? This has nothing to do with disagreement, it's about defamation. Claiming that a researcher was intentionally and fraudulently manipulating data is an entirely different ballpark from disagreeing with their methods or conclusions.

The various groups who have decided as a matter of dogma that their pet theory is correct therefore all of science must be a conspiracy to cover up the truth will of course present things as if this verdict threatens any dissent, but that's simply nonsense.

> Whether you like them or not, we need people who question climate science. We need people who question vaccines. Yes, they are annoying and in this case they went way, way too far.

We need people who question science *in good faith*. People who disagree because they have an alternative that also fits the known facts, or because they see valid weaknesses in the methods used to come to the conclusion. Scientific progress is built on questioning things.

We do not need people like the defendants in this case who have decided that climate change is an evil liberal conspiracy to empower governments. We do not need people like Jenny McCarthy, RFK Jr., etc. who have decided that all the different often entirely unrelated kinds of vaccines in the world are somehow part of the same conspiracy to do...something. These people are not adding to the discussion, they're not contributing to progress, they're at best getting in the way and in a lot of cases trying their hardest to push things back.

I could go on and on. Creationists, flat-earthers, moon landing deniers, etc. will all scream about how the scientific establishment is silencing them for questioning things, but the reality is they're just wrong, annoying, and deserve no credit for anything because they're not doing it in good faith. They're not trying to find the truth, they've decided they know the truth and are hostile to anything else.

I didn't say I like what Steyn and co said or that they should be allowed to say it, but the process matters.

In the US we're supposed to have a very high threshold for what kinds of speech can be punished. For defamation, it is required that the plaintiff be able to show that there were damages.

The jury's awarding of $1 shows that they were not persuaded that there was any financial damage done to Mann by this think tank's actions. Their subsequent award of $1m in punitive damages shows that they were persuaded that Steyn's speech deserved to be punished.

That second part is what I'm not comfortable with. If they awarded him $1m in compensatory damages that would be one thing, but choosing the absolute minimum and then levying a huge punitive fine is a scary result for anyone who values the speech protections we have in the US.

You can look at it like this... They jury was concerned about the speech by the think tank. They don't want anyone else to have to suffer through it. The plaintiff though didn't have actual monetary damages from it, but you and me might have.

The jury is signaling, stronly, that this type of speech isn't allowed and should be punished. The fact that it happened to someone who wasn't monetarily harmed much by it isn't relevant but let's put a high bar out there to deter anyone else from this type of speech towards people who could be damaged.

The way the laws work it is really the only thing they could do if they believed the defendant's speech is harmful.

That's how I read into the monetary awards...

I know that's what the jury thought they were doing, but that isn't actually constitutional in the US. Juries are not empowered to decide whether speech isn't allowed and should be punished, they're empowered to decide whether speech is defamation and how much harm was done by said defamation.

Here, they found there was ~no harm done. That means that, constitutionally, they are unable to levy a substantial fine.

Harassment was not at issue. The jury found malice because they had to if they wanted to impose any damages at all. For a public figure—such as a public employee in the news—the "actual malice" standard applies in defamation cases in the U.S. I'm glossing over a bit of nuance regarding limited public figures, without which I'm not sure this would apply to Mann (I'm not a 1A practitioner), but Wikipedia does a pretty good job of discussing the cornerstone case and further developments, for those interested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sulliv...

The issue is probably more to do with how injury is defined in the context of defamation law. Actual damages require that they prove the victim lost something tangible as a direct result of the defamation. It's not hard to argue that he lost out on the grant funding due to the previous leak or some other outside factor. The decision is more like saying the original article was a marginal factor in the specific claim they made in the lawsuit but the egregiousness of the defamation was severe enough to warrant further damages.

Yes, they made a super edgy comparison to pedophilia, but it is pretty clear they aren't saying Mann is a pedophile. In fact, they even say he doesn't molest children:

> Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data

The comparison is them saying it. You don’t evoke a thought like that without wanting to imply something.

Talk about tortured logic…

The reasons are clearly stated in the article

>It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.

I didn't say they didn't provide reasoning, I said that their reasoning feels icky to me. Essentially, the jury's decision says that no harm was done but that Steyn's motives for speech were reason enough for him to be punished regardless of the actual outcome of that speech.

To me that's a very scary result.

If I try to run you over with my car but I miss, then all is ok?

Just because they failed in harming him doesn't make it harmless.

In the US, speech has higher protections than other malfeasance. You cannot legally be punished for defamation if your words caused no harm, regardless of your intent.

But that doesn't mean you can't be held responsible and civilly liable, which is what punitive damages are. Civil court has a "lower" standard of evidence because it can't take your rights away, not because it can't find you at fault for something and levy a "don't freaking do that" fine against you.

As I've replied elsewhere, it's not a question of the existence of the punitive damages, it's a question of ratio. 4:1 is a typical ratio, 1m:1 is completely unheard of.

You have to actually have damaged someone to have punitive damages levied for what you did, and by setting $1 as the actual damages the jury acknowledges no harm was done and therefore cannot levy substantial punitive damages.

They "legally" did find harm: $1

And as I've said elsewhere, that number gives them the right to levy up to $500 in punitive damages if they feel that Steyn's actions were especially egregious (and even that number would be subject to severe scrutiny on appeal). A 1:1m ratio of actual to punitive damages is just punishing speech as speech, not a true defamation verdict.

The District of Colombia doesn't have those caps

The District of Columbia is within the United States and under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, so Supreme Court rulings establishing a rule of proportionality definitely still apply.

What you're referring to is that there is no cap to the monetary amount of either type of damages, not that the ratio between them can be severely disproportionate.

It was intent to harm through lying. I'm not sure why that feels scary, seems pretty right in line with defamation in general.

The truth is an absolute defense in defamation, so the scary result is what? Willfully lying to harm people is not protected?

To take it a step further, if the person being lied about is a public figure, lying enjoys even more protections (you basically have to have the smoking "I'm lying about this" email for a public figure to prove defamation).

> It was intent to harm through lying. I'm not sure why that feels scary, seems pretty right in line with defamation in general.

Not in the US. If no harm is done, there's no defamation, harm being done is part of the definition:

> To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation

The jury found some harm done (1 dollars worth) and then issued punitive damages because of the intent to harm.

Punitive damages are for when a judge/jury feels the conduct of one of the party's was bad. Conduct includes things like trying to damage someone's reputation.

Again, I just fall to see what's scary here. Don't plan on lying about someone and your golden.

Punitive damages are typically capped at a 4:1 ratio to the actual damages. 10:1 is suspect, and even the extreme cases that go all the way to the Supreme Court are 500:1. This is 1m:1, 2000 times the most extreme cases (which the Supreme Court usually throws out).

>The code is more what you'd call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.

>The District of Columbia does not cap either compensatory or punitive damages, and the collateral source rule applies.

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/insurance-laws-and-produ...

Whether there's a cap on the monetary amount of damages is a separate question from whether there's a maximum ratio between the two. Supreme Court rulings on the ratio are binding everywhere in the US, so state-by-state differences in other aspects of the law aren't relevant to the question.

The supreme court has never put a cap on punitives and in fact, for egregious conduct they've affirmed that no ratio applies. [1]

In fact, if anything it looks like the supreme court has basically left everything to be determined in a case by case basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXO_Production_Corp._v._Allian.... (Note, there's a period at the end here that HN is removing)

Yes, and that was not a defamation case. There's no chance on this earth that if this makes it to the Supreme Court the court will rule that a 1m:1 ratio is acceptable in a speech case (regardless of the political composition of the court at the time), and if they did it would represent a major step backward for free speech in the US.

After TXO, the Supreme Court wrote this in BMW, Inc. v. Gore where a similar 500:1 ratio was at stake (and was overturned) [0]:

> The $2 million in punitive damages awarded to Dr. Gore by the Alabama Supreme Court is 500 times the amount of his actual harm as determined by the jury. Moreover, there is no suggestion that Dr. Gore or any other BMW pur- chaser was threatened with any additional potential harm by BMW’s nondisclosure policy. The disparity in this case is thus dramatically greater than those considered in Haslip and TXO.

> Once again, “we return to what we said . . . in Haslip: ‘We need not, and indeed we cannot, draw a mathematical bright line between the constitutionally acceptable and the constitutionally unacceptable that would fit every case. We can say, however, that [a] general concer[n] of reasonableness . . . properly enter[s] into the constitutional calculus.’ ” Id., at 458 (quoting Haslip, 499 U. S., at 18). In most cases, the ratio will be within a constitutionally acceptable range, and remittitur will not be justified on this basis. When the ratio is a breathtaking 500 to 1, however, the award must surely “raise a suspicious judicial eyebrow.”

When a "suspicious judicial eyebrow" gets raised in a speech case in the US, the plaintiff has already lost.

[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/517/559/case.pdf

> To me that's a very scary result.

Then to circle back on the beginning of this thread, what exactly do you find so scary about this? The trial judge can adjust the damages down, so can the appellate courts, and if that doesn't resolve it ultimately the supreme court can eliminate the damages.

It's not terribly unusual for punitive damages to be adjusted after the jury awards them. So why be scared that a jury potentially gave out too much in damages?

I'm scared about what it says about our society that we've reached the point where juries think it's their job to punish speech and that punishment gets cheered on even in spaces like HN. Just because we have robust speech protections doesn't mean we always will, and I see this verdict and its reception here as evidence of declining interest in preserving speech protections in the United States.

It’s not ‘speech’. It’s anti-science climate denialism fed by a network of right-wing ratfuckers (political technical jargon) going back 60 years now. It’s a literal conspiracy to defraud the public.

Case in point.

It sounds to me like the jury felt that the harm was to third parties. Which isn't actually what the law says - the harm is supposed to be to the one defamed.

This is a problem because on the one hand, the jury should not have based its award on harm to third parties, because that would not have properly been argued before it. But it also means that defamation is not adequate to defend science, where most of the harm of attacking science is towards third parties.

I'd quite like to see lying in public life punished more harshly, because it is in fact corrosive to both public and private life. But it's going to be hard to frame 'harm to third parties' well, since it potentially covers a lot of political speech.

Considering intent is the core of America's legal system.

You can go to jail for attempted murder even if no one got hurt.

You can get away with killing someone if you can show it was an unforeseeable accident.

And yes, you can get punitive damages even if you caused little or no harm.

All of that is true for those offenses, but it is not true of speech. A plaintiff is required to prove actual damage for there to be defamation, and the jury here acknowledged that the actual damages were worth approximately nil. That means that there should be no defamation verdict, or at the very least that punitive damages should be <$10.

The rule of thumb for punitive damages in the US is a 4:1 ratio, with 10:1 or higher being almost certainly unconstitutional barring extreme circumstances. Even in those cases we're looking at ratios of 500:1, not 1m:1.

> All of that is true for those offenses, but it is not true of speech.

I believe this is not the case when the plaintiff can show actual malice.

> The rule of thumb for punitive damages in the US is a 4:1 ratio, with 10:1 or higher being almost certainly unconstitutional barring extreme circumstances

Right - that's why the defense is appealing, as discussed in the article. However, given that the judge did not adjust the award sua sponte I believe there is some actual legal question about whether this is one of those "extreme circumstances" (e.g. due to the degree of malice).

Again, the "extreme circumstances" called for ratios on the order of 500:1. This is 2000x larger.

Perhaps you're basing that on TXO v Alliance? The specific ratio for TXO (which happened to be 526-to-1) does not paint the full picture. Consider two things:

1. TXO does not provide a hard-and-fast rule on a maximum ratio of compensatory to punative damages. Rather, the justices say that "It is appropriate to consider the magnitude of the potential harm that the defendant's conduct would have caused to its intended victim if the wrongful plan had succeeded, as well as the possible harm to other victims that might have resulted if similar future behavior were not deterred."

2. TXO further limits the mandate of due process review of punitive damages by saying that the jury does not have to be wholly accurate in their assessment of punitive damages but rather that courts should ensure their award would not "jar one's constitutional sensibilities."

If a jury might reasonably think that the damage to Mann could have been about $1m if the defendant had successfully discredited him in, say, the eyes of his employers, and if the jury was given proper instructions, that is sufficient to uphold their award under TXO. Further due process review should consider these questions, not whether the punitive damage/compensatory damage ratio is over some arbitrary threshold.

TXO is one of several cases I'm referring to where the 500x number came into question.

But the other way in which TXO doesn't paint the complete picture is that it is not a defamation case, and in the US we much more cautious about preemptively punishing speech (and about discouraging speech with risk of liability) than we are about other types of torts.

The ratio here isn't just large, it's completely off the charts, and an off-the-charts ratio on a speech case isn't going to fly, nor do I believe it should.

You're presenting two claims here:

1. The judiciary makes some distinction between a 500-to-1 and a 1,000,000-to-1 ratio.

2. Speech cases are somehow specially protected from high ratios between punitive and compensatory damages.

I know of no evidence in favor of the first point.

Your second point is patently false because TXO is about speech - it's literally a disparagement case.

> I know of no evidence in favor of the first point.

Do you know of any case where a ratio higher than 10000x was ever tested? Because there have been several that were tossed out as disproportionate at a much lower ratio than that.

> Your second point is patently false because TXO is about speech - it's literally a disparagement case.

It was a case of negotiating in bad faith by slandering a title, and the damages were awarded on the basis that TXO had engaged in similar nefarious behavior across the country while negotiating other deals. That's substantially different in character from a series of unsavory opinion pieces, and within the realm of types of speech that we typically do regulate—it's more akin to fraud than it is to personal slander/libel.

From the ruling:

> [T]he record shows that this was not an isolated incident on TXO’s part—a mere excess of zeal by poorly supervised, low level employees—but rather part of a pattern and practice by TXO to defraud and coerce those in positions of unequal bargaining power.

I agree it's a little scary. Would it have been protected speech if they had prefaced the offending remarks with "in my opinion " or "in this author's opinion "?

In criminal law, the guy who tries to shoot you but misses will get punished as well. Now whether this is a good parallel or not, your decision.

So, I think you are correct. The jury messed up, wasn't explained to properly, etc. There are thresholds on how much punitive damages can be awarded and they are some multiple of the other damages...this one is more than that.

The reasons were...."....after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”

So, the jury found that they made statements that were willfully intended to harm someone - they were deliberate to inflict harm. They found that the actual harm wasn't much in monetary terms but decided to levy a large punitive award to signal to others not to do this and punish the two that did.

That makes sense. You have to prove actual damages, either the plaintff didn't try to or were unsuccessful...so $1 and then a larger amount to punish the behavior and deter others from doing it.

>levy an enormous punitive fine for... reasons.

Do you not know what the word punitive means? Punitive damages are meant to be a punishment as well as to deter others from similar behavior. They are totally normal and not meant to make the plaintiff whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages

> Punitive damages, or exemplary damages, are damages assessed in order to punish the defendant for outrageous conduct and/or to reform or deter the defendant and others from engaging in conduct similar to that which formed the basis of the lawsuit.[1] Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some of the punitive damages in award

My concern isn't punitive damages in the abstract, its the 1m:1 ratio of punitive damages to actual damages.

From that same Wikipedia article:

> In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is high enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional.

There was an exception made for a 526:1 ratio because the case was especially egregious, but this ratio is 1901 times larger than the one in that Supreme Court case.

Oh wow. That's very important context. The current SCOTUS would love to get their hands on a case that lets them give their friends more protection.

I agree with your general argument that the ruling is somewhat self-contradictory. At the same time, I don't fault them for that verdict.

Nobody deserves to be compared to child molesters like that. That's extreme bad faith at best and deliberate character assassination at worst. He clearly suffered a moral injury.

I read somewhere that it’s unconstitutional for overly high punitive damages in libel/slander cases.

Anything above single digit ratio is ($10 punitive for $1 damages) questionable.

Not sure if that applies here.

There is a split in how people view the justice system should work. One thinks the laws should apply to everyone equally and the justice system is there to enforce the law. The other is that life is unfair and the justice system can be used to help fix that imbalance. We get a mix of the two in reality with the same word used to describe both. Things are, of course, more complicated, but here is a short overview of the concept[1].

[1] https://tsowell.com/spquestc.html

To me the concept of punitive damages is very suspect. Civil cases are supposed to have a lower burden of proof because they’re just compensation, not punishment, but then they throw in punitive damages. Maybe there should be a separate verdict for punitive damages with a beyond reasonable doubt standard.

> the jury was persuaded that Steyn was subjectively a bad person

This seems to be par for the course for the jury system, which is why we have an appeals process run by much, much more objective people, fortunately. At least so far.

Which is only accessible for those with sufficient wealth and time

I'm a classic Liberal, but I've never been convinced by the man-made climate change argument. I've always been much, much more concerned about pollution and chemicals in our environment, but that seems to never be addressed. I believe so strongly in protecting the environment that if I had the power, I would invoke anti-constitutional laws that would force chemical company CEOs to live within 1 mile of their worst factories such that those chemicals would be cleaned up immediately.

However, I have many questions about the climate change theory but every time I ask climate change enthusiasts, I get branded as a climate-change-denier or anti-environmental which makes me even more convinced that this is more of a religious debate than a scientific debate.

1) We know that the Earth was much warmer during the Great Warming Period. We also know that the Earth was much colder during the Ice Age. How do we know that right now it's because of CO2 and not because of some process by the planet?

2) As far as I can tell, the theory now is that the changing climate is evidence that the climate-change-via-CO2 theory is correct. I've heard people say that both warmer weather and colder weather are both evidence that the climate-change theory is right. It appears to me that ANY change is evidence that their theory is correct. But they can't have it both ways. In the scientific method, you make a prediction based on your theory and if your prediction doesn't come true then it means your theory is wrong. It appears that ANY CHANGE will validate their thesis, which is absurd, because the only outcome that will invalidate their thesis is NOTHING changes, which we already know is impossible. The Earth is not static and neither is its climate.

3) California had a 10 year drought (that was mostly exacerbated by pumping groundwater for farms but that's another issue entirely). Everyone was calling it "the new normal" but all it took was one good winter and all the reservoirs were filled again to above average levels. Droughts have happened before in California, but people were pointing to it as evidence that human-caused-climate-change was real. No one is talking about how it wasn't evidence at all.

It's simple physics. You put gases into a glass tube and you test the heat retention. Earth's energy economy is determined by how much energy enters the earth in the form of sunrays and how much energy is lost due to infrared radiation. Climate gases are like a blanket that retains the heat, i.e., infrared radiation.

There are some fun practical experiments to be found: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.192075 . Some you could realistically try at home. The first research papers on that are literally 150 years old. Those are actually interesting to look at, too. Great hand-drawn diagrams of their lab equipment.

An issue is that there are paid trolls that go around posting blanket doubt on climate change, so it's always difficult to tell whom to engage with and when it is better not to provide a stage.

Hm. My understanding was that we'd pretty much saturated that bandwidth range in terms of insulation potential, and the real multiplier now is how much humidity was going to get pumped into the atmosphere as a result, with the impact of that depending on how the humidity behaves at different latitudes (clouds can be reflective or insulative depending on land, sea, day, night, tropics, temperate).

https://skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect-advanced.h...

Keep in mind that so far, co2 levels have increased from below 300 to about 420 parts per million (alongside increases in other greenhouse gases). It's a stark difference that makes for a measurable increase in heat retention. The classic experiment is to fill one glass tube with atmospheric air and one with atmospheric air with added co2 and expose both to an infrared lighbulb and then take the temperature over time. Depending on the difference in concentration you can get a measurable temperature difference in hours. So it's really not a theoretical difference anymore that we need to speculate about, it's a tangible difference that we can measure with fairly basic instruments that you would find in a high school lab or even at home.

Also, thanks to both of you for sharing.

Don't believe it then, idk, what do you want from us? There are plenty of climate change denialists on HN it's not exactly a radical or fringe position here. Do you want someone to try to refute these points? You could do it yourself in a few days of targeted reading, but you'd need to leave behind your confidence in your junior high "you can't have it both ways" understanding of scientific methods.

Climate change research is anomalously open and the methods highly scrutinized. That you're hung up on such basic points rather than the actual contentions within the field shows me you're not particularly well informed on the specifics. But I don't think this is a good forum to litigate these specifics, and I'm not sure that's what you're actually asking for here anyway.

What a hostile and dismissive response because someone politely explains several points of worry that they have. HN is exactly the kind of place where some semblance of debate about complex subjects like this should exist, but some commentators, such as yourself apparently, seem to have gotten so emotionally hung up on disdain for any expression of doubt that the reaction is to simply put someone down with absurd phrases like "Don't believe it then, idk, what do you want from us?"

Us? Is there perhaps some specific committee here that's being burdened by too many honest questions?

Right, HN is a place where a semblance of debate can exist. If you are polite enough, you can "just asking questions" any kind of horror you'd like. You will be given a credulous and polite audience to make your case to. I don't think that is actually debate most of the time, but it is certainly a semblance of one!

But this isn't a particularly complex subject at the level of sophistication they are questioning. It has been a mainstream and widely publicized issue for over a generation now. There are a handful of reasons why someone would be this invested in discussing this publicly, but not convinced by their own investigation so far. And yes, what I feel for those motivations is hostility. There's a "call the cops" button right there if it bothers you that much. Dan will probably finally ban me and you can get on with your semblance of debate.

Too much emotion ans supposition. Not so much solid arguments. Sorry.

No, the current theory is that the 'climate change is accelerating' at a 'rate never seen before.' The evidence of this is usually a graph of temperature to a logarithmic timescale. Of course, the data isn't granular enough on a geological timescale to say that the temperature never changed at the rate it's changing today. Of course, that's if you believe the data they provide for today.

> How do we know that right now it's because of CO2 and not because of some process by the planet?

The short answer is "because there's an entire field of science that models this and figures out what contributes to global climate". Things we know contribute to the global temperature include: the atmospheric composition, the albedo of the surface, and the change in the axial tilt. The latter is currently what we understand to be the main driver of the glacial periods [we are still in the Quaternary Ice Age; we are currently in an inter-glacial period, when the glaciers have retreated toward the poles].

Greenhouse warming was also predicted well before it occurred, if it makes you feel any better; back in the 19th century people said, "Hey, we just found out that CO2 makes greenhouses warmer, and we're burning enough coal to have a measurable effect on the composition of the atmosphere; if this keeps up we should expect the Earth to begin warming up." And then, over the next century, we did and it did.

> I've heard people say that both warmer weather and colder weather are both evidence that the climate-change theory is right.

Warmer and colder weather in various places is expected, but the mean global temperature just keeps going up, up, up. It's not like we're having "coldest years on record" and then going, "Yeah, climate change is confirmed again". We have the hottest year on record, year after year, and then the polar vortex goes all wibbly-wobbly and blasts somewhere with weeks of cold. But the overall global temperature is still pretty damn warm.

In regards to 1, I found this to be a helpful chart:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

> 1) We know that the Earth was much warmer during the Great Warming Period. We also know that the Earth was much colder during the Ice Age. How do we know that right now it's because of CO2 and not because of some process by the planet?

Incoming solar electromagnetic radiation can be measured. Outgoing electromagnetic radiation can be measured. From the difference we can see that Earth is gaining energy.

We can also measure incoming and outgoing radiation at the surface, and at various layers of the atmosphere. We can see that when the surface is heated by absorbing incoming visible and ultraviolet solar radiation and then later re-radiates some of that energy it does so by radiating infrared.

We can measure the transparency of atmospheric gases to radiation and see that CO2 is transparent to that incoming visible and ultraviolet but is opaque to the outgoing infrared and hence blocks some energy that would have otherwise been radiated away into space. Increasing the CO2 levels increases how much of the outgoing infrared is blocked.

CO2 that comes from sources that are geologically old has a mix of C isotopes different from CO2 that comes from sources that aren't geologically old. From the isotope mix in the atmosphere and how it changed we can tell that almost all of the increase is from geologically old carbon sources.

Fossil fuels are geologically old sources. We know reasonably accurately the annual consumption of fossil fuels. The amount of CO2 from them is very close to the total amount of old source CO2 that is being added to the atmosphere yearly.

Hence we know that most of the CO2 increase comes from human activity.

> I've heard people say that both warmer weather and colder weather are both evidence that the climate-change theory is right.

The evidence that the climate is warming isn't "warmer weather" or "colder weather". It's that average sea-temperatures around the world have been rising steadily, year-on-year. The predicted effect of that rising temperature on the weather is that we should expect more extreme weather: more floods, more droughts, colder cold-snaps.

It's no good looking at "weather" (e.g. California) to see whether global climate change is happening; weather is a local phenomenon. Mann is vindicated by the behaviour of the (global) climate, not the behaviour of the weather in San Francisco.

> Really, you couldn't find any bad analysis to go after instead?

You're missing the point though. They're not looking for bad science, they're politically opposed to this particular outcome.

> This is a classic case of just how factually, scientifically, and morally bankrupt the money-backed climate denialism movement is. Here was a huge dustup, lots of sizzle, tons and tons of examination, and the end result: it all held up!

Flamewar comment. The verdict of one jury (who very likely already made up their mind about climate change before the trial started) finding a single publication liable for defamation of one author on the _preponderance of the evidence_ bears very little bearing on the overall "climate denialism" debate.

You must be new to this, because denialist outrage over the "hockey stick" has been the core, or quite honestly the only, numerically base objection that I have experienced.

And despite all this effort, quibbles around minor changes of statistical methods, in the end the hockey stick plot has been vindicated. And then impugned and vindicated again.

This defamation case is a cap on the whole sad saga, but it is completely representative of the whole thing. Denialism has no factual or scientific basis, and the defamation suit shows just how immoral the paid-for denialists are.

> You must be new to this, because denialist outrage over the "hockey stick" has been the core, or quite honestly the only, numerically base objection that I have experienced.

Perhaps you are the new one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com