Last week’s blistering courtroom rebuke of U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann – author of the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph – is about far more than the US$1 million in legal costs awarded to the media outlets Mann was suing for defamation, asserts David Manney at PJ Media. With a judge ruling that Mann and his legal team lied to the court, Mann’s broader credibility has plummeted – something Manney terms a “cultural moment” that should encourage more scientists and journalists to question the scientific basis for global warming theory.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
