The two most non-essential professions on the planet right now are that of Big Climate alarmist and his attorney in a vanity lawsuit. Yet Michael E Mann, inventor of the global-warming "hockey stick", and his counsel John Williams are disinclined to let their lousy eight-year-old defamation suit against me shelter in place for a couple of months, and the other day they made a surprise move. By which I mean a deranged and desperate move.

Before we get to that, let me make a general observation: You'll have noticed that millions of people around the world are what one might call Coronaskeptics and pop up on TV and radio pooh-poohing the pandemic models. One reason they do that is because Mann's we're-all-gonna-die school of data analysis did immense damage to modeling in general - to the point where large numbers of persons simply dismiss all models as being a crap shoot of bollocks ...because, as I heard a radio host say yesterday, they'd seen all the climate alarmist models fail to pan out. That's on Mann and his chums.

Anyway, as many readers will know, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are the dynamic duo that broke Mann's hockey stick - to the fury of the warm-mongers. They are not parties to what Steve calls "Mann's stupid lawsuit", but nevertheless:

I have a nominee for most absurdly venal activity during COVID lockdown. Michael Mann has ramped up his vanity libel lawsuit. Last Friday, McKitrick and I (who are non-parties in lawsuit) were notified by a Washington lawyer for one of the defendants that Mann's lawyer had requested that he (the defendant's lawyer) accept service of (separate) subpoenas to McKitrick and myself for documents.

The lawyer in question does not represent McIntyre & McKitrick any more than, say, Alan Dershowitz or Michael Avenatti does. Furthermore, both Macs are Canadians who reside in Canada. So Mann and John Williams really need to find a Canadian process server to serve McIntyre at that rackets club where he plays squash with the chickie from Mean Girls (Steve leads a very glamorous life).

Of course, they'd also have to find a Canadian judge willing to entertain the notion that a Canadian living in Canada should be compelled to comply with such a subpoena. That would be a long shot - not least because, following his loss in another nuisance lawsuit before the British Columbia Supreme Court, Mann reacted to His Lordship's decision by denying he had lost at all and refusing to pay the defendant's costs:

The provision in the Court's order relating to costs does NOT mean that I will pay Ball's legal fees.

See also this interview with Dr Ball:

The judge in the Mann-v-Ball case ruled that the defeated Mann must pay Ball's legal costs, which are in excess of US$700.000. But Mann has already indicated he won't pay.

If that's still the case, then Doctor Fraudpants has joined Cary Katz in the scofflaw department (see Statement 38 here), and there's even less reason for a Canadian judge to entertain the flimflam of a petitioner who disdains to be bound by the courts he appeals to. And all that's if the courthouse was open in the first place:

It's hard to picture a Canadian court being interested in breaking our coronavirus lockdown in order to accommodate Mann's vanity litigation. But it proceeds onward in the fetid swamp of D.C. courts.

True, the DC courts are a fetid swamp. But even they aren't fetid enough not to choke on Mann's absurd grandiosity. Jennifer Anderson, this year's trial judge (her two predecessors retired), ruled a few months back:

Plaintiff is a scientist with his research focus on global warming, not the scientist representing the entirety of the science behind global warming.

The wound to Mann's amour propre evidently still festers, because, even as Judge Anderson quite properly shrank the case to its essentials, Mann refuses to get the message and keeps trying to open it up. Hence this pitiful attempt to ensnare M&M in a case they're not a party to, by attempting to bully them into it by doing an end-run around their nationality and residency.

As Steyn Club members know, Steve and Ross were delightful shipmates on last fall's pre-Corona Mark Steyn Cruise. In fact, one of my most pleasant memories of that voyage was a conversation with Steve's mum about her afternoon tea with the then Princess Elizabeth in Toronto in the early 1930s. As I recall, Mrs McIntyre hopes to have another bath bun and pot of Darjeeling with Her Majesty, but that would depend on international air or sea travel ever enabling them to be on the same continent again.

Mann's demand that some other guy's lawyer accept service for some fellows in another country where he's already in defiance of the courts is a desperate move even by his loser standards. But it would truly be a travesty of justice if Steve and Ross were forced to expend money seeing off his garbage gambit. If they're forced to do so, we'll have to hold a SteynOnline fundraiser or some such to ensure that not one penny (even a Canadian penny, bearing Steve's mum's tea companion's head) is borne by two men guilty of nothing other than forensically dissecting every single flaw in Mann's worthless "science".

If ever anything were "non-essential" right now, it's a sclerotic eight-year going-nowhere vanity lawsuit. Mann should self-quarantine off, to put it politely.

~And with that back to our Corona coverage: I'll be back later today with a brand new episode of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year - and tomorrow with another socially distant self-isolated audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show.

~We opened The Mark Steyn Club over two-and-a-half years ago, and I'm thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. My only regret is that we didn't launch it seventeen years ago, but better late than never. The Steyn Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, we'd love to have you. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.