Mark Steyn has published his latest brief in his protracted court case with discredited climate scientist Michael Mann (who is suing him for libel) and it’s a corker.

Here’s a sample:

The audacity of the falsehoods in Mann’s court pleadings is breathtaking. For example, on page 19 of his brief below dated January 18, 2013, he cites the international panel chaired by the eminent scientist Lord Oxburgh, FRS as one of the bodies that “exonerated” him, whereas on page 235 of Mann’s own book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, he states explicitly that “our own work did not fall within the remit of the committee and the hockey stick was not mentioned in the report.” It is deeply disturbing that a plaintiff should make such fraudulent claims in his legal pleadings. It is even more disturbing that the first such fraudulent claim – to be a Nobel Laureate and thus in the same pantheon as Banting, Einstein, and the Curies – should have led to the amended complaint and the procedural delays that then followed. It would be even more profoundly damaging were his other transparently false claims to be entertained for another two years before trial. It is clear from the ease with which Mann lies about things that would not withstand ten minutes of scrutiny in a courtroom that he has no intention of proceeding to trial.”

For the full background to the case, read this. But all you really need to know is that Michael Mann is exploiting the flaws in the US legal system to try to draw out proceedings as long as possible in order to exhaust – or bankrupt – Steyn into submission.

Unfortunately for Mann he picked the wrong victim. Steyn is a fighter who knows his way round the courts having battled a similarly vexatious and vindictive case in Canada when he was accused of Islamophobia – or some similar nonsense – by something called the Ontario Human Rights Committee. Plus, Steyn is astute enough to appreciate exactly what’s at stake here.

This isn’t about hurt feelings or a damaged professional reputation, let alone an ill-chosen and imprecise turn of phrase. It’s about the very principle of freedom of speech.

And not just about freedom of speech either, important though that is.

This, if Steyn is successful, could be the moment the dam bursts: the one where the global establishment is finally forced to acknowledge the fraudulence, the corruption, the mendacity, the trickery, the deception, the junk science, the big money and the official complicity which for the last two or three decades have been underpinning the Great Climate Change Scam.

Up till now the response of the climate alarmist establishment (and that would include everyone from the Obama administration to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to the Royal Society and NASA GISS to the IPCC to the Prince of Wales to Vice and Grist to John Podesta, Tom Steyer and Michael Mann) in the face of criticism has been to deny, rebuff, bully, insist, conceal, bluster, misrepresent and sue.

They have got away with it not least because they are backed by such vast sums of money – far in excess of anything climate sceptical scientists receive, not just from governments and the United Nations and the European Union but also through various rich and powerful foundations which left-wing billionaire donors use as a political laundering process. (It’s all there in this Senate Minority Report).

They have also got away with it because of the complicity of the scientific, political and media establishment.

This was especially noticeable in the wake of Climategate. To any objective observer there was no mistaking the malfeasance and dishonesty revealed among the private emails of the “scientists” at the heart of the global warming scam. (These are the guys who write the IPCC reports which our governments use to justify hiking our taxes, driving up our energy prices and carpeting our countryside with wind turbines). Yet they got away with it by rigging at least four inquiries into the affair – either by deliberately not asking the right questions or stuffing the investigation panels or both.

Hence Steyn’s point in his brief. Mann and his supporters are forever claiming they were exonerated. But they simply never were – for reasons which become perfectly clear when you read the detailed report compiled by Andrew Montford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and which any court of law, were it to do its job, would fairly swiftly establish.

This is what I’ve always found so thoroughly enjoyable about the global warming debate. It’s not one of those issues where there’s right and wrong on both sides and it’s really a matter of opinion which one you favour. Quite simply it’s a very straightforward battle between, on the one hand a bunch of lying, greedy shysters, fanatical, misanthropic, anti-capitalist eco-loons, bent, grant-troughing scientists, grubby politicians and despicable, rent-seeking millionaires and billionaires; and on the other a handful of brave, honest, rigorous, seekers-after-truth.

Under full disclosure in a US court system all this stuff would come out. It would have to because otherwise – so far as I understand US judicial process – the trial would be prejudiced and invalid. And if and when it does come out only one side can emerge as the winner because only one side is telling the truth or has facts to support its argument.

No wonder Mann (and his anonymous – but evidently very rich – backers) are fighting so hard to delay the process for as long as possible.

If this ever goes to trial they’re all toast.