Monckers him even more back

Monckers him back refers. There's an update to the trove of court dox in the Alsup case¹. Most of them are unbearably tedious, and one of those is SPECIAL STATEMENT OF AMICI CURIAE IN REPLY TO RESPONSE BY PLAINTIFF TO MOTION TO FILE AMICI CURIAE BRIEF by Monckers et al. Whatever they're paying Alsup, it can't be enough for reading all this stuff. How he must be regretting the failure of The People to oppose the Amicus Curiae briefs (though the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council wazzocks got rejected for being too late).

The plaintiffs poke at Monckton's peerage, his Birtherism, and the HIV stuff, and M can't help himself from poking back. Charmingly, M demonstrates his hi-tech credentials by providing a "Basic" program. Quite what the court, or his fellow Amicae, make of all this is anyone's guess, but I'll skip over it to focus on me, me, me. Or at least, maybe me. Because M also can't resist whining about Wikipedia:

This matter [Legates vs State Climatologist] is incorrectly recorded at the relentlessly unreliable Wikipedia, where climate campaigners tend to rewrite the biographies of those skeptical of the official position on the climate in such a way as to cast them in a maximally unfavorable light. Any attempt to correct such errors is simply deleted, usually within minutes. One such campaigner has rewritten some 2,000 biographies of skeptical researchers, some of them many times, in each instance with intent unfairly to harm their reputations.

Is he referring to moi? Well who else could it possibly be? But "has rewritten some 2,000 biographies of skeptical researchers" appears to be simply made up; the brief provides no source for the claim. It is somewhat reminiscent of A Child's Garden of Wikipedia, but in that case the relevant 2,000 comes from "When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions." Which is nonsense, as the link shows; but at least it contains the number 2,000.

My best guess is that M made up the 2,000 number, possibly from a hasty skim of the linked article. But suppose one were to try to justify it... how could one? There's no edit counter that records edits to Category:Living People, and anyway that has 800k+ people in it, most of them nothing to do with climate. There's the List of scientists who disagree with the scientific consensus on global warming, but that contains nothing like 2k people.

Other stuff

There's a pile of motions to dismiss. Here's ExxonMobil's version; the joint defendants one is possibly more interesting. I've no idea whether they are likely or not; my guess would be that hizzoner wouldn't have bothered go this far if he was intending to drop the shiny so early.

Oh, god, there's more. Alsup pokes at the responsibility defence, at least that's my interpretation:

Identify and describe all state and federal court decisions sustaining a nuisance theory of
liability based on the otherwise lawful sale of a product where the seller financed and/or
sponsored research or advertising intended to cast doubt on studies showing that use of
the product would harm public health or the environment at large. Also, identify and
describe all decisions rejecting such a theory

And that's just part 1. Part 2 is the same, but in the context of GW. Part 3 asks about Noerr-Pennington. Part 4 is:

If plaintiffs’ theory is correct, why wouldn’t everyone involved in supplying carbonbased
fuels (or in otherwise increasing carbon dioxide, e.g., deforestation) be liable upon
a showing that they questioned the science of global warming or sponsored research
intending to question it?

This one will run and run. However, I do very much approve of the judge posing questions like this.

Refs

* Federal, State or Dismissal? Here’s the State of Play in the California Nuisance Lawsuits by the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, part of NAM.

Notes

1. I'm somewhat unsure of the status of that link; I don't think it is official; it seems slow to update. As I write [2018/04/11] these words, insideclimatenews.org has a link to statements they've uploaded (you can tell it is them, not official, because the filenames are non-neutral). They parse BP, Shell and Conoco as agreeing, and Exxon as differing, but I don't think that's really true. All of them tried to say as little as possible, and none of them have any substantive points of difference. The implication of all of them - and (re)stated explicitly by Exxon - is that the case won't be about climate science.