Climate scientist Michael Mann has won his lawsuit against two deniers who claimed 12 years ago that he abused children's data like a pedophile. A jury sentenced the defendants to pay $1 million. “I feel very good,” Mann said Thursday after the six-member jury reached its verdict. “It's a good day for us, it's a good day for science,” he added in statements obtained by the Associated Press. The judge in charge of the case, Alfred Irving, had made it clear that the jury's job was not to decide “whether there is global warming” but to decide whether the way in which the two defendants attacked Mann is defamatory.
Pedophilia and climate science are unrelated, but in 2012, a libertarian group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a blog post by Rand Simberg, then a member of the organization, that compared the research on Mann's work to the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach of the Penn State, who was convicted of sexually abusing minors over 15 years old.
At the time, Mann was also employed at Penn State University and his work was embroiled in a controversy, known as Climategate, when his emails and those of other scientists were leaked in 2009. Their content sparked accusations that they had manipulated the data. . Despite some inappropriate comments in the news, investigations by Pennsylvania State University and other institutions such as the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) have found no data misuse by Mann. However, climate deniers continued to accuse him and other researchers of document falsification and destruction and other scientific misconduct.
These attacks included those of the two authors Mann is suing for libel: Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. “You could say Mann is the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, but instead of abusing children, he misused data and tortured him,” Simberg wrote. Another author, Mark Steyn, later referred to Simberg's article in his own article in the National Review and called Mann's research “fraudulent.” “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate change hockey stick card, the ringmaster of the Tree Ring Circus himself,” he posted.
Michael Mann became famous for a graphic first published in the journal Nature in 1998, known as the “hockey stick” for its dramatic depiction of global warming, in which the planet's global temperature suddenly rises after a relatively flat evolution over the last century, as if they were the handle and blade of a hockey stick. Simberg and Steyn questioned the data on which this graphic was based.
Mann then filed suit against both men, claiming that they had harmed his career and reputation both in the United States and abroad. The scientist initially sued the two authors and the editors of the publication, but in 2021 a judge dismissed the lawsuits against the editors because they could not be held responsible for what Simberg and Steyn had written. The case dragged on, even going to the Supreme Court, until it went to trial last month. The jury announced its verdict last week.
Information is the first remedy against climate change. Subscribe to it.
Subscribe to
In it, a District of Columbia Supreme Court jury found that Simberg and Steyn had made false statements. He awarded Mann just $1 in damages for each perpetrator, but also ordered Simberg to pay $1,000 in punitive damages and Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages. The jury answered “yes” to the question of whether both men made their statements with “malice, malice, malevolence, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
“I hope this ruling sends the message that attacking climate scientists with falsehoods is not protected by free speech,” Mann said in a statement.
Mann claimed that the blog articles caused him to lose out on funding, but the defendants countered that he did not provide sufficient evidence of this and instead made him famous. “We have always said that Mann never suffered any real harm from the statement in question,” Steyn said Thursday through his representative, Melissa Howes, in statements reported by the AP. “And today, after 12 years, the jury awarded him $1 in compensatory damages,” he added, noting that he will appeal the $1 million in punitive damages.
For his part, Simberg emphasized that only some of his statements were considered defamatory. “I am pleased that the jury found in my favor on half of the statements at issue in this case, including the conclusion that my statement that Professor Mann was involved in data manipulation was not defamation. “In more than a decade of litigation, the sanctions imposed on Professor Mann dwarf the sentence imposed on me,” he said in a statement. Still, Simberg's attorney, Mark DeLaquil, said his client was “disappointed with the verdict” and would appeal the jury's decision, which ordered him to pay $1,000.
For his part, Mann said he would appeal the District of Columbia Supreme Court's 2021 decision declaring that National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, as publishers, were not liable for defamation. “We believe the decision was made incorrectly,” Mann said. “They’re next.”
You can follow Climate and environment on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter