Climate scientist Michael Mann has won his lawsuit against two deniers who 12 years ago said he abused data like a pedophile abused children.
A jury has sentenced the defendants to pay him one million dollars.
“I feel very good,” Mann said Thursday after the six-person jury returned its verdict.
“It's a good day for us, it's a good day for science,” he added, in statements reported by the Associated Press.
The judge in charge of the case, Alfred Irving, had made clear that the jury's job was not to decide "whether there is global warming," but to rule on whether the way in which the two defendants attacked Mann was defamatory.
Pedophilia and climate science have nothing to do with each other, but in 2012, a libertarian group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a blog post by Rand Simberg, then a fellow at the organization, that compared research on Mann's work to the case. of Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted of sexually abusing minors over 15 years.
At the time, Mann was also employed at Penn State and his work had become embroiled in a controversy, the so-called
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 messages, investigations carried out by Pennsylvania State University and other institutions such as the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) did not find any misuse of data by Mann.
However, climate deniers continued to accuse him and other researchers of falsification and destruction of documents and other scientific misconduct.
Among those attacks were those of the two authors Mann is suing for defamation, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn.
“You could say that Mann is the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of abusing children, he has abused and tortured data,” Simberg wrote.
Another writer, Mark Steyn, later referred to Simberg's article in his own article in
National Review,
calling Mann's research "fraudulent."
“Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate change hockey stick chart, the ringmaster of the tree ring circus himself,” he posted.
Michael Mann rose to fame for a graph first published in 1998 in
Nature magazine,
known as the “hockey stick” for its dramatic illustration of global warming, in which after a relatively flat evolution it suddenly rises. the global temperature of the planet in the last century, as if they were the handle and blade of a hockey stick.
Simberg and Steyn questioned the data on which that graph was based.
Mann filed a lawsuit against both men following those comments, alleging that they had affected 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 publishers, considering that they could not be held responsible for what was written by Simberg and Steyn.
The case dragged on, even going through the Supreme Court, until it went to trial last month.
The jury returned its verdict last week.
In it, a jury in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that Simberg and Steyn had made false statements.
He awarded Mann compensatory damages of only one dollar for each perpetrator, but also ordered Simberg to pay $1,000 in punitive damages and Steyn to pay one million dollars in punitive damages.
The jury answered yes to the question of whether both men made their statements with “malice, spite, ill will, revenge or deliberate intent to harm.”
“I hope this verdict sends a message that attacking climate scientists with falsehoods is not protected free speech,” Mann said in a statement.
Mann claimed that he had lost grant funding as a result of the blog articles, but the defendants countered that he had not provided sufficient evidence of this and had instead propelled him to fame.
“We have always said that Mann never suffered any real harm from the statement in question,” Steyn said Thursday through her representative, Melissa Howes, in statements reported by the AP.
“And today, after 12 years, the jury has awarded him $1 in compensatory damages,” she added, noting that he would appeal the $1 million in punitive damages.
Simberg, for his part, highlighted that only part of his statements had been 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 engaged in data manipulation was not defamation.
“In more than a decade of litigation, the sanctions imposed on Professor Mann dwarf the sentence against 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 to pay $1,000.
For his part, Mann said he would appeal the 2021 decision reached in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that declared that
National Review
and the Competitive Enterprise Institute as publishers were not liable for defamation.
“We believe it was decided wrongly,” Mann said.
“They are next.”
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