Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Climate change myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
A prominent climate scientist who was accused by right-wing bloggers of academic fraud and compared to a notorious child molester has won more than $1mn in damages, ending a 12-year defamation case closely watched by campaigners.
Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who achieved a degree of fame in the late 1990s for his “hockey stick” graph predicting a sharp rise in global temperatures, had sued writers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, as well as their respective publishers, the Competitive Enterprise Institute think-tank and conservative magazine National Review.
After a judge dismissed the claims against the publishers, a jury in Washington, DC, found Simberg individually liable for $1,000 in damages, and Steyn for $1,000,000.
Mann said in a statement that he hoped the verdict would send a message “that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech”.
Simberg said he was pleased that the jury found in his favour “on half of the statements at issue in this case, including finding my statement that Dr Mann engaged in data manipulation was not defamation”.
Lawyers representing Steyn in the matter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The attacks on Mann featured in the lawsuit came after a 2009 hack in which thousands of emails were stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online. Some of the exchanges — including casual emails between Mann and his colleagues — were seized upon by climate deniers who claimed they proved the data behind global warming prognostications was haphazard and even fabricated.
In July 2012, conservative blogger Simberg published a post called “The Other Scandal in Unhappy Valley”, in which he said the emails meant that Mann “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science”, referring to the football coach at Pennsylvania State University — the same school Mann worked at — who had been found guilty of sexually assaulting 10 boys under his care.
Mann “has molested and tortured data in the service of politicised science”, Simberg added, although the line was later removed by editors.
Two days later, Steyn, a right-wing radio and TV personality, quoted the line in a follow-up piece published by National Review, adding that while he was “not sure he would have extended the metaphor all the way into the locker room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does . . . he has a point”.
When Mann threatened to sue National Review, the publication’s editor, Rich Lowry, penned a public response in which he said he looked forward to “teaching him a thing or two about the law”.
