Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1M in defamation lawsuit
Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1M in defamation lawsuit
A jury said Mann was defamed 12 years ago when a pair of conservative writers compared his depictions of global warming to a convicted child molester.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A jury on Thursday awarded $1 million to climate scientist Michael Mann who sued a pair of conservative writers 12 years ago after they compared his depictions of global warming to a convicted child molester.
Mann, a professor of climate science at the University of Pennsylvania, rose to fame for a graph first published in 1998 in the journal Nature that was dubbed the “hockey stick” for its dramatic illustration of a warming planet.
In 2012, a libertarian think tank named the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a blog post by Rand Simberg, then a fellow at the organization, that compared investigations into Mann’s work to the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children.
The jury in Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that Simberg and Steyn made false statements, awarding Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.
It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
On Thursday, Mann said he would be appealing a 2021 decision reached in D.C. Superior Court that held National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute not liable for defamation in the same incident.
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