Nearly 13 years after their legal battle began, Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann must pay more than $500,000 in legal fees to National Review. [emphasis, links added]
In 2012, Mann sued National Review for the first time after Canadian conservative commentator Mark Stein published an article criticizing Mann on the National Review website.
National Review editor Rich Lowry later published a follow-up article defending Steyn's criticism, and Mann chose to sue the outlet for defamation.
This week, a Washington, D.C., judge ruled that Mann must pay the outlet nearly $531,000 within 30 days to cover some of the outlet's legal feesNational Review editors announced Friday.
“The details of Mann's behavior here are still shocking — especially in a country like the United States, which was founded on free speech. Over the years, all these words, all these lawsuits, … there have been several blog posts criticizing Mann Arguments made in everyday political disputes,” National Review editors wrote Friday.
“Science—the field Mann was supposed to be working on—inevitably involves disagreement. But Mann proved unable to handle dissent. Instead of engaging in the debate, he sued us for defamation and infliction of emotional distress. Arguably, this is not the way American debate should be.“
Weaponizing this petrostate-owned (see: https://t.co/JxVNIYYx4R and https://t.co/uAG7kVg249) media to promote anti-scientific disinformation about the California wildfires is why it’s necessary Example of massive X – odus (8 days and counting down…) https://t.co/ilyP1tUhmr
— Professor Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) January 12, 2025
During the investigation of the case, A 2012 email from Mann has surfaced in which he expressed hope that the lawsuit would “destroy” state censorshipa publication he believed to be “A threat to our children” and giving in to “greedy fat cat business owners.”
National Review editors wrote that they were seeking $1 million, but that was still less than what they had spent defending themselves during Mann's ordeal.
The judge's order was for only half that amount, but the editors said the funds they would receive from Mann “will at least somewhat complete us.”
Mann was one of the creators of the 1998 “hockey stick” climate model, which combined many different climate change agents into a single model.
The “hockey stick” aims to show that global temperatures have increased significantly in recent decades relative to previous centuries, although it has come under attack from critics and skeptics who claim Mann and others manipulate data to produce preferred outcomes in models.
A 2021 court order essentially removed National Review from Mann's lawsuit, although a jury ultimately found Stein guilty of defamation. Steyn is now required to pay $1 million in damages to Mann.
Notably, Abraham Wyner—a tenured professor of statistics and chair of the undergraduate statistics program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—testified at Stine’s trial that Mann had “improperly manipulated” the data and therefore his signature model was “misleading.”
Top image from author event/YouTube screencap
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