John Wheeler: Climate scientist wins defamation suit after being politically attacked - INFORUM
John Wheeler: Climate scientist wins defamation suit after being politically attacked - InForum | Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo news, weather and sports
John Wheeler: Climate scientist wins defamation suit after being politically attacked
The verdict is a strong signal that individual scientists shouldn’t be accused of serious misconduct without strong evidence.
FARGO — Michael Mann, a controversial University of Pennsylvania climatologist, has been awarded $1 million for defamation in a trial that sends a message about scientists getting attacked politically for well-intentioned work. The case centered on a 2012 blog post published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in which conservative analyst Rand Simberg compared Mann to Jerry Sandusky, a former football coach at the Penn State who was convicted of sexually assaulting children, saying that “instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” Mark Steyn, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, also accused Mann of committing scientific fraud.
Commenting on the trial, Michael Gerrard, a legal scholar at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York City, said, “It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize scientific findings, but this verdict is a strong signal that individual scientists shouldn’t be accused of serious misconduct without strong evidence.”
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