University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann will have to pay National Review more than $500,000 for legal expenses nearly 13 years after their legal battle began.
Mann first sued National Review in 2012, after Canadian conservative commentator Mark Steyn criticized Mann in a post to National Review’s website. National Review editor Rich Lowry subsequently wrote a follow-up post defending Steyn’s criticisms, and Mann opted to sue the outlet for defamation. This week, a Washington, D.C., judge ruled that Mann must pay the outlet nearly $531,000 to cover a portion of the outlet’s legal fees within 30 days, National Review’s editors announced Friday.
“The details of Mann’s conduct here remain shocking — especially in a nation such as the United States, which was built atop the foundations of free expression. All those years, all those words, all of that litigation, over . . . a couple of blog posts that criticized Mann for an argument that he had offered up during a quotidian political dispute,” National Review’s editors wrote on Friday. “Science — to which Mann is supposed to be devoted — inevitably involves disagreement. And yet, Mann proved incapable of handling dissent. Instead of engaging in debate, he sued us — for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. This, suffice it to say, is not how debate in America should work.”
During the discovery process in the case, a 2012 email from Mann surfaced in which he said he hoped the litigation would “ruin” National Review, a publication he believed to be a “threat to our children” and servile to “greedy fat cat corporate masters.”
National Review’s editors wrote that they sought $1 million, which still would be less than they spent defending themselves through the Mann ordeal. The judge’s order is only for half that amount, but the editors say that the funds they will receive from Mann “will, at least, go some way toward making us whole.”
Mann is one of the creators of the 1998 “hockey stick” climate model, which combines a number of different proxies for climate change into a single model. The “hockey stick” purports to show that global temperatures have increased significantly in recent decades relative to preceding centuries, though it has been attacked by critics and skeptics who allege that Mann and others manipulated data to produce a preferred outcome in the model.
A 2021 court order essentially dropped National Review from Mann’s suit, though Steyn was eventually found by a jury to have defamed Mann. Steyn is now on the hook for $1 million in damages payable to Mann. Notably, Abraham Wyner — a tenured statistics professor and the chair of the undergraduate statistics program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — testified during Steyn’s trial that Mann engaged in “improper manipulation” of data such that his signature model was “misleading.”
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