In a victory for climate scientists, jurors in Michael Mann’s defamation case against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn awarded Mann $1 million in punitive damages for defamatory comments made in 2012.
In a unanimous decision, jurors agreed that both Simberg and Steyn defamed Mann in blog posts that compared Mann to convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky, former assistant coach of football at Penn State University. They announced that Simberg will pay $1,000 in punitive damages and Steyn will pay the larger $1 million.
The trial, however, has proven to be about much more than defamation — the entire field and validity of climate science has been on trial.
Below, ABC News video shows how right wing media misinformation made Mann a favorite target for neo-Nazis more than a decade ago.
In closing arguments, Mann’s lawyer John Williams compared the climate deniers in this case to election deniers overall. “Why do Trumpers continue to deny that he won the election?” he asked the jury. “Because they truly believe what they say or because they want to further their agenda?”
He asked the jury to consider the same question about Steyn and Simberg, the two climate deniers found guilty of defaming Mann: Did they believe what they wrote was the truth, or did they just want to push their agenda?
Mann has “been attacked in all the ways that a climate scientist can be attacked,” Lauren Kurtz, the executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, told DeSmog. “He’s been remarkably public about what’s happened to him, [and] willing to fight back in ways that other scientists haven’t necessarily wanted to take on.”
These attacks, however, take their toll, and Mann’s lawyers expressed hope that this case could help protect other climate scientists from abuse and harassment.
“Michael Mann is tired of being attacked,” Williams told the jury. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way” to Simberg and Steyn.
An underlying current throughout this trial has been that climate denialism, like what the two defendants practice, isn’t really about the science. It’s more about politics and policy that drives organizations and individuals to “attack the science and confuse the public,” as Michael Mann wrote in his 2016 book, “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy,” co-written with cartoonist Tom Toles.
In fact, as the jury heard when Williams cross-examined Simberg on Tuesday, Simberg hadn’t even read Mann and his coauthor’s two reports on the hockey stick graphs before writing his infamous 2012 blog post accusing Mann of scientific misconduct.
The trial transported observers back to 2012, the heyday of the blogosphere and an era of rancorous polemics over the existence of global warming, what the psychology researcher and climate misinformation blogger John Cook called “a feral time.”
The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.
The jury also found the writers had made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same.
“This is a victory for science and it’s a victory for scientists,” Dr. Mann said.
In 2012, Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn drew parallels between controversy over Dr. Mann’s research and the scandal around Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting children. Dr. Mann was a professor at Penn State at the time.
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The presiding judge, Alfred Irving, emphasized to the jury that their job was not to decide whether or not global warming is happening. “I knew that we were walking a fine line from a trial concerning climate change to a trial concerning defamation,” he said earlier while discussing which witnesses to allow.
The story of this lawsuit isn’t over.
In 2021, Judge Irving, along with another D.C. Superior Court judge, decided that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review could not be held liable. The publishers did not meet the bar of “actual malice” imposed on public figures suing for defamation, the judges ruled, meaning employees of the two organizations did not publish Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn’s posts knowing them to be false, nor did they have “reckless disregard” for whether the posts were false.Dr. Mann’s attorneys have indicated that they will appeal this earlier decision. Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, John Williams, who represents Dr. Mann, said, “They’re next.”
Big Social Media reaction incoming:
On the day that major media outlets are reporting a year of the breach of the global temperature rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial norms, this is a welcomed verdict. You cannot bandy words around under the guise of the freedom of speech, and get away with it.
“Global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 12 months for the first time on record, new data shows, breaching a critical threshold that, if it continues, will push the limits of life on Earth to adapt. ”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/08/climate/global-warming-limit-climate-intl/index.html
It is a huge relief to see that truth, decency, common-sense and a worthy body of evidence have been upheld. It is high time these liars, deniers, slanderers, libelers and assorted shills of the entrenched fossil fuel monsters are made to pay their long-delayed dues.
Amen! I say again, amen!
God bless Dr. Mann and all the scientists trying to understand climate and its science. Their work is to be held in high esteem.
EH HAR, YEA and Bluddy great!!
This may not turn out to be a big win in terms of money awarded. Mann only had one dollar in damages awards from both Steyn and Simberg. There is precedent where punitive awards are limited to something like 4 to 10 times damage awards. In this district where almost all the potential jurors vote for the same party as the highly politically opinionated Mann, the jury saw no damages. As someone who watched most of the trial, I think in any other district, Mann might’ve been subject to perjury charges and his lawyer had his law license suspended.