Great to See Climate Science and Legal Matters Upheld

From this NPR segment on climate science:

Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded more than $1 million in damages after a trial in D.C. court.

Michael Mann, among the world’s most renowned climate scientists, won a defamation case in D.C. Superior Court against two conservative writers.

Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had sued Rand Simberg, a policy analyst, and Mark Steyn, a right-wing author, for online posts published over a decade ago, respectively, by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.

Mann is partly responsible for one of the most consequential graphs in climate science, one that helped make the steep rise in global average temperatures from fossil fuel use understandable to a wide audience.

One doesn’t have to look hard on social media to find people with no scientific training claiming that climate change is a hoax, and, in particular, that the folks who have spent their entire adult lives studying the subject are charlatans and grifters.

I attended a lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara a few years back at which the keynote speaker claimed that “what was once science now is politics, where people with ‘PhD’ at the end of their names are sucking down grant money to study a phenomenon that they know does not exist.”

This would have been an outrageous claim if it were made anywhere, but in front of hundreds of people at UCSB’s physics building?

Perhaps the case here reminds us that defamation is not covered as free speech.  If you make baseless and slanderous claims about another person, be prepared to fork across some serious damages.