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One morning in July 2012, climate scientist Michael Mann woke up to a terse email from a fellow scientist.
A message from astronomer and science communicator Phil Preit said: “This is complete nonsense.” “This is the most damning statement I’ve ever seen about a climate scientist. If someone wrote this about me, I would call a lawyer.”
Conservative media and right-wing research organizations published editorials comparing Dr. Mann, then a professor at Penn State, to former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children. did. The authors claimed that Dr. Mann created fraudulent graphs and accused the university of misinvestigating both the coach’s crimes and the scientist’s work.
Dr. Mann did indeed call a lawyer. He sued the author and his publisher for libel and slander. Now, 12 years and a pinball journey through an obstacle course of free speech and defamation laws, the case is being heard in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The two authors are the only ones being tried as individuals. A verdict is expected to be handed down as early as Wednesday.
“Being compared to Jerry Sandusky as the father of a 6-year-old girl was probably the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Dr. Mann testified in court on January 24. I am an outcast in my community. ”
The case unfolds at a time when outright denial of climate science has declined, but scientists’ integrity has become a bigger target.
“The nature of climate change denial has changed,” said Callum Hood, research director at the Center to Counter Digital Hate, an advocacy group. The group recently published a report analyzing YouTube videos and found that personal attacks against scientists are now one of the most common types of climate change denying content online.
The case attracted the attention of climate scientists and legal scholars, among others. Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said the case is one of the few times a climate scientist has stood up for his research in an American court.
“It’s rare for a climate scientist to hit back at a climate denier,” Gerrard said. He is also a board member of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and previously assisted Dr. Mann in another legal case. Fight.
Since Dr. Mann is legally considered a public figure, he will have to clear a higher bar than most to succeed in his defamation suit. He faces the difficult task of proving that the authors he accused knowingly lied in their work. The authors claim that their posts are simply expressing their opinions. The publisher also petitioned the Supreme Court to reconsider the case, but it was unsuccessful.
Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University, said Dr. Mann’s case resonates with other climate scientists. “Not a day goes by that I’m not attacked,” she said. “He’s fighting for all of us.”
In court, Dr. Mann is defending his most famous study, published in the late 1990s. The study shows that average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have risen so rapidly in recent decades that the graph resembles the shape of a hockey stick.
The study was based on the 2009 incident known as ‘Climategate’, in which hackers broke into the computer servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and published thousands of emails between scientists, including Dr Mann. received criticism. Skeptics used email to claim that he had manipulated the data to exaggerate the hockey stick graph.
Pennsylvania State University investigated his work, as did the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce and others. All cleared Dr. Mann of any wrongdoing. Before and after the protests, other scientists replicated his findings using a variety of data sources and statistical methods.
The issue seemed resolved until Sandusky was convicted in 2012 and a report was released that found Penn State’s administration had failed to prevent Sandusky from committing crimes.
The day after the report was released, Rand Shinberg, then an adjunct fellow at the Institute for Competitive Enterprise, published a blog post on the think tank’s website comparing Mann and Sandusky. “Mr. Mann may be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, but instead of abusing children, he is abusing data for politicized science with potentially dire economic consequences. , except that they have been tortured,” Shinberg wrote.
A few days later, Mark Stein, an author and guest host on conservative radio and TV shows at the time, republished some of Shinberg’s posts on National Review Online. “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent ‘hockey stick’ graph on climate change and the true ringleader of the tree-ring circus,” Stein added in his commentary.
Dr. Mann immediately filed suit.
The scientific consensus on climate change has been clear for 20 years. A 2004 paper that reviewed more than 900 scientific studies on climate change found no refutation of the idea that human activity is producing greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
However, public acceptance of this fact is fluctuating.
In 2008, 71 percent of Americans acknowledged that climate change was occurring, according to a long-running twice-yearly survey conducted by Yale University’s Climate Change Communication Project and George Mason University. But between 2008 and 2010, the years before and after Climategate, the percentage of Americans accepting climate change fell to 57 percent.
There has been a rebound since then. A 2023 survey by Yale University and George Mason found that 72 percent of Americans accept that climate change is occurring.
In recent years, research has also progressed on climate change skepticism, denial, and campaigns to delay climate action. In 2021, an international group of researchers trained a machine learning model to classify climate-related claims from 255,000 documents collected from conservative think tank websites and popular blogs published over the past 20 years. . This dataset included Mr. Simberg’s posts about Dr. Mann.
The study, published in the academic journal Scientific Reports, divided the claims into five broad categories. Human greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. The climate impact isn’t bad. Solutions to climate change don’t work. And the climate movement and science cannot be trusted.
According to an analysis provided by Travis Cohn, a computational social scientist at the University of Exeter and author of the study, the model placed the claims in Simberg’s blog post in the category of “climate change/science cannot be trusted.” .
University of Melbourne psychology researcher and co-author John Cook said scientists were an even bigger target within this category than activists or politicians. Attacks on scientists “are actually one of the most widespread forms of climate misinformation,” he said.
According to his group’s research, claims that climate change measures are ineffective have also become more prominent, now accounting for more than half of the claims from conservative research organizations.
Regardless of their format, all of these arguments share the goal of slowing climate action, Dr Cook said. “They try to get there through a different route.”
Building on a 2021 study, a recent report from the Center to Combat Digital Hate used the same methodology to analyze 12,000 YouTube videos posted over the past six years. The researchers found that what they called “old denial” – claims that global warming is not happening or that humans are not to blame – now accounted for just 30 percent of all negative claims. It found that this is down from 65 percent in 2018. ” claims, which include attacks on scientists and misinformation about solutions, now account for 70 percent of these claims, up from his 35 percent in 2018.
A spokesperson for the Competitive Enterprise Institute declined to comment on the case. “We don’t believe this case is actually about climate science,” said Schinberg’s attorney Mark Delaquile. “We do not believe that this case is actually about climate science. But I believe it’s about the right of individuals to express their opinions freely.” An attorney assisting Mr. Stein, who is representing him in court, also declined to comment for this article. Asked for comment, National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowery pointed to an editorial published at the beginning of the trial in January.
Regardless of the outcome, legal experts say the case is important not only for climate science but also for defamation and free speech laws.
“This case is at the intersection of some of our most difficult questions,” said Ronnell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. Courts need to balance people’s right to express their opinions freely with preventing lies that damage people’s reputations, she said.
Sonya West, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said if Dr. Mann were successful, his case would show that “there really is a limit to defamation law.” If he loses, the case could “impact the larger conversation about how strong First Amendment rights are.”
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