The descent of Mann's legal standing

Story submitted by Rob Ricket

Mann plays the victim in article from “The Scientist”

Opinion: Life as a Target

Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.

By Michael E. Mann| March 27, 2013

As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I be fired from my job because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of human-caused climate change. I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations by congressman in the pay of the fossil fuel industry and was the target of what The Washington Post referred to as a “witch hunt” by Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. I have even received a number of anonymous death threats.

My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate scientists are regularly the subject of such attacks.

This cynicism is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by fossil fuel companies, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort to discredit the science linking the burning of fossil fuels with potentially dangerous climate change.

My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of a series of articles estimating past temperature trends. Using information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores, my two coauthors and I had pieced together variations in the Earth’s temperature over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, is an unprecedented aberration in this period of documented temperature changes, and recent work published in the journal Science suggests that the recent warming trend has no counterpart for at least the past 11,000 years, and likely longer. In a graph featured in our manuscript, the last century sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.

Source:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34853/title/Opinion–Life-as-a-Target/

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This header from Dr. Mann has some important legal value:

Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.

A public figure has a higher burden of proof in defamation cases, such as the one where Dr. Mann is suing Dr. Tim Ball and Mark Steyn at The National Review. For example:

According to the public figure doctrine, prominent public persons must prove actual malice on the part of the news media in order to prevail in a libel lawsuit. Actual malice is the knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of whether a statement is true or false. The public figure doctrine makes it possible for publishers to provide information on public issues to the debating public, undeterred by the threat of liability.

Source: http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/public-figure-doctrine/

Further, Dr. Mann is going to have to prove that the statements by Tim Ball and NRO weren’t parody or satire:

Whether parodies should be potentially actionable as defamation depends on whether the statement is deemed factual and thus potentially actionable, or is a matter of protected opinion and not actionable.

Although plagued by confusion and lack of consensus, under the prevailing trends of constitutional law and/or state substantive defamation law principles, four core bases have emerged for classifying a statement as protected opinion:

(a) it did “not contain a provably false factual connotation;”

(b) it “cannot ‘reasonably [be] interpreted as stating actual facts;’”

(c) it consists merely of “rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet,” or “imaginative expression;”

(d) it does not state or imply undisclosed, unassumed, or unknown defamatory facts.

Source: http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr/article/viewFile/74/66

I think with his public figure admission, combined with the recognized first amendment right to satire and parody of public figures,  he just took his two legal cases out back and shot them dead.