The Climate Trial of the Century is over, and the result is an absolutely travesty of justice. A D.C. jury ruled yesterday that Mark Steyn must pay $1 in compensatory damages and an absurd $1 million in punitive damages to climate media star Michael Mann for his claimed defamation. His co-defendant, Rand Simberg, was socked with paying $1 in compensatory damages, but only $1,000 in punitive damages.
We followed the trial every day for nearly four weeks, and we can tell you that it was a disgrace to the professions in our legal system, the “profession” of juries to administer justice, and the professions in alarmist climate science. In short, the whole thing was a disgrace.
On episode 97 of Climate Change Roundtable, The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely break down what happened in the trial, how this criminally unjust jury decision came to be, and what this means for the First Amendment rights of anyone who questions alarmist dogma in public.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) to get caught up on the trial and join the chat to ask questions of your own. You can also play the video later, as it will be recorded.
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I dare not say what I think of Mann
None of us dare any more. Where any and all criticism may be actionable, no criticism will be allowed.
What will happen to McIntire and McKitrick? Can Mann now sue them for showing Mann’s errors? M&M never compared Mann to a sexual predator but they did show that certain tree ring sets were covered in the plots so as to obscure the fact that these tree rings showed a decrease in temperature when Mann claimed they were rising. In a DC court, truth does not appear to be a defense.
Wikipedia claims that the investigation into Mann’s work by the National Science Foundation vindicated Mann and that the bias introduced by Mann’s principal component analysis was very minor. I don’t remember it that way.
I haven’t followed this for a long time, thinking that Mann had been discredited.
What is really interesting is that the jury only found 2 of Simbergs statements and 2 of Steyns statements defamatory. The jury did NOT find either defendant liable for calling the hockey stick fraudulent nor for saying that Mann manipulated the data on the hockey stick.
Sterling made the point that the jury was sending a message to the effect of “we don’t like mean people.” However, Mann was shown to be a very mean and vindictive figure and the jury sent no message there.
The problems appear otherwise.
First, the D.C. area is not only overwhelmingly Democrats, but partisan Democrats as well. The example set by New York and D.C. against Trump has perhaps made a big impression on copy-cat juries about messages they should send.
The attorney Williams offered little in actual evidence, but did spend a lot of time making sure the jury got a message that Steyn is a Fox contributor and conservative. It was manipulation of the suspected characteristics of the jury.
The Manhattan Contrarian noted that the jurors seemed confused by the sustained objections against the plaintiff’s attorney in his closing statements. If so, then one might ponder that when people become confused they tend to fall back on tribal affiliation, prejudices, and even superstitions.
As mentioned in the other post regarding this trial: the punitive damages were awarded so that in the future, no one will dare engage in “climate denialism” and not for defamation. So this was against free speech and not for the so-called defamation. That won’t stand on appeal.
Alluding to Mann’s actions being akin to an act of pedophilia is problematic at best. Sometimes conservatives get a bit too cute and in the process they do a lot of damage to the cause of truth. There appear to have been so many ways to deconstruct Mann and his grafted data graph that there was no need to go there. One would think even by 2012 conservative commentators would have figured out there are two sets of rules for conservatives and the opposition. So now points for an unforced error go to the opposition. Haven’t people figured out only the Left can use slander and ad hominem attack.
As H. Sterling Burnett mentioned, you obviously don’t understand what an analogy is. Neither defendant ever alluded to Mann being akin to a paedophile.
Having listened to all 13 of the excellent Podcast series on the trial by Mark’s team, it seems apparent that justice has eluded the defendants. The financial burden of an appeal is very great as the court may require a Bond from the Defendants in order to go forward. Additionally, several more years of legal fees.
Has anyone set up a crowd funding account for an appeal? Are there enough people who care about this to make a difference?
There is a ‘donation’ link on SteynOnline.
What hasn’t been said yet is that Mann missed his target with this case – his goal was to shut down and, hopefully, bankrupt the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, 2 sites that the left would dearly love to silence. Mann got Steyn and Simberg (the authors) rather than CEI and NR (the publishers) so he’s likely to try again against them, then any other online outlet that he disagrees with. This is only the beginning for Mann – I think he genuinely sees himself as a crusader going after ‘bad guys’ and putting them out of business, permanently.
Roger Pielke Jr. has a very good post … dated Monday, before the Mann V. Steyn verdict came in … titled “The Weaponization of Scientific Consensus” (direct link).
One of the comments under that article was by someone using the username “Dale & Laura McIntyre”, which I copy below (“spaced out” for readability, and with what I consider to be the relevant phrases following the jury verdict in Mann v. Steyn & Simberg highlighted).
_ _ _ _ _ _
Science is not self-correcting if guardians of “the consensus” impose penalties on dissenting voices.
It takes a chest full of character to point out flaws in the conventional wisdom when doing so might cost you your job and wreck your peace of mind with slander, libel, calumny and contempt.
There is a saying that “Silence implies consent.” Not so.
Silence implies fear, fear that speaking up will cost you your career, your livelihood and the good opinion of friends.
For these reasons, I regard the influence of those insisting on “scientific consensus” as pernicious.
Michael Crichton had it right when he wrote, “Consensus is the tool of politics, not of science.”
Jury bought? No Way that this is Justice… FACTS/EVIDENCE were totally ignored. Just one more indictment of New York corruption.
I was wondering if Professor Mann has to pay taxes on all that “free” legal representation he received over the years for this trial?