From this NPR phase on local weather science:
Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science on the College of Pennsylvania, has been awarded extra the $1 million in damages after a trial in D.C. courtroom.
Michael Mann, among the many world’s most famed local weather scientists, gained a defamation case in D.C. Superior Courtroom in opposition to two conservative writers.
Mann, a professor on the College of Pennsylvania, had sued Rand Simberg, a coverage analyst, and Mark Steyn, a right-wing writer, for on-line posts revealed over a decade in the past, respectively, by the Aggressive Enterprise Institute and the Nationwide Assessment.
Mann is partly chargeable for one of the consequential graphs in local weather science, one which helped make the steep rise in world common temperatures from fossil gas use comprehensible to a large viewers.
One doesn’t should look laborious on social media to search out folks with no scientific coaching claiming that local weather change is a hoax, and, specifically, that the parents who’ve spent their whole grownup lives learning the topic are charlatans and grifters.
I attended a lecture on the College of California at Santa Barbara just a few years again at which the keynote speaker claimed that “what was as soon as science now could be politics, the place folks with ‘PhD’ on the finish of their names are sucking down grant cash to review a phenomenon that they know doesn’t exist.”
This might have been an outrageous declare if it had been made anyplace, however in entrance of lots of of individuals at UCSB’s physics constructing?
Maybe the case right here reminds us that defamation just isn’t coated as free speech. Should you make baseless and slanderous claims about one other particular person, be ready to fork throughout some severe damages.
