Jury rules for climate scientist Michael Mann in long-running defamation case

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https://www.science.org/content/article/jury-rules-climate-scientist-michael-mann-long-running-defamation-case

By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. 

Excerpt: A jury found today that Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist, was defamed by the writers of two blog posts 12 years ago that compared his work on global warming to child molestation. ...At the heart of Mann’s lawsuit are two 25-year-old scientific papers that he led. The studies combined historical records with tree rings and other temperature proxies going back 1000 years to show that temperatures stayed largely flat until the past century, when they rose sharply. A key chart from the papers, dubbed the “hockey stick” because of its shape, was used in a 2001 U.N. climate report. ...One of those attacks was written in 2012 by Simberg, then a blogger at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, following the arrest of Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky, a serial child molester who coached football at the school. Simberg likened the case to the university’s investigation of Mann, saying Mann “molested and tortured data” to reach his conclusions on the hockey stick. Steyn then quoted Simberg’s post in a blog hosted by the National Review, calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”... 

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