A sad day for free speech.

The climate scientist Michael Mann on Thursday won his defamation lawsuit against Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, a contributor to National Review.

The trial transported observers back to 2012, the heyday of the blogosphere and an era of rancorous polemics over the existence of global warming, what the psychology researcher and climate misinformation blogger John Cook called “a feral time.”

The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.

The jury also found the writers had made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same.

It should be noted that the trial lasted a few weeks but the drama that lead up to this trial’s conclusion lasted up to twelve years. The verdict is no surprise since the trial took place in Washington D.C. and, as Donald Trump’s experience shows, that any well known conservative or libertarian who is not on the left’s team is sure to lose in heavily Democrat areas like Washington D.C. and New York City.

This is very reminiscent of what happened in the pre-Civil Rights south where predominately White juries would render guilty verdicts against Black suspects, Jews, and Civil Rights activists regardless of their race. Except this time the Left has moved the goal posts basing their bigotry and hatred against people who do not think like them, focusing mainly on criminalizing ideas rather than race.

While I am not an attorney, hopefully Mark Steyn and Ran Simberg can appeal. It is my understanding that, as opposed to court decisions based on legal decisions, appeals based on jury verdicts are accepted but in very limited circumstances since they are based on facts. This also demonstrates that the Left has learned how to influence juries and when jurors decide cases like despots then our society and civilization are in big trouble.

ADDENDUM 02/09/2024: One other point I neglected to make was that the Climategate emails exposed a lot of bad scientific analysis, including Michael Mann changing data sets in order to achieve his desired results, hence the term hide the decline.

Dr. Judith Curry wrote a statement that she hoped to be accepted into evidence during the trial, but wasn’t. Her essay, however, is a good summary of the problems with Mann’s work. Curry says, in part:

Accusations that the Hockey Stick is a “fraud” have permeated the public debate about the graph for more than twenty years. In one of the most famous of the Climategate emails, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia referred to Michael Mann’s “trick” in the Hockey Stick graph when he wrote:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”55 This phrase — “Mikes Nature trick . . . to hide the decline” — went viral. And it stoked an already politically and scientifically charged debate.

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