by Kevin Killough
Just The News
Dr. Michael Mann was once riding high on a $1 million defamation ruling against bloggers who criticized his “hockey stick” graph, purporting to show a drastic rise in temperatures in the last century. Now he’s been ordered to pay them tens of thousands of dollars for having acted in “bad faith” during the trial.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann’s losses in court continued to mount Thursday when a D.C. Superior Court judge denied his request to reconsider sanctions against him for having “acted in bad faith.”
As a result, he owes more than $28,000 to two bloggers, who once faced $1 million in damages that a jury had awarded to Mann in his defamation suit against them. The ruling also had strong words concerning Mann’s conduct in the case, accusing him of presenting figures to the jury that he knew to be incorrect.
“I think this goes more towards showing that climate skeptics have been right about Mann all along. I mean, we’ve always questioned his honesty,” Steve Milloy, senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com, told Just the News...
Milloy agreed with Irving that Mann was responsible for the false evidence presented at the trial, but he said Irving shares some of the blame, too. Going into the trial, Irving had expressed doubt, Milloy said, that the evidence supported Mann’s case.
“So why do we have the trial? Why did this go on for 12 years? Why do this to the defendants? So ultimately, the bad seed is Mann, but the justice system is also a problem,” Milloy said.
