A jury on Thursday awarded $1 million to climate scientist Michael Mann, who sued a pair of conservative writers 12 years ago after they compared his depictions of global warming to a convicted child molester.
Mann, a professor of climate science at the University of Pennsylvania, rose to fame for a graph first published in 1998 in the journal Nature that was dubbed the “hockey stick” for its dramatic illustration of a warming planet.
The work brought Mann wide exposure but also many skeptics, including the two writers Mann took to court for comments that he said affected his career and reputation in the U.S. and internationally.
“It feels great,” Mann said Thursday after the six-person jury delivered its verdict. “It’s a good day for us, it’s a good day for science.”
Rand Simberg was one of those authors and the article in question was for the Competitive Enterprise Institute which received 2 millions dollars from Exonmobile.
So here we see a classic example of a corporation paying thru a proxy someone to release propaganda to influence public opinion and then when there is a reaction to it they throw a low level guy under the bus.
Think of how much better of a world we would have if all the influence peddlers all the hired gun “journalists” had real jobs.
Notice how the judgement is always against flunkies like simberg and not the Exxons paying them. What would the jury have awarded if they had the whole story and the proper defendant? Probably more than 1M.
Interesting question. Can some clever lawyers go after the people who put out the hit? Exxon has to have more money than the “think” tank involved.