From libel court to climate science to Milei economics

While Donald Trump’s embarrassing and costly defamation quagmire received all the headlines last week, a more significant libel trial was grinding on in another Washington courtroom. In a case initiated in 2012, climate scientist Michael E. Mann is alleging he was defamed by journalist Mark Steyn in a commentary in National Review in July of that year titled “Football and Hockey.” But rest assured that this trial is not a sports case.

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Reports from the courthouse show Steyn, a Canadian and former National Post columnist, arriving in a wheelchair following heart attacks, to conduct his own defence in a case that has been dragged through a decade of legal wrangling. The trial is before a jury burdened with what looks like tens of thousands of pages of evidence filled with some of the most contentious libel and science issues.

The hockey part of Steyn’s 2012 commentary refers to Mann’s best-known achievement: a graph published in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that allegedly represents global temperatures dating back 1,000 years. The trend line in the graph shows relatively stable temperatures over hundreds of years but then shoots almost straight up in the 20th century. With its sharp upward surge angled toward 2000, the graph instantly became known as “The Hockey Stick Curve.”

The graph soon became a powerful and effective piece of supposed evidence for makers of climate policy and a near-religious icon that activists continue to revere. Coverage of the Mann-Steyn trial has been minimal in major media, except to raise the hockey stick even higher up the totem of policy worship. When the trial opened last month, The Guardian said Mann was an “esteemed” and “renowned” climate scientist who had been attacked by Steyn as part of a “network of climate sceptics” that continues to produce “online abuse of climate scientists” funded by fossil fuel industries.

Anyone interested in a different perspective on the trial can turn to non-media reports from the Heartland Institute and on Steyn’s website, where trial sessions are dramatized by actors and narrators.

Mann appeared as a witness on Monday under questioning from Steyn, who asked about the time Mann spread a story about climate scientist Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Mann, upset with her climate science, once claimed in emails that Curry as a student had an affair with a married man named Webster. “Judy Curry was a graduate student. Affairs, ugly divorce, et cetera, yada, yada. Webster and Curry left together … to the relief of everyone I know here who was around then.” Mann signed the email........

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