Slashdot Mirror
Michael E. Mann Sues For Defamation Over Comparison To Jerry Sandusky
eldavojohn writes "The global warming debate has left much to be desired in the realm of logic and rationale. One particular researcher, Michael E. Mann, has been repeatedly attacked for his now infamous (and peer reviewed/independently verified) hockey stick graph. It has come to the point where he is now suing for defamation over being compared to convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky. Articles hosted by defendants and written by defendant Rand Simberg and defendant Mark Steyn utilize questionable logic for implicating Michael E. Mann alongside Jerry Sandusky with the original piece, concluding, 'Michael Mann, like Joe Paterno, was a rock star in the context of Penn State University, bringing in millions in research funding. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal was also the president when Mann was being (whitewashed) investigated. We saw what the university administration was willing to do to cover up heinous crimes, and even let them continue, rather than expose them. Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide academic and scientific misconduct, with so much at stake?' Additionally, sentences were stylized to blend the two people together: 'He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.' One of the defendants admits to removing 'a sentence or two' of questionable wording. Still, as a public figure, Michael E. Mann has an uphill battle to prove defamation in court."
Dr. Mann complains about two statements: 1) that as "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph," he is "the very ringmaster of the three ring circus" on climate change; and 2) that he "could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet." Neither of these statements is actionable. Moreover, if Dr. Mann decides to pursue this matter, he and his research would be subjected to a very extensive discovery of materials that he has fought so hard to protect in other proceedings. Such materials would be required for National Review to defend itself.
My work here is dung.
At the same time, Steyn has flown awfully close at times to libel, and this comes as close to crossing the line as I've seen. Whether it crosses the line or not will be up to a court to decide, unless Steyn backs downs. My opinion is that while it is an obnoxious, immoral piece of trash piece that shows Steyn and Simberg to be dishonorable disreputable shitbags, it's not truly libelous.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As someone who has been on both sides as both an author and reviewer of scientific papers, "peer reviewed" doen't not mean something is automatically correct, simply that it is worthy of publication. It's closer to saying it's plausible, and should be out there for the scientific community to discuss. Correctness is more judged by reproducability over a timescale of decades, but even that is not definative.
Science is a lot more messy that a lot of people would like to believe...
The defendants are much more creative than that. They are going to use discovery in this case to gain access to documents that Michael Mann has very strenuously fought to keep out of the public eye. There may be nothing in those documents relevant to either this case or to the AGW debate, but the fact that Michael Mann has fought so hard to keep them private suggests that there is something in them he would rather the public not know (it may be on a completely unrelated topic).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Also, discovery should be ... interesting.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. I was thinking of the children.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It sounds like their argument is that the Penn State administration has a tendency to cover-up embarrassing stuff and protect their own.
The Penn State Hershey Medical Center brings in over a billion dollars a year in revenue to Penn State. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal also presided over said medical center with obvious financial interests that were easily orders of magnitudes higher than the football program. When will we re-investigate all of their malpractice suits? When will we bring their alleged (just now) organ trafficking ring from China to justice? Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide treatment and medical misconduct, with so much at stake?
My work here is dung.
And yet, for all the problems, science marches on, the most successful system for gathering data and creating testable explanations ever created.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Simberg is best known for a fabricated "Reuters" article allegedly from 1945 which, unbelievably, was taken seriously and cited by both Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Basically, it was a lame satire about the Iraqi resistance which (falsely) claimed that similar things had happened in Germany after WWII.
"Any intentional false communication, either written or spoken, that harms a person's reputation; decreases the respect, regard, or confidence in which a person is held; or induces disparaging, hostile, or disagreeable opinions or feelings against a person." From: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Defamation+of+character
It really is a slimy piece of shit move to compare someone to Sandusky because they were at Penn under the same umbrella. This definitely harms his reputation and if you believe it then certainly you will have disagreeable opinions and feelings towards him. He's a scientist who interpreted data in a controversial way that is argued among academics, he certainly didn't rape innocent children in the showers.
The "Writing In the Sciences" online course over at Coursera says to distinguish between "compare to" and "compare with".
"Compare to" is used to find similarities, as in "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". "Compare with" is used to find differences, as in "His time was 2:11:10 compared with 2:14 for his closest competitor." (Many sources on the net.)
So I have to ask, was he being compared to Jerry Sandusky, or compared with Jerry Sandusky?
Inquiring [Scientific writing] minds want to know :-)
One way to give your detractors more attention than they otherwise would have gotten is to attack them (this article is a case in point.) Worse is that if he loses the case (which given his public figure status, is easily possible) he'll just add to their credibility.
Disclaimer: I myself generally distrust climate alarmists. The earth has had periods of MUCH warmer climates, and life thrived in all of them. Hell, lets even look at more recent history: some archeologists have found evidence that during the medieval warm period, there were farms in areas that are now considered far too inhospitable for agriculture due to the cold climate. Further, what we're seeing now may very well be yet another temperate anomaly, only now our measurements are more accurate so it seems different.
And yes, I do believe in global warming.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Seems like you never heard about the null hypothesis. Weather disasters rack up no matter what and none of what we have seen is in the least out of line with what has happened in history.
If you ignore history, however, you'll always think things are going to hell in a handbasket ... as people have done all the time in history.
Mark Steyn on the freedom of speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH70VHZ857M Mark Steyn is known for intelligent and cutting right wing satire. He is also known for being prosecuted in various courts for his writings. As such, he is one of strongest defenders of the freedom of speech today. Everyone needs to remember that freedom of speech is not for those you agree with, it is for those you don't agree with.
Defamation is a broad category that includes libel and slander. Libel is defamation that occurs in a persistent form; slander is defamation that occurs in a transitory form.
According to the complaint, Mann is suing for five counts of libel and one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
That even if Mann had engaged in scientific fraud, which is questionable considering that his accusers are known liars and can barely spell "science", they're stiill equating the violation of scientific integrity with the RAPING OF CHILDREN. .
Fuck these guys hard.
The reason Mann has fought all of that discovery is because he's standing up for other scientists. The discovery is not after anything relevant to anything. What's relevant is his published work.
"earned them the 2007 Nobel Prize"
Is that the same organization that gave a peace prize to a president who assassinates people, along with killing women and children, with no due process of law?
Yeah, I'm not sure how that gives them any kind of credibility.
Be good enough to point out the red herring.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline-advanced.htm
Mods, feel free to mod parent down not because you think he's wrong, but because he is wrong.
:(){
And the null hypothesis (there is no warming trend) has been refuted.
Weather disasters are racking up at rates higher than the null hypothesis ("there is no increase in weather disasters") can accept, so that is refuted.
What we have seen IS out of line with what has happened in history. Two 150-year events in the same year worldwide is no proof of a change in the climate. over 30 is.
The reason he's fought it is that a scientists work should be judged by the science they produce, the published results of their work, not some gotcha quote mining of working papers and communications with peers.
The reason he fights it is clearer to me. It's the same reason why, if a law enforcement officer showed up at my house and demanded to rifle through all of my blongings looking for anything that might be illegal I would tell him to go pound sand. Not because I'm guilty, not because I hate the police but because he has no right to without a warrant! Furthermore, if 90% of people in our society allowed this and it became expected or, worse yet, legal then you would have effectively forfeited your right to privacy.
Scientists are human beings that work long hours at their jobs. Demanding the publication of everything is a bit dehumanizing and Mann is correct to fight it lest other scientists find themselves under the same expectations after it has been established as the norm. I think it will be acceptable to release it during the discovery phase of a case like this but it should not be given up lightly.
This is a clear attempt to intimidate and repress scientists and researchers.
My work here is dung.
Second sentence is also a lie. The "hockey stick graph" was not "independently verified" unless you mean proven to be false. Wiped out were the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. If one feeds white noise into the program used to generate the graph, one still gets a hockey stick. This was all done by weighting the data samples he liked (showing AGW) higher than the data samples he did not like (those not showing AGW).
It's the same reason why, if a law enforcement officer showed up at my house and demanded to rifle through all of my blongings looking for anything that might be illegal I would tell him to go pound sand. Not because I'm guilty, not because I hate the police but because he has no right to without a warrant!
Dr. Mann and his university accept public funds from the federal government and that subjects him to FOIA requests. And frankly, I see nothing wrong with examining relevant email communications from Dr. Mann on that basis. If he doesn't like it, then he can always refuse federal funding for his research projects.
Anybody who would say what you just said is worse than Hitler. (It's Slashdot, I have to mention Hitler!)
But seriously? People are inciting to have you killed and you're supposed to say, "Oh well, it's part of the job"? If we let that stand, American science doesn't have much of a future.
the null hypothesis has been refuted in this issue. IT's in all the expert scientific journals.
What we have seen is out of line with the overall history trend. That, along with mountains of other data clearly indicate AGW is really. External sources have been eliminated. The current shape of the earths orbit* doesn't account for the change. So, it' internal.
Yes, looking at one set of data, say 2 years' in and of itself doesn't mean the planet is warming, nor would it mean it's not warming. To isolate one piece of data, then use that one tiny pieces in an argument ignoring the rest of the relevant data it really fucking shitty.
*it goes between phases of round to more oval; which causes 'ages' This is a quick laymans explanation, you can find the data online.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A hypothetical scenario:
If all that Simberg, Steyn et. al. wanted to do was have a look at Mann's data, this is how they might be going about it:
W: Simberg, Steyn write inflammatory articles about Mann and his hockey stick graph, hoping Mann tries to sue their asses.
B: Mann tries to sue their asses.
W: Simberg & Steyn subpoena data out of Mann's ass.
B: Mann must choose which is more important, the anonymity of his data or realizing the slim possibility of owning S & S's asses but still being more likely to lose.
W: S & S smile.
It's called Zugzwang, baby!
I'd say 8 or 9 other graphs that show substantially the same thing using different proxy data provide independent verification of the Hockey Stick Graph.
The whitewashes explicity decided not to invetigate Mann's "hide the decline" because he did it and it couldn't be denied.
This is materially false. You are living in a fantasy world. Go read one of the many independent investigations on this, or better yet, read the original email yourself.
Talk about cherry-picking.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Seems like you never heard about the null hypothesis. Weather disasters rack up no matter what and none of what we have seen is in the least out of line with what has happened in history.
oOOooOOoo the "null hypothesis". You must think that 1000s of scientists don't know something about elementary experimental design! That MUST be it! Gee, you could use statistics and evidence to draw conclusions as to the likelihood of various hypotheses. Mmm, let me see... that EXACTLY what that IPCC did!!
Sorry, it might not mean shit to you, but null hypothesis (as you put it) was rejected in a 1979 NAS report (30 years ago). Today, the evidence is just stronger.
If you ignore history, however, you'll always think things are going to hell in a handbasket ... as people have done all the time in history.
Like the history of increasing weather disasters!
Of course I'm wrong, along with the scientific community. You just gotta find the logic to connect the dots.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The only problem with slashdot is that no matter how far I adjust the brightness on my monitor, the AGW denial posters just aren't getting brighter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Muller has been outed as a long-time warmist, his claims otherwise notwithstanding.
You make it sound like he is homosexual, and not a scientists who followed the data where it lead him. The fact that he reached a conclusions that you don't like is PROOF he is BIASED, right? Either that, or you can't handle the truth.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's the same reason why, if a law enforcement officer showed up at my house and demanded to rifle through all of my blongings looking for anything that might be illegal I would tell him to go pound sand. Not because I'm guilty, not because I hate the police but because he has no right to without a warrant!
Dr. Mann and his university accept public funds from the federal government and that subjects him to FOIA requests. And frankly, I see nothing wrong with examining relevant email communications from Dr. Mann on that basis. If he doesn't like it, then he can always refuse federal funding for his research projects.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- reportedly said by Cardinal Richelieu
There's good reason to want to keep your communications private, personal relationships you don't want cross examined in public, small mistakes that could be mischaracterized, or things you can't even imagine. Just consider writing an email that you know will be seen only by 1 person you trust, or writing an email that will probably be seen by a thousand people who are out to get you. Don't you think that's going to harm your work?
I stole this Sig
Are you serious? You want e-mails when most projects in medicine and physics that are federally funded don't even release their raw data?! Why aren't you clamoring for the DNA and raw collider data that has been built with your taxpaying dollars? Or should they just refuse federal funding as well?
Maybe this is off-topic, but I (and many others) believe that publicly funded research should be freely available to the public.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I have seen business presentation after business presentation where their great idea had a hockey stick. This hockey stick was always just a few years away. The other half of the pattern was that they spent all the investment money around the same time the graph was about to turn up. So for me hockey stick graphs are usually a huge bad smell. If you look at the past you can find all kinds of hockey sticks. But I find that most were not predictable that far in the future. So take the number of European soldiers killed in either World War and you have hockey sticks. But few predicted either war say a decade before they happened. Another hockey stick would be the number of mortgage defaults in the US. Again a few predicted it but the vast majority didn't.
So when someone calls bullshit on anyone waving a hockey stick graph and saying the sky is falling; give me money. I support anyone who calls Bullshit on them.
The decline is not hidden from anyone who has enough scientific background to go read the original papers. The "hidden" data is included in the paper and it is explained why they are not used. The words "hide the decline" refer explicitly to not using the data since it was shown to be wrong by other measurements. To quote the scientists over at RealClimate:
As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
Can someone post Mann's Hockey Stick (which ends around 2004 going straight up) and the actual temperature charts? Or just go look at them yourself. I'll give you a hint, one looks like a hockey stick and the other looks like a stick.
Again, this is just a consequence of Dr. Mann receiving federal funding and in effect acting as a agent of the US government (in particular in furthering certain environmental policies). I don't believe in innocent until proven guilty when it comes to government activities.
It's useful to look at longer time periods:
http://skepticalscience.com/still-going-down-the-up-escalator.html
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Maybe this is off-topic, but I (and many others) believe that publicly funded research should be freely available to the public.
Yes, obviously. That means data sets, methods, apparatus, experiment outcomes, results, conclusions, papers (which shouldn't be limited to paywalled journals I.M.O.), and intellectual property (though these currently go to the university). I'm sure it means other things as well, such as transparency on funding.
That doesn't mean that you can record every aspect of one's job and hand it over to people on a witchhunt. The whole CRU email thingy itself shows why this is the case: it's easy to pick a few lines out of complex scientific dialog and distort them with a quick media blitz designed to portray someone as dishonest, or crooked, or biased, or incompetent, or silly. (As the saying goes, a lie gets half way around the world before the truth can get its shoes on.)
Moreover, doing so destroys the ability of people and organizations to think and act creatively. If this hasn't happened to you already, I am sure that one day you will be in a meeting, get-together, or other discussion where the team needs to figure out a difficult problem, and you'll see the entire conversation shut down by the negative attitude and comments of one person. That's why the first rule of any brainstorming session is to save critique until brainstorming is finished. It's also why the FOIA protects (under exemption 5) what the courts term "deliberative processes" so as to "prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions."
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The Met Office (who released the data), sent a letter to the author of that article, stating precisely how he doesn't understand what the data means, as he's not a scientist. This is the second time this same author has tried this stunt, and people like you take it on face value without checking the cited sources. If you believe this, what other nonsense do you believe? It's clear you don't bother to check the sources, so you have no way to discern fact from fiction, apart from your own bias.
It sounds like he's comparing Mann to Paterno, not to Sandusky.
That complaint is a good summary of this dispute. For Mann to win a libel case, he has to show that they wrote things that were false and defamatory, and (since he's a public figure) that they published it with knowledge that it was false or with disregard of whether it was false. It's libelous to accuse somebody of "fraud" or "deception." It's libelous to accuse someone of practicing his profession incompetently. Libel law protects opinions, as opposed to fact, but I think they've crossed the line. I think a jury could decide that they've met that test.
This isn't William Buckley's National Review. I'm familiar with right-wing crackpots from reading the Wall Street Journal comments pages. One of their problems is that they don't particularly concern themselves with facts. They don't even seem to understand what a fact is, or what the difference is between a fact and an opinon. They think that if somebody disagrees with them, he's a "liar." You see people calling Obama a "socialist," a "Kenyan," etc. These are words without meaning. It's like football hooligans screaming insults at Manchester United. Chris Mooney has written about this in his books and articles starting with "The Republican War on Science." I've often reflected on how much of it was actually libelous, if anybody bothered to sue. Now somebody did bother to sue.
Rand Simberg, as quoted starting in paragraph 26 of the complaint, said that Mann was "behaving in a most unscientific manner", "engaging in data manipulation", is hiding "academic and scientific misconduct." In paragraph 28, he called Mann's hockey-stick curve "deceptions" "in the service of politicized science." Steyn called Mann "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph."
In paragraph 31, the complaint says that "their allegations of misconduct and data manipulation were false and were clearly made with the knowledge that they were false." If they can convince the jury of that, they've won the case.
In paragraph 32, the complaint says that Rich Lowry, the editor of NRO, said that Mann's research was "intellectually bogus."
In paragraph 35, the complaint says that the statements "are defamatory per se and tend to injure Dr. Mann in his profession because they falsely impute to Dr. Mann academic corruption, fraud, and deceit as well as the commission of a criminal offense, in a manner injurous tot he reputation and esteem of Dr. Mann professionally, locally, nationally, and globally."
The delicious irony is that in a libel suit, both sides have to disclose huge amounts of documents relating to the case in discovery. Mann's emails were already exposed. Now Simberg and Steyn's correspondence will probably be exposed. If they were taking money from the energy industry, that will be exposed. They'll get the same treatment Mann did.
Reading the original mails is exactly what brought many people to conclude that the whole discipline is full of shit.
This is shit science. You don't just chop out data post 1960 without knowing what is wrong with it. Yes, it was discussed in the literature. No, they had no definitive answer, only speculation.
Even worse, what Phil Jones did was chop out the data and replace it with thermometer data so that three separate data sets rose up in striking agreement in a hockey stick fashion.
I bet you a dollar that this gets settled out of court so those emails don't have to come to light. If necessary, the libelers' financial backers will intervene to make this so.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Actually McIntyre and McKitrick (and Wegman) cherry picked the top 100 out of 10,000 runs of the code to show that it always produces a hockey stick. There's a good discussion of it here.
The science does not say the world is going to end. The science does not say unless we tax everyone's energy use, the world is going to end. The science does not say we have to implement changes that restrict the freedoms of people while granting the government increasing power over people's lives. The science does not say that we cannot live through any changes. The science does not say we cannot question the motives and the work of people making those claims. Global warming is in the realm of politics whether you think it is or not and being part science does not shield it or the people backing it from criticism no matter how religious you are about science.
Science is not some irreproachable god that a group of people organize around and claim it is written in order to get the masses to do things that everyone else sees as wrong.
Go read the papers. The problem is that you don't have the knowledge to understand them and judge if they are correct.
Then there's not much point to reading the papers, is there? "Go do X. But you can't do X."
Of course the same applies to the private email between colaborators
That depends what the emails are about, doesn't it? My experience with the "climategate" emails (and programming code releases!) has been that the private emails have been quite enlightening with declarations of uncertainty, disagreement, bug-ridden databases, and other such things that somehow never make it to the research papers or the IPCC executive summaries. I think what is most damaging is that the climate research in question was cleansed of all uncertainty and risk prior to public consumption. There was two faces, the public one above and the private one where researchers kept their disagreements, doubts, errors, and in general hid their human nature.
There's also the matter of control over bottlenecks in the process. The summary article claims that Mann's "hockey stick" has been "independently verified". It has been independently shown to be based on flawed method. That's not in doubt. But aggregation of paleoclimate data was controlled by allies of Mann, Phil Jones and James Hansen.
Or you are trying to substitute a judgement of character for a judgement on merit.
Character is part of merit. And in a field where the right determination has low hundreds of billions of dollars per year in value (both for fossil fuel-derived companies and climate change-related technologies and regulation, such as renewable energy companies and environmental regulators), there is a vast amount of temptation out there for the person of dubious character.
If the temperatures in summer were a prime example, then please tell me why 33 out of 51 of the hottest temperatures on record in the US are from the 1930ies or earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_temperature_extremes
This statistic also favours more recent dates. When a record temperature has not been surpassed,but merely reached, only the most recent date is mentioned. So it's already biased towards a warming trend.
With Mann being a public figure, it will certainly be an uphill battle for him to require anything from Simberg or Styne. 1st amendment protections of freedom of speech may be enough to protect them from even bothering to disclose anything at all, particularly if all they are stating is personal opinion.
Furthermore, you are presuming that there is some kind of connection to the energy industry when you have absolutely no idea what they do and who they are. Mark Steyn is a conservative commentator who has occasionally filled in for Rush Limbaugh as a guest host on Limbaugh's show, and writes his own blog as well as participates in on-line discussions of various kinds.
Rand Simberg is really more along the same line as Mark Steyn and Rush Limbaugh as he has been making generally conservative POV commentary with his blog, Transterrestrial Musings. It has become increasingly political although much of his earlier commentary had little to do with politics but rather with space policy and following things like the Ansari X-Prize or talking about NASA. He used to work for Rockwell International and did some engineering work on the Space Shuttle, as well as other similar kinds of projects. Climate science and discussions are just a very minor part of his commentary, but he certainly has been vocal about the issues surrounding climate science. At best, you can call him a skeptic. Rand Simberg has written quite a bit in magazines like Popular Science or Wired recently, and has pretty much become a full time freelance writer.
For those two, I think you would be very hard pressed to see them taking any money from the energy industry, except for perhaps some modest advertising revenue for their websites that is not aimed specifically at influencing their opinions. Neither one is really anything more than spouting off what other conservative political pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck have been saying for years as well. They are perhaps a little more vulnerable because they are not as widely published as those major pundits and don't have nearly so much money, but that doesn't change who they are. It certainly is disingenuous to claim that there is a connection of these guys to "big oil" or other "energy producing companies" without any sort of evidence to back up the assertion.
I've talked to lawyers about discovery, I've read trial transcripts and I've sat in court during trials. So I know something about discovery.
In one patent case, the lawyers had subpoenaed a chemist's entire 4-drawer file cabinet, digitized it, put it in a database, indexed and reviewed the whole thing, and projected pages in the courtroom.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from disclosure in a libel suit.
Lawyers tell me that the judge can order both parties -- and people who have nothing to do with the litigation -- to supply them with any information that's "in the interests of justice."
As the Mann complaint details, they were doing more than just stating personal opinion. This is what the libel lawyers call "personal opinion based on underlying facts." People have lost libel suits for saying things like, "In my opinion X is a Communist," even when the person was a public figure. "Communist" is libelous per se.
Steyn and Simberg crossed the line when they accused Mann of "fraud." That's libelous per se.
"Academic and scientific misconduct," if it is an opinion, is an opinion based on claims of underlying fact. "Misconduct" is libelous.
That's libelous even if Mann is a public figure.
After discovery, Mann's lawyers will look through the documents to see if they demonstrate reckless disregard for the truth.
I'd like to see Simberg on the witness stand explain how he came to the conclusion that Mann was guilty of "academic and scientific misconduct."
I know a bit about the writing business that these guys are in. Lots of people in their position take money from industries that are affected by their work. They might get paid $10,000 from the industry to fly out to Nevada to give a speech. A freelance writer might get paid travel expenses to attend a meeting. They're getting money from somewhere, and it would be interesting to know where it is.
Yeah, it's a fishing expedition. Their demand for Mann's documents was a fishing expedition.