Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a fiery defense of free speech Monday morning as the high court announced it would not hear an appeal from the conservative magazine National Review in a defamation case against it by liberal climate science professor Michael Mann.
Mann’s case against the magazine stems from his creation of the infamous “hockey stick graph” and a central role in the “Climategate” scandal — in which his employer, Penn State University, eventually cleared him of wrongdoing.
National Review published an op-ed that called his graph — which displays earth’s temperature increasing seemingly exponentially beginning right around the industrial revolution — “deceptive” and “fraudulent” over its substitution of certain types of data for thermometer readings for time periods before thermometers were available.
The magazine called for an investigation into Mann and doubled down on its stance in subsequent writings.
Monday’s decision means Mann can continue his defamation suit against National Review, which argued that its articles criticizing his methodology were protected speech.
“If the speech in all these cases had been held to be unprotected, our Nation’s system of self-government would not have been seriously threatened,” Alito wrote after naming several recent cases in which the Supreme Court upheld controversial speech, including the trade name “F-U-C-T” for a clothing company.
“But … the protection of even speech as trivial as a naughty trademark for jeans can serve an important purpose: It can demonstrate that this Court is deadly serious about protecting freedom of speech.”
The petition the court denied was on a procedural issue in a lower court — whether a jury could decide if a claim is “provably false” — and National Review will have the chance to appeal the ruling if lower courts rule against it.
In fact, the Supreme Court’s denial of the National Review’s petition is just one more step in a case that’s been in the courts since 2012.
But Alito said protecting the First Amendment meant the Supreme Court should take up the case that it would normally let play out at lower levels before stepping in.
“[R]equiring a free speech claimant to undergo a trial after a ruling that may be constitutionally flawed is no small burden,” he wrote. “A journalist who prevails after a trial in a defamation case will still have been required to shoulder all the burdens of difficult litigation and may be faced with hefty attorney’s fees. Those prospects may deter the uninhibited expression of views that would contribute to a healthy public debate.”
It its petition to the high court, National Review argued its criticisms of the graph’s “cherry-picking of data and apples-to-oranges comparisons,” were valid, adding that since it was at the center of a larger controversy about climate change the op-ed fell squarely within protected speech and National Review could not be sued for defamation.
Mann, on the other hand, leaned on the argument that he — and his graph — had survived significant scrutiny following the leaked emails that led to the “Climategate” scandal.
“Furthermore, the court’s repeated findings that the allegations against Dr. Mann were capable of verification were unequivocal,” his legal team’s brief in the case said. “These allegations were not only ‘capable of being proved true or false,’ they were proven ‘false by four separate investigations.'”
Alito, however, emphasized the importance of open debate for America’s democratic process, especially about hot-button issues like climate change.
“If citizens cannot speak freely and without fear about the most important issues of the day, real self-government is not possible,” he said.
“To ensure that our democracy is preserved and is permitted to flourish, this Court must closely scrutinize any restrictions on statements that can be made on important public policy issues. Otherwise, such restrictions can easily be used to silence the expression of unpopular views.”
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Actually, a few did to show that there was no bias in Mann’s study but most used different proxy data from different regions and with different methodolgies and time frames. However, the “blade” of the hockey stick showing the sharp uptick of temperatures this last century was the same.
Kaboom
Since Mann’s original Hockey Stick study from last century, there have been no less than 3 dozen paleo-reconstruction studies that all show the same Hockey Stick graph.
In science, there is no higher form of validation than reproducing results.
It’s called photocopying, Drewski. Anyone will get the same results when they use the same data. It’s impossible to go back 1000 years using your own thermometers and satellite data to do independent calculationsand research so they all use the Mann / Weaver numbers.
Dont ever expect the Athiests Communists and Layers Undergound to ever help in such cases
And where is the ACLU ?
The great champions of free speech.
ACLU did in fact file an amicus brief in support of National Review.
This is just as stupid as allowing the Sandy Hook lawsuit against the gun makers its total irresponsible
None of the “investigations” even looked at the data. It has never been released. The reason why Mann lost to Ball.
Precisely! If Mann has nothing to hide, then abide by scientific integrity and release your detailed data & methodology to appropriate scrutiny/peer review. Something tells me this will go the same course as his efforts in BC courts…
Mr. Ball won decisively in the British Columbia Supreme Court earlier this year when he was attacked by Mann and his buddy Andrew Weaver who is currently a member of the Green Party in BC. Mann & Weaver refused to provide the Court with their “data” regarding the infamous Hockey stick, claiming it was just private notes or some other BS excuse, and not real research. This Court case went on for about seven years until the Court had enough of the Weaver / Mann crap, threw the case out for lack of evidence or ?, and and awarded Mr. Ball all his costs to be paid by Weaver and Mann.
These two are the reason we have so much alarm about fake climate change and it has cost people, countries and companies billions. Those two and others like Gore and Suzuki should be sued for billions. The news about this horrendous expose of the fake / false manipulation of data was kept to back pages for a couple of days here in BC and has now disappeared. We all know the climate garbage persists, promoted by things like Trudeau and his barbie, supported by Soros the Rockefellers and Tides.