Tort Trial of the Decade

Stacy McCain on the suit Michael Mann is pursuing against Mark Steyn and National Review:

Mark Steyn vs. a Thin-Skinned Bully

Lawsuits don’t make for interesting journalism. No tort has ever earned “Trial of the Century” status. So it is that even a defamation case involving a famed writer like Mark Steyn and a notorious “scientist” like Michael Mann gets relatively little attention.

Steyn’s recent column about the case doesn’t capture what is so outrageous about Mann’s lawsuit: A tenured academic whose particular hustle is the taxpayer-funded “climate change” racket ought to have the decency to pocket his ill-gotten cash and leave honest men alone, but Mann is evidently the shameless sort who thinks he deserves both government money and a good reputation.

Now a tedious douchebag says Steyn “specializes in whipping right-wing readers into a froth of know-nothing indignation”?

Absurd — that’s my job!

Well someone has to do it.

The suit is over a column the Steyn ran about climate science:

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

Since there is pretty good evidence that Mann did indeed torture the tree ring data until it told him what he wanted to see, the discovery for this trial could be illuminating.