Conservative pundit and radio host Mark Steyn has been ordered by a jury to pay a former Penn State professor and “climate scientist” $1 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit about blog posts, published in 2012, criticizing the professor’s work.
via AP:
The jury in Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that [think tank fellow Rand] Simberg and Steyn made false statements, awarding Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer. It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”[…]
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…