A defamation lawsuit may kill National Review

[Gothmog]

28. Here is another article on this lawsuit

I have bookmarked and read a couple of different climate science sites. I love going to the links and reading some of the scientific papers to see if I can still follow the math.

Here is an article that I saw on one of these sites (yes it is from Newsweek but it is still good) http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/01/31/change-legal-climate.html

That is, until maybe now, with the spinning potentially coming to a stop in the most unlikely of places - a Federal district court in Washington, D.C. There, a little-noticed lawsuit filed by one of the world's preeminent climatologists against a premiere conservative publication and a conservative think tank is moving forward, and both sides - absent dismissal or settlement - will have to put up or shut up.

The suit filed by Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, claims that the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) libeled him in a pair of articles in which they stated he had manipulated climate data and that the fraud had been covered up by his employer, which said its investigation concluded he had done nothing wrong. To make the point, the CEI writer, Rand Simberg, drew a comparison between Penn State's handling of abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky - the university's longtime assistant football coach convicted as a child molester - and its review of Mann's work....

For months before those articles, Mann and other climatologists had been speaking among themselves about the need to start fighting back against the attacks on their work and their character. The science is on their side, they argue, and by not responding aggressively against the skeptics, they have allowed the discussion to become derailed. And if critics have slandered or libeled them, they shouldn't stand for it.

"If we don't step up to the plate, we leave a vacuum [for] those with an ax to grind," Mann says, while cautioning that he would not specifically address the lawsuit. Mann has no doubt some critics are advancing their positions honestly, but he believes that responding to bad-faith attacks on climatologists and their work is "a call to arms to our fellow scientists. We should not apologize for trying to inform that discussion."

It appears that the scientific community has decided not to take crap from the climate deniers and flat earthers any longer. I am happy about this development.