Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1M in defamation lawsuit
apnews.com
apnews.com
Here was a huge dustup, lots of sizzle, tons and tons of examination, and the end result: it all held up! There's a looooot of stuff in all of science that could be proven to be wrong, so going after something so vigorously, and not having anything to show for it at the end is absolutely sad. Really, you couldn't find any bad analysis to go after instead?
It's quite likely that all of climate science is of much much higher quality than the typical science that makes it into the newspapers. What other body of science has something like the IPCC which works so hard to review and summarize the latest knowledge?
Reminds me of that physicist who started the BEST effort around temperature readings. He thought "I'm a physicist, and there's so much noise about sloppy climate science, I'll go clean it up and show these people how real analysis is done," and then just came up with exactly the same results that the climate scientists had done. But now, since it was from a physicist at a tier 1 institution, it was finally good work...
> “We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue,” Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. “And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages.”
The jury essentially acknowledged that there was no actual damage, but then proceeded to levy an enormous punitive fine for... reasons. That feels less like the jury was persuaded by hard evidence that Mann was in the right and more that the jury was persuaded that Steyn was subjectively a bad person who needed punishing, which is a weird outcome.
Ok, so active harassment of a person, by a think tank, perpetuating lies and making comparisons to pedophilia is "no damages"?
This spurred on harassment including hacking of email contents.
What is possibly "icky" about a defamation result, other than the jury didn't find higher compensatory damages?
If it's OK in our society for individuals to be attacked with lies like this, with money undirected through think tanks, are you OK with your professional life and personal life being intruded in this way with lies? Really?
At the same time, I worry about a "chilling" effect on anyone who questions "the science". Whether you like them or not, we need people who question climate science. We need people who question vaccines. Yes, they are annoying and in this case they went way, way too far.
In what way? This has nothing to do with disagreement, it's about defamation. Claiming that a researcher was intentionally and fraudulently manipulating data is an entirely different ballpark from disagreeing with their methods or conclusions.
The various groups who have decided as a matter of dogma that their pet theory is correct therefore all of science must be a conspiracy to cover up the truth will of course present things as if this verdict threatens any dissent, but that's simply nonsense.
> Whether you like them or not, we need people who question climate science. We need people who question vaccines. Yes, they are annoying and in this case they went way, way too far.
We need people who question science *in good faith*. People who disagree because they have an alternative that also fits the known facts, or because they see valid weaknesses in the methods used to come to the conclusion. Scientific progress is built on questioning things.
We do not need people like the defendants in this case who have decided that climate change is an evil liberal conspiracy to empower governments. We do not need people like Jenny McCarthy, RFK Jr., etc. who have decided that all the different often entirely unrelated kinds of vaccines in the world are somehow part of the same conspiracy to do...something. These people are not adding to the discussion, they're not contributing to progress, they're at best getting in the way and in a lot of cases trying their hardest to push things back.
I could go on and on. Creationists, flat-earthers, moon landing deniers, etc. will all scream about how the scientific establishment is silencing them for questioning things, but the reality is they're just wrong, annoying, and deserve no credit for anything because they're not doing it in good faith. They're not trying to find the truth, they've decided they know the truth and are hostile to anything else.
In the US we're supposed to have a very high threshold for what kinds of speech can be punished. For defamation, it is required that the plaintiff be able to show that there were damages.
The jury's awarding of $1 shows that they were not persuaded that there was any financial damage done to Mann by this think tank's actions. Their subsequent award of $1m in punitive damages shows that they were persuaded that Steyn's speech deserved to be punished.
That second part is what I'm not comfortable with. If they awarded him $1m in compensatory damages that would be one thing, but choosing the absolute minimum and then levying a huge punitive fine is a scary result for anyone who values the speech protections we have in the US.
The jury is signaling, stronly, that this type of speech isn't allowed and should be punished. The fact that it happened to someone who wasn't monetarily harmed much by it isn't relevant but let's put a high bar out there to deter anyone else from this type of speech towards people who could be damaged.
The way the laws work it is really the only thing they could do if they believed the defendant's speech is harmful.
That's how I read into the monetary awards...
Here, they found there was ~no harm done. That means that, constitutionally, they are unable to levy a substantial fine.
> Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data
>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.
To me that's a very scary result.
Just because they failed in harming him doesn't make it harmless.
You have to actually have damaged someone to have punitive damages levied for what you did, and by setting $1 as the actual damages the jury acknowledges no harm was done and therefore cannot levy substantial punitive damages.
What you're referring to is that there is no cap to the monetary amount of either type of damages, not that the ratio between them can be severely disproportionate.
The truth is an absolute defense in defamation, so the scary result is what? Willfully lying to harm people is not protected?
To take it a step further, if the person being lied about is a public figure, lying enjoys even more protections (you basically have to have the smoking "I'm lying about this" email for a public figure to prove defamation).
Not in the US. If no harm is done, there's no defamation, harm being done is part of the definition:
> To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
Punitive damages are for when a judge/jury feels the conduct of one of the party's was bad. Conduct includes things like trying to damage someone's reputation.
Again, I just fall to see what's scary here. Don't plan on lying about someone and your golden.
>The District of Columbia does not cap either compensatory or punitive damages, and the collateral source rule applies.
https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/insurance-laws-and-produ...
In fact, if anything it looks like the supreme court has basically left everything to be determined in a case by case basis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXO_Production_Corp._v._Allian.... (Note, there's a period at the end here that HN is removing)
After TXO, the Supreme Court wrote this in BMW, Inc. v. Gore where a similar 500:1 ratio was at stake (and was overturned) [0]:
> The $2 million in punitive damages awarded to Dr. Gore by the Alabama Supreme Court is 500 times the amount of his actual harm as determined by the jury. Moreover, there is no suggestion that Dr. Gore or any other BMW pur- chaser was threatened with any additional potential harm by BMW’s nondisclosure policy. The disparity in this case is thus dramatically greater than those considered in Haslip and TXO.
> Once again, “we return to what we said . . . in Haslip: ‘We need not, and indeed we cannot, draw a mathematical bright line between the constitutionally acceptable and the constitutionally unacceptable that would fit every case. We can say, however, that [a] general concer[n] of reasonableness . . . properly enter[s] into the constitutional calculus.’ ” Id., at 458 (quoting Haslip, 499 U. S., at 18). In most cases, the ratio will be within a constitutionally acceptable range, and remittitur will not be justified on this basis. When the ratio is a breathtaking 500 to 1, however, the award must surely “raise a suspicious judicial eyebrow.”
When a "suspicious judicial eyebrow" gets raised in a speech case in the US, the plaintiff has already lost.
[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/517/559/case.pdf
Then to circle back on the beginning of this thread, what exactly do you find so scary about this? The trial judge can adjust the damages down, so can the appellate courts, and if that doesn't resolve it ultimately the supreme court can eliminate the damages.
It's not terribly unusual for punitive damages to be adjusted after the jury awards them. So why be scared that a jury potentially gave out too much in damages?
This is a problem because on the one hand, the jury should not have based its award on harm to third parties, because that would not have properly been argued before it. But it also means that defamation is not adequate to defend science, where most of the harm of attacking science is towards third parties.
I'd quite like to see lying in public life punished more harshly, because it is in fact corrosive to both public and private life. But it's going to be hard to frame 'harm to third parties' well, since it potentially covers a lot of political speech.
You can go to jail for attempted murder even if no one got hurt.
You can get away with killing someone if you can show it was an unforeseeable accident.
And yes, you can get punitive damages even if you caused little or no harm.
The rule of thumb for punitive damages in the US is a 4:1 ratio, with 10:1 or higher being almost certainly unconstitutional barring extreme circumstances. Even in those cases we're looking at ratios of 500:1, not 1m:1.
I believe this is not the case when the plaintiff can show actual malice.
> The rule of thumb for punitive damages in the US is a 4:1 ratio, with 10:1 or higher being almost certainly unconstitutional barring extreme circumstances
Right - that's why the defense is appealing, as discussed in the article. However, given that the judge did not adjust the award sua sponte I believe there is some actual legal question about whether this is one of those "extreme circumstances" (e.g. due to the degree of malice).
1. TXO does not provide a hard-and-fast rule on a maximum ratio of compensatory to punative damages. Rather, the justices say that "It is appropriate to consider the magnitude of the potential harm that the defendant's conduct would have caused to its intended victim if the wrongful plan had succeeded, as well as the possible harm to other victims that might have resulted if similar future behavior were not deterred."
2. TXO further limits the mandate of due process review of punitive damages by saying that the jury does not have to be wholly accurate in their assessment of punitive damages but rather that courts should ensure their award would not "jar one's constitutional sensibilities."
If a jury might reasonably think that the damage to Mann could have been about $1m if the defendant had successfully discredited him in, say, the eyes of his employers, and if the jury was given proper instructions, that is sufficient to uphold their award under TXO. Further due process review should consider these questions, not whether the punitive damage/compensatory damage ratio is over some arbitrary threshold.
But the other way in which TXO doesn't paint the complete picture is that it is not a defamation case, and in the US we much more cautious about preemptively punishing speech (and about discouraging speech with risk of liability) than we are about other types of torts.
The ratio here isn't just large, it's completely off the charts, and an off-the-charts ratio on a speech case isn't going to fly, nor do I believe it should.
1. The judiciary makes some distinction between a 500-to-1 and a 1,000,000-to-1 ratio.
2. Speech cases are somehow specially protected from high ratios between punitive and compensatory damages.
I know of no evidence in favor of the first point.
Your second point is patently false because TXO is about speech - it's literally a disparagement case.
Do you know of any case where a ratio higher than 10000x was ever tested? Because there have been several that were tossed out as disproportionate at a much lower ratio than that.
> Your second point is patently false because TXO is about speech - it's literally a disparagement case.
It was a case of negotiating in bad faith by slandering a title, and the damages were awarded on the basis that TXO had engaged in similar nefarious behavior across the country while negotiating other deals. That's substantially different in character from a series of unsavory opinion pieces, and within the realm of types of speech that we typically do regulate—it's more akin to fraud than it is to personal slander/libel.
From the ruling:
> [T]he record shows that this was not an isolated incident on TXO’s part—a mere excess of zeal by poorly supervised, low level employees—but rather part of a pattern and practice by TXO to defraud and coerce those in positions of unequal bargaining power.
The reasons were...."....after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
So, the jury found that they made statements that were willfully intended to harm someone - they were deliberate to inflict harm. They found that the actual harm wasn't much in monetary terms but decided to levy a large punitive award to signal to others not to do this and punish the two that did.
That makes sense. You have to prove actual damages, either the plaintff didn't try to or were unsuccessful...so $1 and then a larger amount to punish the behavior and deter others from doing it.
Do you not know what the word punitive means? Punitive damages are meant to be a punishment as well as to deter others from similar behavior. They are totally normal and not meant to make the plaintiff whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
> Punitive damages, or exemplary damages, are damages assessed in order to punish the defendant for outrageous conduct and/or to reform or deter the defendant and others from engaging in conduct similar to that which formed the basis of the lawsuit.[1] Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some of the punitive damages in award
From that same Wikipedia article:
> In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is high enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional.
There was an exception made for a 526:1 ratio because the case was especially egregious, but this ratio is 1901 times larger than the one in that Supreme Court case.
Nobody deserves to be compared to child molesters like that. That's extreme bad faith at best and deliberate character assassination at worst. He clearly suffered a moral injury.
Anything above single digit ratio is ($10 punitive for $1 damages) questionable.
Not sure if that applies here.
This seems to be par for the course for the jury system, which is why we have an appeals process run by much, much more objective people, fortunately. At least so far.
However, I have many questions about the climate change theory but every time I ask climate change enthusiasts, I get branded as a climate-change-denier or anti-environmental which makes me even more convinced that this is more of a religious debate than a scientific debate.
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer during the Great Warming Period. We also know that the Earth was much colder during the Ice Age. How do we know that right now it's because of CO2 and not because of some process by the planet?
2) As far as I can tell, the theory now is that the changing climate is evidence that the climate-change-via-CO2 theory is correct. I've heard people say that both warmer weather and colder weather are both evidence that the climate-change theory is right. It appears to me that ANY change is evidence that their theory is correct. But they can't have it both ways. In the scientific method, you make a prediction based on your theory and if your prediction doesn't come true then it means your theory is wrong. It appears that ANY CHANGE will validate their thesis, which is absurd, because the only outcome that will invalidate their thesis is NOTHING changes, which we already know is impossible. The Earth is not static and neither is its climate.
3) California had a 10 year drought (that was mostly exacerbated by pumping groundwater for farms but that's another issue entirely). Everyone was calling it "the new normal" but all it took was one good winter and all the reservoirs were filled again to above average levels. Droughts have happened before in California, but people were pointing to it as evidence that human-caused-climate-change was real. No one is talking about how it wasn't evidence at all.
There are some fun practical experiments to be found: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.192075 . Some you could realistically try at home. The first research papers on that are literally 150 years old. Those are actually interesting to look at, too. Great hand-drawn diagrams of their lab equipment.
An issue is that there are paid trolls that go around posting blanket doubt on climate change, so it's always difficult to tell whom to engage with and when it is better not to provide a stage.
Also, thanks to both of you for sharing.
Climate change research is anomalously open and the methods highly scrutinized. That you're hung up on such basic points rather than the actual contentions within the field shows me you're not particularly well informed on the specifics. But I don't think this is a good forum to litigate these specifics, and I'm not sure that's what you're actually asking for here anyway.
Us? Is there perhaps some specific committee here that's being burdened by too many honest questions?
But this isn't a particularly complex subject at the level of sophistication they are questioning. It has been a mainstream and widely publicized issue for over a generation now. There are a handful of reasons why someone would be this invested in discussing this publicly, but not convinced by their own investigation so far. And yes, what I feel for those motivations is hostility. There's a "call the cops" button right there if it bothers you that much. Dan will probably finally ban me and you can get on with your semblance of debate.
The short answer is "because there's an entire field of science that models this and figures out what contributes to global climate". Things we know contribute to the global temperature include: the atmospheric composition, the albedo of the surface, and the change in the axial tilt. The latter is currently what we understand to be the main driver of the glacial periods [we are still in the Quaternary Ice Age; we are currently in an inter-glacial period, when the glaciers have retreated toward the poles].
Greenhouse warming was also predicted well before it occurred, if it makes you feel any better; back in the 19th century people said, "Hey, we just found out that CO2 makes greenhouses warmer, and we're burning enough coal to have a measurable effect on the composition of the atmosphere; if this keeps up we should expect the Earth to begin warming up." And then, over the next century, we did and it did.
> I've heard people say that both warmer weather and colder weather are both evidence that the climate-change theory is right.
Warmer and colder weather in various places is expected, but the mean global temperature just keeps going up, up, up. It's not like we're having "coldest years on record" and then going, "Yeah, climate change is confirmed again". We have the hottest year on record, year after year, and then the polar vortex goes all wibbly-wobbly and blasts somewhere with weeks of cold. But the overall global temperature is still pretty damn warm.
Incoming solar electromagnetic radiation can be measured. Outgoing electromagnetic radiation can be measured. From the difference we can see that Earth is gaining energy.
We can also measure incoming and outgoing radiation at the surface, and at various layers of the atmosphere. We can see that when the surface is heated by absorbing incoming visible and ultraviolet solar radiation and then later re-radiates some of that energy it does so by radiating infrared.
We can measure the transparency of atmospheric gases to radiation and see that CO2 is transparent to that incoming visible and ultraviolet but is opaque to the outgoing infrared and hence blocks some energy that would have otherwise been radiated away into space. Increasing the CO2 levels increases how much of the outgoing infrared is blocked.
CO2 that comes from sources that are geologically old has a mix of C isotopes different from CO2 that comes from sources that aren't geologically old. From the isotope mix in the atmosphere and how it changed we can tell that almost all of the increase is from geologically old carbon sources.
Fossil fuels are geologically old sources. We know reasonably accurately the annual consumption of fossil fuels. The amount of CO2 from them is very close to the total amount of old source CO2 that is being added to the atmosphere yearly.
Hence we know that most of the CO2 increase comes from human activity.
The evidence that the climate is warming isn't "warmer weather" or "colder weather". It's that average sea-temperatures around the world have been rising steadily, year-on-year. The predicted effect of that rising temperature on the weather is that we should expect more extreme weather: more floods, more droughts, colder cold-snaps.
It's no good looking at "weather" (e.g. California) to see whether global climate change is happening; weather is a local phenomenon. Mann is vindicated by the behaviour of the (global) climate, not the behaviour of the weather in San Francisco.
Flamewar comment. The verdict of one jury (who very likely already made up their mind about climate change before the trial started) finding a single publication liable for defamation of one author on the _preponderance of the evidence_ bears very little bearing on the overall "climate denialism" debate.
And despite all this effort, quibbles around minor changes of statistical methods, in the end the hockey stick plot has been vindicated. And then impugned and vindicated again.
This defamation case is a cap on the whole sad saga, but it is completely representative of the whole thing. Denialism has no factual or scientific basis, and the defamation suit shows just how immoral the paid-for denialists are.
Perhaps you are the new one?
You're missing the point though. They're not looking for bad science, they're politically opposed to this particular outcome.
The Supreme Court has said punitive damages must bear a reasonable relationship to actual damages.
As a rule of thumb, 10:1 is usually unconstitutional. 1000000:1 is off the charts.
$1 in compensatory damages means the jury decided that yes it was technically defamation, but that it was literally the smallest, tiniest, itty-bittiest amount of defamation that is possible. That it did about the same amount of damage to the scientist's career and reputation, as if he'd ordered delivery and discovered a can of soda was missing.
The idea that you could do $1 of damage and your punishment is $1,000,000 is just nonsensical. Either it did extensive damage to his career (years' worth of salary lost) and a million dollars is appropriate additional punishment, or it didn't and he wins a dollar because he was defamed but it did virtually no damage and the defendants merely have to pay his court costs or something.
Can you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone? I think you have to take intent into account and here it's so blatantly purposeful.
Yes, there is typically differences in law between reckless endangerment, manslaughter, premeditated murder, hate crime additions, etc.
If one were to balance benefit/harm, if the jury found that the would-be defamers benefited Mann personally and professionally in the manner of the "Streisand Effect," would Mann need to pay them?
As the great Sideshow Bob put it [1]: "Attempted murder", now honestly, what is that!? Do they give a Nobel prize for "attempted" chemistry? Do they?
In a criminal one you are correct -- if you try to rob a bank and try but fail to kill a bunch of hostages, you're still going to jail for possibly the rest of your life.
But in a civil trial, the main point is the damages. Yes there can be a punitive element on top, but only if there are damages in the first place. If you attempt something bad but don't succeed, a civil suit can't punish you. It's not like a criminal trial.
No, it has nothing to do with elements of criminality.
It's the simple fact that if civil actions resulted in only restitution and nothing more, then everybody would be committing torts whenever they could, because sometimes you'll get away with it and sometimes you won't, but statistically you'll always come out ahead. Because sometimes people don't bring charges, sometimes they're too hard to prove, etc.
So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence. To ensure that if we only count the suits successfully brought and prosecuted, the tort-committer will still lose overall in the end.
There's nothing to do with criminality here, which is prosecuted by the state rather than by a private party.
> So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence
That's exactly what I mean by elements of criminality. You're not just saying that you harmed someone and have to make them whole but also that you did something wrong and have to be punished so you won't do it again. It's a fine by another name.
What? It was my impression that scientists draw salary directly out of the grant, and that many scientists do not earn any salary other than what comes out of their grants.
That's why it was tricky for Mann to prove damages here - Penn State was likely harmed, but Penn State didn't sue.
If someone posts all over Twitter that I'm a fraudster and an asshole, and I feel like I'm having fewer prospective customers choose me to tile their bathroom and I'm getting fewer dates on Grindr - am I supposed to be able to prove that, and the causality in court?
Even if I somehow have detailed records of exactly how all of my dates have gone and how many prospective clients I've given quotes to - maybe there's just another tile guy who started asking for less, and I'm getting fewer dates because I got this garish pink mohawk.
Yes, they are hard to prove, but the jury gets to take that into account. It could have picked almost any number ($1m, $10m, etc.) for reputation damages, but that would go in the "actual" damages line on the form.
The "punitive" damages really are just to discourage future bad conduct. And it will be difficult to support the idea that it takes a $1m penalty to prevent future bad conduct worth $1.
There's some precise way to say the same thing without falling afoul of it, even then.
If a group elevates someone to be a public figure, and uses the fact that they're a public figure to defame them in ways that would not be permitted for non-public figures, should the group really be allowed the same protections that random members of the public have talking crap about people who are incidentally famous?
(I suppose it gets a bit complicated that Mann didn't retreat from the attacks, and used the notoriety thrust upon him to become a fairly prominent science communicator. Even so, giving his attackers any benefit of the doubt doesn't seem right somehow...)
Absolutely not. It can't be defamation unless it's untrue, and it also can't be defamation unless it's injurious to your target's reputation.
> To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
In American political debate, it is common to throw around names like "communist" and "fascist" to refer to your political opponents but that doesn't mean most people actually think the Democrats and Republicans really are the Communists and the Fascists. I think it's dangerous rhetoric because some people might believe it and act accordingly while others might genuinely be totalitarians and stay under the radar but it's the political culture we have.
The child molester comparison does provide additional context in this case that makes it much easier to interpret "fraudulent" literally rather than as hyperbole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> Although the First Amendment applies only to state actors, there is a common misconception that it prohibits anyone from limiting free speech, including private, non-governmental entities.
Ken White (Popehat) is a prominent 1st amendment attorney and has written about this - the second bullet point applies;
https://web.archive.org/web/20240116140758/https://www.popeh...
> As I said at the trial, Mann has not been the best colleague to me, but I am fine even so. Who knows what demons haunt him and why he behaves the way that he does. I do hope he can find peace at some point.
Clearly this person's perspective is driven by more than just being "a scientist".
https://bsky.app/profile/michaelemann.bsky.social/post/3kkws...
Concluding that scientific research is fraudulent because you have you own reasons to believe its conclusions are false can’t be defamation without compromising free scientific inquiry. Even if your reason for concluding its fraudulent is because you believe in a flat Earth, courts are not the venue to resolve questions of scientific debate. That is a can of worms that should never be opened lest we find ourselves in a new Lysenkoism.
https://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/civil-litigation/defama...
Another term you might want to look up is "Dunning-Kruger."
I see no evidence that data fraud is "career ending" and the snark about dunning Kruger is fitting for your comment.
Typically however, climate 'scientists' abstract their fraud. They take raw data, fit it to their 'model', and then produce a conclusion. Sometimes they get over zealous, and manipulate the raw data, like the NOAA was caught doing.
1- there is a difference between being wrong and being fraud. Einstein was wrong in a paper claiming that gravitational waves are not real (he was convinced later it is). He did not fabricate anything in this work. He did not invent equations, made up observation data ...etc.
2- You are talking about conclusions and belief. Here is the problem, there is a scientific method. If you want to draw conclusions, then you have to follow that. You provide evidence. If you think this is fraud because the conclusion doesn't fit then you need to argue with better models/data or interpretation but not just based on final result that you don't like.
If you believe that everything contradicts flat earth is fraudulent then you are basically making up stuff and you don't have proof and this is defamation not science.
> with skeptics claiming Mann manipulated data. Investigations by Penn State and others found no misuse of data by Mann, but his work continued to draw attacks, particularly from conservatives.
As an example. You solved a problem and I see that you solution is wrong (whether I am correct or not ia irrelevant) I would say you are wrong because you did this and that. I will not say that you are wrong because you have cheated unless I have a proof that you actually cheated (i.e data manipulation)
Welcome to the scientific community.
You never even need to engage with the question of whether something is fraud when disputing something.
If you say that there are 75 million people living in Germany I don’t need to call you a lier or a fraud to say that you are wrong and dispute your statement. That‘s just not necessary. I can just point at this website https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula... and say you are wrong. What do I care whether you simply misremembered, go wrong information from someone else and believed them or are actively lying.