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Column: The climate scientist who just won a $1-million judgment against climate change deniers

Published

2 years ago

February 13, 2024

Column: The climate scientist who just won a -million judgment against climate change deniers

One of the major issues confronting scientists today — especially those working in the heavily politicized fields of global warming, vaccines and the origin of COVID-19 — is how to deal with the torrents of misinformation and disinformation, some of it personal, pushing back against their work.

Climate scientist Michael E. Mann just found an answer. Sue the critics — and win.

Last week, a Washington, D.C., jury awarded Mann more than $1 million in punitive damages against two right-wing writers who had accused him of research fraud.

I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.

— Climate scientist Michael Mann

The jurors didn’t appear to find this a close question. They ruled that the online posts written by Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn breached the legal standards applied to defamation lawsuits involving a public figure such as Mann — that their writings asserted facts that were “provably false” and that they knew or should have known that their assertions were false.

The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each defendant, plus $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and $1 million in punitive damages from Steyn. The verdicts capped a painful 12-year battle that Mann waged to protect his reputation from trolls questioning his integrity.

“I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech,” Mann said after the verdict.

There’s more to the case than the exoneration of a single scientist. The verdict scored a direct hit on personal attacks on scientists using innuendo and outright lies, all aimed at advancing partisan and economic ideologies by undermining scientific research.

“The attacks denigrating science and trying to undercut science, both for climate science and biomedicine, [are] not just about the science,” Peter Hotez, a leading authority on medicines and vaccines and a prominent foe of anti-science politics, told PBS.

“It’s now gone the next step to attack the scientists and portray us as public enemies,” said Hotez, who is collaborating with Mann on a book about the anti-science movement. “Both Michael and I are stalked regularly. We receive threats online, phone calls to the office, sometimes physical confrontations. So it’s gone out to that new level.”

Scientists working in all fields subjected to partisan critiques have lamented that the flow of lies about their work and about established science can be unrelenting.

The critics are financed by right-wing foundations and their claims repeated at congressional hearings — typically, these days, chaired by House Republicans aiming to pump conspiracy theories into the mainstream. Sometimes, as many targets have experienced, the criticism degenerates into personal threats and physical confrontations.

Much is at stake in these battles. Global warming is an elemental threat to life on Earth, and ignoring it as its deniers advocate is a recipe for extinction. Campaigns by anti-vaccine activists can cause sickness and death for untold millions in the U.S. and worldwide.

To understand Mann’s case, it helps to start at the beginning.

In 1998 and 1999, Mann and colleagues published two papers reporting that global temperatures, which had been stable for at least a millennium, began rising sharply during the 20th century and especially in the last 50 years. They used evidence from tree rings, sediment cores from oceans, caves and lakes and ice cores from glaciers to reconstruct climate patterns of the distant past.

The famous “hockey stick” graph developed by Michael Mann and colleagues showed average climate temperatures soaring sharply over the last century as burning of fossil fuels increased.

(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

The 1999 paper illustrated their findings with what became known as the “hockey stick” graph because it resembled that implement with a long horizontal shaft (the distant past) ending with a nearly upright blade (recent times).

Mann’s research and the graph drew immediate pushback from global warming deniers, who questioned his data and methodology. After 2009, when emails among climate scientists including Mann were hacked from the files of the University of East Anglia in Britain and cherry-picked to suggest that the scientists were manipulating their data, they also questioned his integrity.

The attacks on Mann should have been ended by a series of official investigations through 2021 that cleared him of research wrongdoing, including two by Pennsylvania State University, where Mann taught from 2005 to 2022, and another by the National Science Foundation.

In all, eight separate investigations by official bodies found Mann innocent of wrongdoing or validated his research findings; the results all were made public. But the attacks continued, even up to this day. (Mann is now at the University of Pennsylvania.)

That brings us to the noxious posts by Simberg and Steyn.

Simberg’s post, titled “The Other Scandal in Unhappy Valley,” was published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute on July 12, 2012 — after Mann had been cleared. It’s worth noting that the CEI is a free-enterprise think tank that has been funded by the Koch network, other far-right moneybags and the tobacco industry, and that global warming denial has been one of its favorite themes.

Simberg drew a connection between the scandal in the Penn State football program involving a cover-up of sexual molestations by Jerry Sandusky, an assistant coach, and the university’s purported “whitewash” of Mann’s hockey stick deceptions. (The headline referred to the nickname of Penn State’s scenic location, “Happy Valley.”)

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” Simberg wrote, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

CEI has left Simberg’s post up on its website but has excised his references to Sandusky as “inappropriate.” However, the full post, including its original references to Sandusky, was reprinted in a 2016 decision by a Washington, D.C., court of appeals that allowed Mann’s case against the writers to proceed to trial.

Steyn followed Simberg’s post with his own, published in the conservative organ National Review on July 15.

While writing, apropos of Simberg’s Sandusky reference, that he was “not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers,” Steyn asserted that Simberg “has a point.” He called Mann’s hockey-stick graph “fraudulent.”

Steyn and Simberg both questioned the investigations that cleared Mann. Simberg noted that Penn State’s investigators were all tenured professors on its faculty. Steyn wrote, “If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?”

Simberg also referred disdainfully to a 2011 investigation by the National Science Foundation’s inspector general, which exonerated Mann, writing that it relied on information from Penn State and therefore was “not truly independent.”

A couple of points about that. First, Simberg wrote that the investigation was by the National Academy of Sciences, which is different from the NSF. (The NAS conducted its own investigation upholding Mann’s work, in 2006, but that’s not the one Simberg quoted.)

Second, the NSF’s office of inspector general specifically stated that in its investigation it did not rely on Penn State.

Rather, it examined “a substantial amount of publicly available documentation concerning both [Mann’s] research and parallel research conducted by his collaborators and other scientists” in the field of global warming, and also interviewed Mann, “critics, and disciplinary experts” before finding that there was no evidence that Mann “falsified or fabricated any data.”

National Review defended itself and Steyn’s column with the sort of vacuous braggadocio that is its stock in trade.

In a 2012 editorial headlined “Get Lost,” its editor, Rich Lowry, laughed off Mann’s threat to file a lawsuit by pledging that if Mann did so it would be pleased to engage in “extremely wide-ranging” discovery — “we will be doing more than fighting a nuisance lawsuit; we will be embarking on a journalistic project of great interest to us and our readers.”

In any event, National Review turned tail and ran. It persuaded the D.C. court to drop it from Mann’s lawsuit in 2021 by pleading that Steyn wasn’t its employee but merely an “independent contractor” and that none of its employees had reviewed his posting until it was published on its website, which it portrayed as sort of a neutral landing place for posts to appear. That “journalistic project of great interest”? Fugeddaboutit.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute also got itself dismissed from Mann’s lawsuit in 2021 via a similar argument that a judge described as “an assertion of ignorance”: It said Simberg wasn’t its employee and that the low-level employee who did review his article before it posted checked it only for “formatting error and typos,” not for content.

National Review continued to ridicule Mann. In January, as the trial against the writers began in a D.C. courtroom, it labeled Mann “a darling of fashionable opinion,” placed his case in the category of “runaway snowflakery” and called it “laughably weak.” (Whoops.) Given the publication’s court-ordered immunization against liability, it appeared to be taking on the role of a bully who goads others into waging battle with the words, “Let’s you and him fight.”

Now that the verdict is in, National Review is wrapping itself in the U.S. Constitution. It editorialized that a few blocks from the courthouse, “at the National Archives Museum, the 1st Amendment faded a little on its parchment.”

It asserted that Mann won the $1-million verdict merely for a blog post that did no more than “ruffle [his] feathers.” It charged that Mann’s “mendacity and egomania” motivated his lawsuit.

“Ultimately, this lawsuit is not about Mark Steyn or about conservative magazines or about climate change,” National Review wrote, “but about the integrity of free speech in these United States.”

The truth is, however, that Steyn and Simberg lost only after the jury applied the most stringent standards for defamation lawsuits — standards that have been developed precisely to protect “the integrity of free speech” and that protect serious journalism. Mann had to show that the authors knew or should have known that their factual assertions about his work were false, and that’s exactly what he did.

The lesson embodied in the jury award is not that you can’t smear or defame your targets. The jury didn’t rule that you can’t express an opinion about them or their work in the course of robust debate.

What it did rule, and it isn’t alone in honoring this principle, is that you can’t smear them by parading lies and misrepresentations as though they’re facts — not without paying a price.

That may be a frightful lesson for National Review and other publications like it, but it should be comforting for the rest of us.

Business

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

Published

8 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

In mapping out Elon Musk’s wealth, our investigation found that Mr. Musk is behind more than 90 companies in Texas. Kirsten Grind, a New York Times Investigations reporter, explains what her team found.

By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey

February 27, 2026

Business

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Published

10 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Trump has crowed about the gains in the U.S. stock market during his term, but in 2025 investors saw more opportunity in the rest of the world.

If you’re a stock market investor you might be feeling pretty good about how your portfolio of U.S. equities fared in the first year of President Trump’s term.

All the major market indices seemed to be firing on all cylinders, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gaining 17.9% through the full year.

But if you’re the type of investor who looks for things to regret, pay no attention to the rest of the world’s stock markets. That’s because overseas markets did better than the U.S. market in 2025 — a lot better. The MSCI World ex-USA index — that is, all the stock markets except the U.S. — gained more than 32% last year, nearly double the percentage gains of U.S. markets.

That’s a major departure from recent trends. Since 2013, the MSCI US index had bested the non-U.S. index every year except 2017 and 2022, sometimes by a wide margin — in 2024, for instance, the U.S. index gained 24.6%, while non-U.S. markets gained only 4.7%.

The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade.

— Katie Martin, Financial Times

Broken down into individual country markets (also by MSCI indices), in 2025 the U.S. ranked 21st out of 23 developed markets, with only New Zealand and Denmark doing worse. Leading the pack were Austria and Spain, with 86% gains, but superior records were turned in by Finland, Ireland and Hong Kong, with gains of 50% or more; and the Netherlands, Norway, Britain and Japan, with gains of 40% or more.

Investment analysts cite several factors to explain this trend. Judging by traditional metrics such as price/earnings multiples, the U.S. markets have been much more expensive than those in the rest of the world. Indeed, they’re historically expensive. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index traded in 2025 at about 23 times expected corporate earnings; the historical average is 18 times earnings.

Investment managers also have become nervous about the concentration of market gains within the U.S. technology sector, especially in companies associated with artificial intelligence R&D. Fears that AI is an investment bubble that could take down the S&P’s highest fliers have investors looking elsewhere for returns.

But one factor recurs in almost all the market analyses tracking relative performance by U.S. and non-U.S. markets: Donald Trump.

Investors started 2025 with optimism about Trump’s influence on trading opportunities, given his apparent commitment to deregulation and his braggadocio about America’s dominant position in the world and his determination to preserve, even increase it.

That hasn’t been the case for months.

”The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade,” Katie Martin of the Financial Times wrote this week. “Wherever you look in financial markets, you see signs that global investors are going out of their way to avoid Donald Trump’s America.”

Two Trump policy initiatives are commonly cited by wary investment experts. One, of course, is Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, which have left investors with little ability to assess international trade flows. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of most Trump tariffs and the bellicosity of his response, which included the immediate imposition of new 10% tariffs across the board and the threat to increase them to 15%, have done nothing to settle investors’ nerves.

Then there’s Trump’s driving down the value of the dollar through his agitation for lower interest rates, among other policies. For overseas investors, a weaker dollar makes U.S. assets more expensive relative to the outside world.

It would be one thing if trade flows and the dollar’s value reflected economic conditions that investors could themselves parse in creating a picture of investment opportunities. That’s not the case just now. “The current uncertainty is entirely man-made (largely by one orange-hued man in particular) but could well continue at least until the US mid-term elections in November,” Sam Burns of Mill Street Research wrote on Dec. 29.

Trump hasn’t been shy about trumpeting U.S. stock market gains as emblems of his policy wisdom. “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” he said in his State of the Union address Tuesday. “Think of that, one year, boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and the millions of Americans.”

Trump asserted: “Since I took office, the typical 401(k) balance is up by at least $30,000. That’s a lot of money. … Because the stock market has done so well, setting all those records, your 401(k)s are way up.”

Trump’s figure doesn’t conform to findings by retirement professionals such as the 401(k) overseers at Bank of America. They reported that the average account balance grew by only about $13,000 in 2025. I asked the White House for the source of Trump’s claim, but haven’t heard back.

Interpreting stock market returns as snapshots of the economy is a mug’s game. Despite that, at her recent appearance before a House committee, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi tried to deflect questions about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein records by crowing about it.

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now, she declared. “Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I predicted that the administration would use the Dow industrial average’s break above 50,000 to assert that “the overall economy is firing on all cylinders, thanks to his policies.” The Dow reached that mark on Feb. 6. But Feb. 11, the day of Bondi’s testimony, was the last day the index closed above 50,000. On Thursday, it closed at 49,499.50, or about 1.4% below its Feb. 10 peak close of 50,188.14.

To use a metric suggested by economist Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, if you invested $48,488 in the Dow on the day Trump took office last year, when the Dow closed at 48,448 points, you would have had $50,000 on Feb. 6. That’s a gain of about 3.2%. But if you had invested the same amount in the global stock market not including the U.S. (based on the MSCI World ex-USA index), on that same day you would have had nearly $60,000. That’s a gain of nearly 24%.

Broader market indices tell essentially the same story. From Jan. 17, 2025, the last day before Trump’s inauguration, through Thursday’s close, the MSCI US stock index gained a cumulative 16.3%. But the world index minus the U.S. gained nearly 42%.

The gulf between U.S. and non-U.S. performance has continued into the current year. The S&P 500 has gained about 0.74% this year through Wednesday, while the MSCI World ex-USA index has gained about 8.9%. That’s “the best start for a calendar year for global stocks relative to the S&P 500 going back to at least 1996,” Morningstar reports.

It wouldn’t be unusual for the discrepancy between the U.S. and global markets to shrink or even reverse itself over the course of this year.

That’s what happened in 2017, when overseas markets as tracked by MSCI beat the U.S. by more than three percentage points, and 2022, when global markets lost money but U.S. markets underperformed the rest of the world by more than five percentage points.

Economic conditions change, and often the stock markets march to their own drummers. The one thing less likely to change is that Trump is set to remain president until Jan. 20, 2029. Make your investment bets accordingly.

Business

How the S&P 500 Stock Index Became So Skewed to Tech and A.I.

Published

21 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Press Room

How the S&P 500 Stock Index Became So Skewed to Tech and A.I.

Nvidia, the chipmaker that became the world’s most valuable public company two years ago, was alone worth more than $4.75 trillion as of Thursday morning. Its value, or market capitalization, is more than double the combined worth of all the companies in the energy sector, including oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

The chipmaker’s market cap has swelled so much recently, it is now 20 percent greater than the sum of all of the companies in the materials, utilities and real estate sectors combined.

What unifies these giant tech companies is artificial intelligence. Nvidia makes the hardware that powers it; Microsoft, Apple and others have been making big bets on products that people can use in their everyday lives.

But as worries grow over lavish spending on A.I., as well as the technology’s potential to disrupt large swaths of the economy, the outsize influence that these companies exert over markets has raised alarms. They can mask underlying risks in other parts of the index. And if a handful of these giants falter, it could mean widespread damage to investors’ portfolios and retirement funds in ways that could ripple more broadly across the economy.

The dynamic has drawn comparisons to past crises, notably the dot-com bubble. Tech companies also made up a large share of the stock index then — though not as much as today, and many were not nearly as profitable, if they made money at all.

How the current moment compares with past pre-crisis moments

To understand how abnormal and worrisome this moment might be, The New York Times analyzed data from S&P Dow Jones Indices that compiled the market values of the companies in the S&P 500 in December 1999 and August 2007. Each date was chosen roughly three months before a downturn to capture the weighted breakdown of the index before crises fully took hold and values fell.

The companies that make up the index have periodically cycled in and out, and the sectors were reclassified over the last two decades. But even after factoring in those changes, the picture that emerges is a market that is becoming increasingly one-sided.

In December 1999, the tech sector made up 26 percent of the total.

In August 2007, just before the Great Recession, it was only 14 percent.

Today, tech is worth a third of the market, as other vital sectors, such as energy and those that include manufacturing, have shrunk.

Since then, the huge growth of the internet, social media and other technologies propelled the economy.

Now, never has so much of the market been concentrated in so few companies. The top 10 make up almost 40 percent of the S&P 500.

How much of the S&P 500 is occupied by the top 10 companies

With greater concentration of wealth comes greater risk. When so much money has accumulated in just a handful of companies, stock trading can be more volatile and susceptible to large swings. One day after Nvidia posted a huge profit for its most recent quarter, its stock price paradoxically fell by 5.5 percent. So far in 2026, more than a fifth of the stocks in the S&P 500 have moved by 20 percent or more. Companies and industries that are seen as particularly prone to disruption by A.I. have been hard hit.

The volatility can be compounded as everyone reorients their businesses around A.I, or in response to it.

The artificial intelligence boom has touched every corner of the economy. As data centers proliferate to support massive computation, the utilities sector has seen huge growth, fueled by the energy demands of the grid. In 2025, companies like NextEra and Exelon saw their valuations surge.

The industrials sector, too, has undergone a notable shift. General Electric was its undisputed heavyweight in 1999 and 2007, but the recent explosion in data center construction has evened out growth in the sector. GE still leads today, but Caterpillar is a very close second. Caterpillar, which is often associated with construction, has seen a spike in sales of its turbines and power-generation equipment, which are used in data centers.

One large difference between the big tech companies now and their counterparts during the dot-com boom is that many now earn money. A lot of the well-known names in the late 1990s, including Pets.com, had soaring valuations and little revenue, which meant that when the bubble popped, many companies quickly collapsed.

Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet and others generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year.

And many of the biggest players in artificial intelligence these days are private companies. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are expected to go public later this year, which could further tilt the market dynamic toward tech and A.I.

Methodology

Sector values reflect the GICS code classification system of companies in the S&P 500. As changes to the GICS system took place from 1999 to now, The New York Times reclassified all companies in the index in 1999 and 2007 with current sector values. All monetary figures from 1999 and 2007 have been adjusted for inflation.