The conservative Canadian newspaper National
Post and several of its reporters have been found
guilty of
defaming a climate scientist in numerous articles that attacked his
character. The defendants - the Post, its publisher Gordon Fisher, and
its journalists Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, and Kevin Libin - have
to retract all their articles about climate scientist Andrew Weaver and
pay $50,000 in general damages jointly.
The judge in the case, Justice Emily Burke, did not find the defendants guilty of malice, merely that they “deliberately created a negative impression of Dr. Weaver” because of their climate-change denial and “have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts.”
Dr. Andrew Weaver is one of the world’s pre-eminent paleoclimatologists, a professor at the University of Victoria since 1992. He has spent considerable time working to educate the public on climate change, writing Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World in 2008 and acting as a lead author for every IPCC report since 1995. During the
In a series of articles and editorials, the Post claimed Weaver, as “Canada’s warmist spinner-in-chief,” was part of a global scientific conspiracy to concoct fear about fossil-fueled global warming. This “Climategate” smear against varied climate scientists was promoted by conservative media worldwide during the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks. While other scientists were being smeared following the hacking of a set of email correspondence, Weaver was the victim of an office break-in. The Post then falsely claimed Weaver blamed the oil industry for the burglary. The Post also falsely claimed Weaver was trying to dissociate himself from the IPCC and was generally corrupt and deceitful. In 2010, Weaver filed suit against the Post, after years of asking for corrections and retractions.
Justice Burke found the defendants’ claims that their articles did not defame Weaver’s character completely unconvincing. She found, instead, they lied and defamed Dr. Weaver. According to Burke, they “altered the complexion of the facts and omitted facts sufficiently fundamental that they undermine the accuracy of the facts expressed in the commentary to the extent the facts cannot be properly regarded as a true statement of the facts.”
As she wrote in her decision:
Essentially, the allegations of the defamatory character of the words in the four articles can be summarized as the following innuendos or inferences that Dr. Weaver:
(a) attempted to divert public attention from the IPCC and Climategate scandal by fabricating stories about the involvement of the fossil fuel industry with respect to the break-ins at his office, theft of emails from a UK University, and hack attacks at the Centre;
(b) engaged in deceptive misconduct in the news media to do so;
(c) engaged in willful manipulation and distortion of scientific data for the purposes of deceiving the public in order to promote a public agenda;
(d) in doing so, is motivated by a corrupt interest in receiving government funding and financial rewards;
(e) is wilfully concealing scientific climate data;
(f) knows or believes the IPCC reports concerning global warming are unscientific and fraudulent and seeks to avoid personal accountability for the manipulation/distortion of those reports by disassociating himself from that organization;
(g) has deceitfully or incompetently linked current weather and temperature events with global warming;
(h) authored a deceitful and manipulative work of agitation propaganda known as The Copenhagen Diagnosis; and
(i) is untrustworthy, unscientific and incompetent.
As of this writing, the National Post has not yet removed the offending articles from its website.
The full judgment can be found here.