Penn State University global warming researcher Michael Mann is lawyering up to counter attacks by conservatives who have referred to him as the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science.”
Mann’s lawyer wrote Friday to National Review Executive Publisher Scott Budd demanding a retraction and apology for a July 15 blog post that compares Penn State’s mishandling of years of child sexual abuse to the university’s investigation of “Climategate.”
The charged reference to Sandusky, the convicted child molester and former assistant coach, originated with a July 13 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog, OpenMarket.org. The National Review Online post quoted from a now-deleted line by CEI’s Rand Simberg, who wrote: “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
CEI later removed the line and added an editor’s note that said, “Two inappropriate sentences that originally appeared in this post have been removed by the editor.”Earlier this month, Myron Ebell of CEI leaked a document about a "secret" carbon tax meeting that the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held.
Based on the latest publicly available documents, CEI had around $4.2 million in total net revenue and total assets of around $2 million. CEI President Fred Smith received a salary of $210,222.
