PIXABAY, FREE-PHOTOSUpdate (February 21): At a hearing yesterday in the District of Columbia Superior Court, a judge heard testimony from National Academy of Sciences lawyers, who were asking her to dismiss the defamation lawsuit. According to Retraction Watch, the attorneys argued that PNAS is protected by a law designed to preserve speech that’s in the public interest. Jacobson’s lawyer disagreed, but the judge has yet to make her decision.
Mark Jacobson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, is suing the National Academy of Sciences and the authors of a paper published in PNAS that criticized his 2015 PNAS study on renewable energy. As The Washington Post reported yesterday (November 1), Jacobson is asking for $10 million and a retraction of the critical report, claiming that the journal and authors knowingly published false statements.
Christopher Clack, the lead author of the 2017 paper that countered Jacobson’s work, tells the Post that “our paper underwent very rigorous peer review, and two further extraordinary editorial reviews by the nation’s most prestigious academic journal, which considered Dr. Jacobson’s criticisms and found them to be without merit. It is unfortunate that Dr. Jacobson has now chosen to reargue his ...
