A Canadian court has found that Toronto's National Post libeled a climate scientist named Andrew Weaver. The paper and several of its writers and editors will be responsible for paying Weaver C$50,000 (about US$39,500) and removing all the libelous pieces from its site, as well as notifying anyone who has republished them. But by quickly removing further libelous comments left by its readers in response to the article, the National Post avoided being held responsible for those as well.

In contrast to US law, the Canadian legal standard for libel is simply that statements must be inaccurate (not "based on facts truly stated"), and they must "tend to lower the plaintiff’s reputation in the eyes of a reasonable person." Put another way by the judge in this case, "While the Supreme Court of Canada is clear about the critical importance of free speech, as noted earlier, this does not provide a roadmap to the individual’s reputation as a 'regrettable but unavoidable road kill on the highway of public controversy.'"

Compared to the statements that prompted a US libel suit by climate scientist Mike Mann, the National Post's articles are quite mild (Mann was compared to a convicted child molester). And the material is standard fare on a variety of sites rum by people skeptical of the scientific establishment, claiming that he manipulated data to make a case for climate change, that he was profiting from the resulting grants, that he was jumping from the sinking ship that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that he saw fossil-fuel-industry conspiracies everywhere, and so on.

The judge, however, ruled that these articles collectively had "suggestions and innuendo" that Weaver "engaged in willful manipulation and distortion of scientific data for the purposes of deceiving the public in order to promote a public agenda"; "is wilfully concealing scientific climate data"; and "is untrustworthy, unscientific and incompetent." Thus, if they were not clearly supported by facts, they were libelous.

And that's where the National Post and its editors and writers ran into trouble. It's not so much that they displayed the US' standard for libel (a reckless disregard for truth), but more that they displayed a systematic incompetence. Documents introduced during the trial indicated that after Weaver used the phrase "unadulterated rubbish" to describe one particular claim about climate science. The National Post went on to say that he used the phrase to describe three completely different things—each case was followed by a letter of complaint from Weaver that led to a formal correction.

The judge even concluded, "As evident from the testimony of the [the writers and editors], they were more interested in espousing a particular view than assessing the accuracy of the facts." For his part, Weaver sounded intensely frustrated by the divorce between reality and the writers. In one letter to the National Post quoted in the decision, he writes, "In addition, I would also ask that you provide evidence that I state 'it is dangerous to allow skeptics a voice in scientific debate.' I have never made this statement. It makes no sense since by definition, real scientists are all skeptics."

Given this behavior by the defendants, it shouldn't be surprising that the judge found that the columns at issue showed a similarly poor grasp of the facts. Those pieces, according to the judge, implied that Weaver conflated weather events with climate trends; in reality, Weaver has an extensive record of publications cautioning against doing precisely that. Similar problems were found with claims about Weaver's role in and thoughts on the IPCC; the columns suggested one thing while a variety of publicly available documents clearly showed something different.

There is some relatively good news for the defendants. The judge declined to assign any punitive damages, limiting the impact to the C$50,000. And while the columns provoked a series of comments that were even more clearly libelous, the National Post's staff removed any that were the subject of complaint. That decision means that it is not responsible for publishing further libel.

Although the judge has ruled that the National Post must remove the original offending columns, that order comes over five years after the columns went live (as of this writing, they are still available). In that time, they have been republished elsewhere and quoted extensively in countless blogs. While the judge ordered the National Post to "expressly withdraw any consent given to third parties to re-publish the defamatory expression and to require these third parties to cease re-publication," there's no way to enforce this order.

Thus, the decision does little to re-establish Weaver's reputation, and it can't prevent him from being disparaged at any of the sites that chose to repost the original pieces.