Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Eighty-seven years ago, people and organizations who believed in freedom of scientific inquiry arranged for a test case of Tennessee’s law against teaching the theory of evolution. The result was theater so cogent that it was later distilled as the play “Inherit the Wind.”

A closer look at big issues facing the country in the 2012 Election.

Now the climate scientist Michael E. Mann may be laying the groundwork for his own version of that trial, threatening to sue National Review for defamation. The offending piece was a blog post by Mark Steyn, which described Dr. Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.”

Like the original Scopes “monkey trial” or, more recently, the legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8 — a case already transformed into a play — any hockey stick trial would be both well financed and extremely high-profile. Issues of free scientific inquiry and free speech, as well as parsing of the word fraudulent would likely dominate the proceedings.

And while the business of getting a trial together tends to be slower than the business of electing a president, the prospect of a courtroom defense of climate science — or of the right of opponents to call it fraudulent — might just nudge the issue into a little more prominence in the national campaign.

Certainly, the idea of a courtroom review of the foundations of climate science — and of its professional standards and ethics — had immediate appeal when Dr. Mann announced his intention on his Facebook page.

But after months of legal wrangling to keep Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, from digging into his e-mails from his days at the University of Virginia, does Dr. Mann, now with Penn State, really want to open up his files to discovery motions from lawyers representing the National Review? What, then, was the point of beating back all those Freedom of Information Act requests?

It’s also worth noting that, unlike the Proposition 8 case, defamation is not a constitutional matter for a judge. It is a tort to be tried by a jury. Would defense lawyers try to shape from a jury pool a group that doubted human contribution to climate change? Could they?

Finally, science, a process of continuing inquiry that is sometimes beset with ambiguity and caveats, has never meshed terribly well with the cut-and-dried certainties that work best in a court of law.

Not for nothing did the National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, write a column saying, in effect, “bring it on.”

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

What Mr. Steyn called fraudulent is one of the most examined sets of data in climate science: Dr. Mann’s work showing changes in Earth’s temperature from the year 1,000 onward, with relatively little variation in the first 850 years (the shaft of the ‘hockey stick”) and then a sharp rise in the post-industrial period (the blade).

It was published in 2001 with a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since then it has become one of the biggest targets for climate-change skeptics.

Dr. Mann’s lawyer, John B. Williams, pointed out on a Facebook post that repeated investigations, some in the wake of “Climategate,” the 2009 release of e-mails by many climate scientists in correspondence with peers at the University of East Anglia, have supported Dr. Mann’s work. But Mr. Steyn is not the first to use the word “fraud” or “fraudulent” in the same sentence as “hockey stick.”

Dr. Mann fought back most recently with the publication of his book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.” The legal threat seems to be the next step to put climate science, so long on the defensive, on the offensive in the public sphere.

Could a defamation suit against National Review help raise the profile of the climate-change issue during the current race? And if it does, which campaigns are likely to benefit?