Updated and bumped. See updates below.

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the "hockey stick graph" that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The graph was first published in 1998, was prominently featured in the 2001 U.N. Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore's 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth.

The graph's methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel. One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball, was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann's case thrown out, and him ordered to pay the defendant's legal costs, no doubt a tidy sum of money. News first broke in Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watts. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including much background on the hockey stick.

The Canadian court issued it's [sic] final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball's libel lawyers. Not only did the court grant Ball's application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course. This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are "unprecedented." (snip) Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the 'working out') behind the world-famous 'hockey stick' graph[.]

Real science, not the phony "consensus" version, requires open access to data so skeptics (who play a key role in science) can see if results are reproducible. Of course, there are no falsifiable experimental data associated with the global warming predictions of doom, so it doesn't really stand as science as Karl Popper defined it.

This is an important victory in the process of debunking the warmist scare.

Update 1: Michael Mann disputes the notion that he lost (and more):

There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media. Here is our statement (https://t.co/8tGoBZnE3Y): pic.twitter.com/ySeJcOktX9 — Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) August 23, 2019

Update 2: Technology.news has a rather different take from Mann's, noting that further legal steps are on their way.