A few climate scientists have found themselves in court in recent years. Generally, they've been the targets of suits, often by political groups filing Freedom of Information Act requests to fish through their emails. But in a couple of cases, fed-up scientists have taken their most vitriolic detractors to court for defamation and libel.

Well-known Penn State researcher Michael Mann, for example, sued columnist and radio host Mark Steyn and two others for articles repeatedly accusing him of academic fraud (and making an analogy to child molestation).

Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver is in a slightly different position, as he decided to run for office several years ago and is now the leader of the Green Party in British Columbia. In 2015, he won a case against the National Post for an article accusing him of scientific misconduct, though that decision was overturned by an appeals court last year.

A separate lawsuit Weaver filed in 2011 finally came to a decision last week. This one involves retired professor Tim Ball, who has a history of blatantly misrepresenting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and comparing such efforts to (you guessed it) Hitler’s Germany.

The “nobody read it” defense

In 2011, Ball wrote a story titled “Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years” for the conservative website Canada Free Press. The story made a number of wildly false claims about Weaver, including that he had refused to contribute to the latest IPCC report, even though Weaver was a lead author of a chapter of the report. Ball’s story also criticized the IPCC’s entire approach and called for its chairman to resign. Ball described Weaver as knowing “very little about climate” and said he “got on the bandwagon of politics and funding.”

After Weaver (and a lawyer) sent a complaint to the website that had published the article, it was retracted, and Ball acknowledged some errors in an apology letter a couple of months later. But Weaver also filed a libel suit centered on the assertions that he was an unqualified and corrupt researcher.

In his defense, Ball argued that the article was obviously opinion and was mostly about climate scientists as a whole rather than Weaver, specifically. Curiously, he also challenged the Supreme Court of British Columbia’s jurisdiction on the basis that there was no evidence anyone in British Columbia read the article (other than Andrew Weaver).

Last week, the court decided in favor of Ball, the author of the article. The reasoning is somewhat surprising. Partly, the judge found that many of the article’s accusations could be read as complaints about the system of science and education—of which Weaver was just a part—rather than specifically alleging flaws in Weaver’s professional character.

But the judge also decided that the derogatory statements aimed more clearly at Weaver failed to meet the legal standard for defamation. His reason? No one could take them seriously. Citing a list of careless inaccuracies in Ball’s article, the judge said it lacked “a sufficient air of credibility to make them believable and therefore potentially defamatory.”

So bad it’s good

The decision references a previous case in which “the court found that certain published comments were not defamatory because they were so ludicrous and outrageous as to be unbelievable and therefore incapable of lowering the reputation of the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking persons.”

Asked about this decision, Lauren Kurtz of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund in the US gave Ars a few examples of cases that turned on similar questions—though not always in favor of the defendant.

A few years ago, a Canadian court ruled against a blogger who accused a law student of lying to the Ontario Human Rights Commission and supporting extremist violence. While the blogger’s lawyers argued he was a “provocateur” who wouldn’t be taken literally, the judge decided that “the defendant’s dominant motive in these blog posts was ill will and that his repeated failure to take even basic steps to check his facts showed a reckless disregard for the truth.”

In the US, an unsuccessful 1988 lawsuit filed by Jerry Falwell against the magazine Hustler is often cited to separate parody from libel. The magazine had published a parody of an actual advertisement, changed to portray Falwell (a well-known preacher) as an incestuous drunk. While offensive, the court found the parody too absurd to be taken seriously as defamation.

Similarly, climate scientist Michael Mann’s recent US case explicitly avoided comments it accepted were “rhetorical hyperbole” that “cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual.”

Essentially, the judge in this latest case found Tim Ball’s entire article outlining his case against climate science to be as transparently unserious as an intentional parody, which may not exactly be the victory Ball hoped for.