Professor Michael Mann’s lawsuit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review has run into a little problem. Mann claims in his lawsuit that he was a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some actual fact checkers used a 20th century device called the telephone to call the Nobel Committee and ask; the committee said: No. Only the IPCC as an organization and Al Gore won the 2007 award. But Penn State University, apparently, didn’t bother to make a phone call when it conducted its own investigation into Mann’s work.

Mark Steyn (one of the named parties in the lawsuit) thinks that error could be material to the case. Mann’s claim that CEI and National Review defamed him relies in part on Penn State’s “exoneration” of his work, and that investigation in turn cited Mann’s Nobel as one of the reasons for concluding his work was copacetic. Steyn quotes the Penn State review:

Moreover, Dr. Mann’s work on the Third Assessment Report (2001) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received recognition (along with several hundred other scientists) by being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field. [National Review, November 1]

Of course, if Mann hadn’t been thoroughly ensconced in an ivory tower bubble, he might have noticed that claiming to be a Nobel Peace Prize Winner no longer carries much weight, as National Review’s recent ad in the Penn State student newspaper very cleverly pointed out.