Michael Mann Claiming a Nobel Prize He Didn't Receive

A few days ago, Professor Michael Mann  of the University pf Pennsylvania — a climate scientist whose “hockey stick” graph was at the center of, among other things, Al Gore Jr.’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” — filed a libel suit against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Mark Steyn, and (regular PJ contributor) Rand Simberg.  The reason for the libel suit was that both Steyn and Simberg had questioned whether the investigation that “exonerated” Mann of misconduct related to the Climategate emails (we revealed them at PJM in 2010.)

Well, there are some interesting things to be found in the complaint, including page 2 paragraph 2, in which he claims to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently because he was one of the IPCC scientists.  The IPCC received the Peace Prize along with Al Gore in 2007.  Mann even shows a certificate for this:

The Nobel Committee is usually pretty careful with these things, and the IPCC had more than a thousand participants — are they all Nobel Laureates?  The Washington Examiner contacted the Nobel Committee, and got this answer:

Geir Lundestad, Director, Professor, or The Norwegian Nobel Institute emailed me back with the following:

1) Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
2) He did not receive any personal certificate. He has taken the diploma awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and to Al Gore) and made his own text underneath this authentic-looking diploma.
3) The text underneath the diploma is entirely his own. We issued only the diploma to the IPCC as such. No individuals on the IPCC side received anything in 2007.

Lundestad goes on to say that, “Unfortunately we often experience that members of organizations that have indeed been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize issue various forms of personal diplomas to indicate that they personally have received the Nobel Peace Prize. They have not.”

This should be an interesting lawsuit indeed.