A Washington, D.C., jury found two critics of a high-profile climate scientist liable for defamation on Thursday, an outcome that has the potential to introduce a “chilling effect” on those who criticize scientific consensus, according to several of those dissenting voices. Michael Mann won a defamation suit he originally filed in October 2012 against Rand Simberg, who compared Mann to convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky for Mann’s alleged data manipulation in his landmark 1998 “hockey stick” climate model in a blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and Mark Steyn, a right-of…