Michael Mann Overboard A climate scientist has dragged his critics though the D.C. courts for 12 years. William McGurn
Anthony Fauci isn’t the only oracle of science who regards dissent from his findings as heresy.
Meet Michael Mann. He is the climate scientist who gave us the iconic “hockey stick” graph showing a sharp rise in the global temperature in the 20th century. He has been pursuing two of the stick’s critics—conservative author Mark Steyn and policy analyst Rand Simberg—through the courts for 12 years, saying they defamed him by attacking his personal and professional integrity. Their fate will be decided any day now by a District of Columbia Superior Court jury.
This isn’t Mr. Mann’s first legal rodeo. In 2011 he sued geographer Tim Ball in Canadian court for saying in an interview that “Michael Mann at Penn State should be in the state pen, not Penn State.” In 2019 a Canadian judge dismissed the charges because of the “inexcusable” delay in the trial and ordered Mr. Mann to pay Ball’s legal costs. But news reports say Mr. Mann never paid, and Ball died in 2022.
But back to the science. Mr. Mann’s hockey stick charts the Earth’s temperatures since the year 1000, showing a slow decline that turned sharply upward in the 20th century. Critics have questioned Mr. Mann’s statistical methods and the proxies he used. These proxies include the data from tree rings with which he estimated surface temperatures in medieval times.
In a 2012 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute blog, Mr. Simberg let it rip. He likened Mr. Mann to a Penn State football coach just found guilty of having sexually abused boys: “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
Mr. Steyn then quoted Mr. Simberg in his own post for National Review Online. “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.”
Mr. Steyn was referring to leaked emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. These showed there was far from a scientific consensus about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decision to feature the hockey stick in its 2001 report. Both Mr. Steyn and Mr. Simberg suggested that Penn State had covered for Mr. Mann just as it had for Mr. Sandusky.
So Mr. Mann sued. He pointed to independent investigations by the National Science Foundation and Penn State that had cleared him of any research misconduct.
Three years ago, a judge dropped National Review and CEI from the suit, ruling they weren’t liable because Messrs. Steyn and Simberg weren’t their employees. But the judge’s decision can be appealed once the lawsuit itself is resolved—so CEI and National Review could still find themselves on the hook.
Meanwhile in Washington, Mr. Steyn is acting as his own counsel, which may not be wise but is entertaining. He obviously feels passionately about free speech and equally passionately that he can defend it. At the end of each day of the trial, his website features re-enactments of some of the more spirited encounters.
During the trial, Mr. Steyn characterized Mr. Mann as a “guy who can dish it out but can’t take it.” In an April 2023 tweet touting his own book on the climate wars, Mr. Mann said one criticism of the hockey stick had “a disturbing connection w/ the bad stats used to support early theories of white supremacy.” In addition, one of Mr. Mann’s witnesses in the trial, Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, had admonished Mr. Mann more than two decades ago that his “scorched earth” approach to criticism—even criticism that is unreasonable—wasn’t doing his reputation any good.
On the stand last week, Mr. Mann also admitted that 12 years of litigation had cost him nothing, though he declined to name who was funding it. In sharp contrast, National Review’s legal defense has gone through millions in insurance claims and significant out-of-pocket expenses.
That seems to be the goal, judging by one of Mr. Mann’s emails explaining his rationale: “Going to talk w/ some big time libel lawyers to see if there is the potential to bring down this filthy organization [National Review] for good.”
The beauty of “bringing down” National Review or any of the other defendants is that Mr. Mann doesn’t have to prevail to do it; he just has to keep the suit going in hopes the legal fees bury them. This is lawfare. The message is: If you don’t like a critic’s tweet or blog posts, just drag him through the courts. It’s especially sweet if someone else foots your bill.
That isn’t the way science ought to be practiced. We know now, for example, that Dr. Fauci tried to quash those who questioned lockdowns. With both Dr. Fauci and Mr. Mann, the real issue is not so much that they got things wrong but that they tried to suppress the robust debate that is necessary for scientific truth.
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