The Fall of Climate Change Poster Boy Michael Mann

A judge finds that the father of the "hockey stick" chart knowingly and willfully used “erroneous and misleading information.”

Apr 05, 2025

A climate scientist's legal win just got flipped on its head - EHN

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by James Delingpole
April 5, 2025

Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring.

Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – he’d become the poster boy for the alleged global warming apocalypse. Never before had a scientist demonstrated the threat of imminent climate catastrophe so graphically or dramatically.

But from the start, Mann’s thesis came under attack from an array of critics. They argued, for example, that the proxies he had used to recreate early temperatures (e.g. tree ring data) were unreliable; that his statistical methodology was flawed; that his algorithms were so corrupt that whatever data you input, you’d always get the same unscientific, politically driven hockey stick shape.

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And at last those critics have been vindicated. Not, unfortunately, by an official re-examination of Mann’s chart, which is never going to happen because there are too many vested interests at stake. But rather in the unlikely setting of a Jarndyce versus Jarndyce-style lawsuit, which Mann launched years ago with a view to impoverishing and immiserating his detractors, but which has recently backfired spectacularly.

The lawsuit has been grinding through the U.S. courts since 2012, when Mann filed a defamation lawsuit against two journalists. One, the Canadian wag and former Spectator critic Mark Steyn, had called Mann’s work “fraudulent.” The other, Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had said that Mann had “molested and tortured data,” calling him “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” in reference to a convicted child abuser.

For the first few years of this protracted exercise in lawfare, Mann appeared to be making all the running. “The process is the punishment” it’s often said of such cases, which are designed to drag on and on to the point where the defendants can no longer afford legal representation and are forced into humiliating and costly capitulation.

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Steyn and Simberg fought back by accusing Mann of SLAPP (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”), i.e. of using the law to censor legitimate criticism. But for a long period, it looked as if their heroic struggle against Mann and his seemingly bottomless-pocketed sponsors (it is not known who is paying his legal fees) was going to be in vain. At one terrifying point early last year, a jury decided that for the crime of trenchant critical analysis Steyn should be liable to Mann for $1 million in punitive damages.

More recently, however, Mann has found himself very much on the back foot. This month, the judge delivered his final judgment order, reducing Steyn’s punitive $1 million damages to a much more manageable $5,000. And last week, the judge took the unusual step of publicly shredding the moral character of both Mann and his lawyers. They had acted in “bad faith” on multiple occasions, he declared. Worse, the two lead lawyers had “each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the court,” while Mann had “knowingly participated in the falsehood” even to the point of using “erroneous and misleading information.”

This, piquantly, will render Mann liable for some of the legal costs of the men he was trying to sue.

The bigger question now arises: if Mann cannot even be trusted to tell the truth when he’s under oath and in court on pain of perjury, why on earth should any of us take him seriously on the subject of climate change? And why should a man with a track record of cheating and lying ever have been allowed to play such a pivotal role in everything from the future of the global economy to the kind of scaremongering nonsense our children are forced to learn in science and geography classes?

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The hockey stick, let us never forget, was promoted as the last nail in the coffin of climate skepticism. “It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been,” declared a BBC journalist, and on this rare occasion that BBC journalist was right. The hockey stick was cited frequently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report; it was used in support of the Kyoto Treaty; it appeared in textbooks; it was quoted by politicians as proof that urgent action needed to be taken.

Yet all along, the hockey stick theorem was questionable. And you didn’t need to be a scientist, or a statistician, or any kind of “expert” to know this. There were more than enough informed amateurs, such as Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, offering their erudite, detailed takedowns. Neither Mann nor any of his so-called “hockey team” allies could refute them. All they could ever manage was ad homs (“I hope you are not fooled by any of the myths about the hockey stick that are perpetrated by contrarians, right-wing thinktanks and fossil fuel industry disinformation,” spluttered Mann), appeals to authority and indignant pearl-clutching.

Mann’s hockey stick is still wielded to club critics, but he is revealed as a liar and his dismal legacy — from the wind turbines despoiling your horizon to the net-zero rules killing your business — lives on.

— This essay originally appeared at The Spectator World.