Last Mann Standing

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify the roles of Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn in the legal disputes involving Michael Mann. The original text suggested that Steyn himself made the comparison between Mann and Jerry Sandusky. In fact, the comparison originated with Simberg, and Steyn quoted and commented on Simberg’s remarks while explicitly distancing himself from the metaphor. We regret any confusion this may have caused and have revised the article to accurately reflect these details.

Michael Mann has received a modicum of the comeuppance he deserves. A court in Washington, DC, has ordered him to pay the National Review $540,820.21  for court costs and attorney’s fees. This is the final settlement of a nuisance suit brought by Mann against the magazine many years ago.

To those not familiar with the case, it goes back to a time when suspicion abounded that Mann, a professor of climatology at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), may not have been entirely scrupulous in the way he reported his supposedly scientific findings. This mattered because Mann was the originator, in 1998, of the famous “hockey stick graph,” which purported to show drastic increases in global temperatures beginning in the late twentieth century. The International Panel on Climate Change features the hockey stick graph as its chief visual aid in its 2001 Third Assessment Report. The image became the “icon” of the global warming panic movement.

Doubts about its validity became widespread, but Professor Mann basked in his celebrity.

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Matters took a serious turn in 2009 when someone released a cache of documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. A straightforward reading of some of the emails in that cache suggested that Mann had manipulated data to support his theory and had also participated in attempts to suppress rival scientific papers. Penn State “investigated” and, in 2012, cleared Mann of any wrongdoing.

A fair number of observers—myself included—questioned the integrity of that investigation and continued to harbor suspicions about the reliability of his findings.

One chooses one’s words carefully on this matter. Dr. Mann is jealous of his reputation and has sued several parties, including the National Review, for implying that he is anything but a diligent researcher devoted to the highest standards of scientific conduct. I wish to be clear that I have no reason to think otherwise. But even diligent researchers sometimes make mistakes.

By way of additional context, predictions of climate catastrophe extrapolated from measurable increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by the Industrial Revolution and modern use of fossil fuels had become a highly contentious issue by 2010. Indeed, it still is, with reputable scientists, as well as economists and political leaders taking strongly polarized positions. The issues are not whether the climate changes, whether the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, or whether CO2 is a “greenhouse gas,” but whether any of this adds up to a credible threat of catastrophe.

I am among those who see the real catastrophe in the resulting hysteria, the damage it has done to legitimate scientific inquiry, and the reign of political error it has brought. Western governments, including our own, have wasted trillions of dollars fighting a phantom danger. Colleges and universities, which, above all other institutions, should have proceeded cautiously, have recklessly embraced the hysteria. And government incentives have prompted scientific researchers to fit their work into the prevailing agenda.

The persisting doubts about catastrophic global warming are the deep background to what happened in 2011. That was the year when a child sex abuse scandal roiled Penn State, and the university president, Graham Spanier, and longtime football coach, Joe Paterno, were removed on the suspicion that they had participated in a cover-up. These events had no direct bearing on Mann, but the coincidence of two “scandals” involving alleged cover-ups prompted several observers to make sarcastic remarks. Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, drew a controversial parallel between Sandusky and Mann, accusing Mann of having “molested and tortured data.” Mann filed lawsuits against Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for the comment. He also sued Mark Steyn and the National Review for quoting and expanding on Simberg’s statement, though Steyn explicitly distanced himself from the metaphor. Last year, a court awarded Mann $1 million in his case against Steyn. I wrote about the case in the American Conservative, where the reader who is interested in the fuller account can find a wealth of additional detail. (I should add that Jerry Sandusky also has defenders who believe he was wrongly accused).

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When the Spaniard, Mann, and Sandusky matters were happening, I was a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, where my heterodox views on climate change occasioned a fair amount of consternation among readers.  I came near to making the comparison that Steyne did, but I happily avoided any formulation that Mann could twist into an action for libel. Not that he didn’t try—or so the editors at the Chronicle told me. They had heard from Mann’s lawyer but apparently decided that the National Review, Mark Steyne, and a third writer were more promising targets. The judgment against Steyn is a disgrace. The new verdict against Mann rewards National Review for its patient endurance of years of lawfare against it by a malicious actor.  (NB: my opinion. I have no objective proof of Dr. Mann’s malignity). National Review reports that its actual legal costs far exceed the $540,000 Mann must now pay. So, in a practical sense, Dr. Mann has been rewarded for his efforts to bully his critics into silence.

But I suspect that history will not judge him kindly, and science will one day, too, wake up from its long global warming nap and ask, “How could we have fallen for this?”

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Michael E. Mann. (2024, December 13). on Wikipedia.