Analysis: Mike’s Legal Trick—Michael Mann Wins Defamation Suit Against Climate Critics

The “science believers” strike again, and truth suffers for it.

On Feb. 8, a jury in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia awarded climate scientist Michael Mann damages in his lawsuit against two writers who criticized his scientific claims about global warming. The fact it went to the jury at all is remarkable, and the trick Mann’s legal team pulled in closing arguments is one for the ages. Ultimately, this trial didn’t prove that Mann prevailed on the facts. Rather, much like the OJ Simpson murder trial three decades prior, it demonstrated the folly of a legal strategy which entrusts complex scientific questions to a jury.

Those defendants, writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, had written in 2012 that Mann’s famed “Hockey Stick” graph alleging global warming constituted scientific fraud; and that an investigation by Mann’s employer, Penn State University, resembled the coverup Penn State engaged in when investigating football coach Jerry Sandusky for child rape in 2011.

Twelve years later, Mann offered sparse evidence of damage he suffered and had few witnesses to call on his behalf.

For its part, the defense argued that Steyn and Simberg had the truth on their side, offering up numerous experts in the field of climate science to criticize Mann’s statistical analysis techniques. Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, testified on Simberg’s behalf that she believed the Hockey Stick graph qualified as fraudulent. She published her expert testimony on her blog:

It is my opinion that it is reasonable to have referred to the Hockey Stick in 2012 as ‘fraudulent,’ in the sense that aspects of it are deceptive and misleading:

• Image falsification: Mann’s efforts to conceal the so-called “divergence problem” by deleting downward-trending post-1960 data and also by splicing earlier proxy data with later instrumental data is consistent with most standards of image fraud.

• Cherry picking: Evidence shows that Mann engaged in selective data cherry picking to create the Hockey Stick, and that this cherry picking contributes to the perception of a “fraudulent” Hockey Stick by journalists, the public and scientists from other fields.

• Data falsification (the ‘upside-down’ Tiljander proxy): Substantial evidence shows that Mann inverted data from the Tiljander proxies in a version of the Hockey Stick published in 2008. Mann did not acknowledge his mistaken interpretation of data. Even after published identification of the mistake, this mistake has propagated through subsequent literature including the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.

The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige

Curry was only one of a number of expert witnesses that testified on behalf of Steyn and Simberg that the Hockey Stick was and is junk science.

The jury didn’t see it that way.

It remains to be seen whether the verdict will stand up on appeal, but for now, Michael Mann gets to claim he struck a blow against criticizing science itself, much in the same manner Anthony Fauci did in congressional testimony about questioning COVID science.

This will be remembered as Mike’s Legal Trick, just as Mike’s Nature Trick—and Mike’s Other Nature Trick—are remembered as his tortuous method of creating the Hockey Stick graph in the first place.

In a statement, Steyn’s spokesperson reacted to the verdict:

We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue. And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages. The punitive damage award of one million dollars will have to face due process scrutiny under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

The U.S. Supreme Court has indicated that punitive damages awards 10 times greater than compensatory damages awards are generally unconstitutional.

What is Mike’s Legal Trick? Steve Milloy, who runs JunkScience.com, explained on X/Twitter after the verdict:

DC jury awards @MichaelEMann $1 in compensatory damages from each defendant; and $1,000 in punitive damages against Rand Simberg and $1 million against @MarkSteynOnline in travesty of justice. I guess last day @washingtonpost jury tampering and the inappropriate last minute politicization of the trial by Mann’s attorney worked with the DC jury. Because Mann had not seemed to offer a shred of persuasive evidence. Someone had frowned at him in a supermarket? C’mon. The $1 in compensatory damages shows Mann was not actually harmed by anything that was written. The punitive figures represent message-sending to climate skeptics. It’s why dark money funded the lawsuit all these years.

Lots to unpack there. Let’s go through it one item at a time.

$1 In Compensatory Damages

The jury awarded $1 each from Steyn and Simberg to Mann for compensatory damages, or the actual financial harm caused to Mann by the blog posts. That is such a laughably low number as to be meaningless. Very telling that the jury awarded almost nothing when considering how much damage the blog posts caused to Mann. On the other hand…

Punitive Damages

The jury awarded $1,000 to Mann from Simberg, and $1,000,000 in punitive damages from Steyn. As many have noted, the Supreme Court has routinely thrown out punitive damages more than ten times the amount of compensatory damages as excessive and not pursuant to constitutional protections of due process. An appeal seems likely to get this amount reduced. However, while radical “dark money” groups have backed Mann’s entire legal effort and he’s paid zero of his own money in, this will represent more legal burden and significant expense for the defendants, Steyn and Simberg, to litigate. 

Jury Tampering by the Washington Post?

In another X/Twitter post, Milloy points out the puff piece run by the Washington Post giving coverage heavily biased in Mann’s favor as the trial wrapped up:

The jury instructions almost certainly warned jurors not to read or watch coverage of the trial, but since they weren’t sequestered, there was no possible enforcement.

Last-Minute Politicizing by Mann’s Attorney

This was one of the most shocking moments of the trial, when Mann’s attorney was giving his summation. It caused the defense to raise an objection:

Evidently, despite the objections, the jury bought the notion that one cannot question science itself. The attorney actually asked the jury to send a strong message to “stop the attacks on climate scientists.” John Williams, the attorney giving the closing remarks, said the jury should award punitive damages, “so that, in the future, no one will dare engage in climate denialism.” Williams went so far as to connect climate denialism to Donald Trump’s allegations of election fraud in 2020, which he said also needs to be suppressed, playing on the sentiments of a jury pool in deep blue D.C.

That was Mike’s Legal Trick.

This trial was not about the merits. Throughout the trial, tried in front of a jury pool from deep blue Washington, D.C., Mann’s legal team repeatedly cast the defendants and their numerous expert witnesses not as scientists or experts in their fields, but rather as climate deniers and fringe purveyors of ideas frowned upon by the scientific consensus. It was brilliant sophistry that worked on the jury, especially since the testimony often got bogged down in technicalities that were difficult to follow even for seasoned court observers.

Follow the Money

Mann often used his social media following to beg for money so he could attack more of his critics. He solicited donations to the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF). CSLDF was founded specifically to defend Mann in a lawsuit filed against him by the State of Virginia after the Climategate email scandal.

For reference, Kevin Killough of Just The News summarized the main points of the blog posts at question in the D.C. trial:

According Judge Alfred Irving’s summary of the case given to the jury, Simberg had posted an article on his blog that compared the Penn State’s investigation into assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who was found guilty in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 young boys over the course of 15 years, to the investigation of Mann’s research on global historic temperatures as shown in the scientist’s controversial hockey stick graph, which many scientists have questioned.

Steyn quoted Simberg’s post and called Mann’s research “fraudulent.” Mann contended that as a result of these posts, his reputation was harmed.

John Hinderaker, who runs the Power Line blog, probably summed up the case the best, saying:

In a sane world, this case never would have gone to the jury. The legal standard is actual malice, which means the defendants must have thought, subjectively, that what they said wasn’t likely true. In this case, there was no evidence whatever that Steyn and Simberg didn’t sincerely believe that what they said was true. Indeed, as Mark pointed out in closing argument, he has been saying the same things about Mann’s hockey stick for something like 21 years, and even wrote a book about it.

Instead, Mann’s legal team successfully argued that this case didn’t center on the legal standard of actual malice, or the truth of the statements made in the articles by Steyn and Simberg. Rather, they won on the noble fight against misinformation, attacks on science, and the overwhelming notion that we must do something to save Earth from the degradations of man.

Meanwhile, we still wait for salvation from the scientific degradations of Mann.