Climate change alarmist Michael Mann's ill-conceived lawsuit against the online critics continued to go pear-shaped Wednesday as a federal judge sanctioned Mann and his legal counsel for acting in "bad faith." That, of course, could easily describe Mann's entire career as a climate grifter. "Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence," wrote DC Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving, Jr., (George W. Bush appointee), "That Dr. Mann, through [his lawyers] Mr. Fontaine and Mr. Williams, acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding."

The saga began in 2012 when Mann, bruised from the email leak that seemed to indicate his famous "hockey stick" graph was a deliberate fraud (remember "hide the decline?"), decided to go after a handful of particularly vocal critics who dubbed him the "Jerry Sandusky of climate change," a hat tip to Penn State's legendary football coach. They were the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a CEI blogger Rand Simberg, National Review, and NR contributor Mark Steyn.

Mann had a good run of it, eventually winning a Supreme Court decision that allowed the case to proceed to trial over Justice Samuel Alito's objections. In 2021, the National Review and CEI were able to extricate themselves from the lawsuit; NR was awarded $530,820.21 in attorney's fees. The cases against Simberg and Steyn, however, went ahead.

The apogee of Mann's courthouse vendetta happened on February 8, 2024, when a DC jury found in favor of Mann.

The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.

The jury also found the writers had made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same.

“This is a victory for science and it’s a victory for scientists,” Dr. Mann said.

The $1,000 and $1 million awards against Simberg and Steyn, respectively, were because of lost grant opportunities Mann had claimed. I think this summary of the case gets it right:

The defense made a big mistake in thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case while Mann chose not to put one on. That was wrong.

There is no equivalence here between the “renowned” Michael Mann and the “right-wing trolls” who deny climate science and support Donald Trump. The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put on by the prosecution and the defense. Mann simply had to show up.

The fact that the jury awarded him only $2 in actual damages and $1,001,000 in punitive damages (send a message!) supports this interpretation — The defense won on merits, and Mann won on the framing and the politics.

There was celebration on the left: Michael Mann climate scientist wins defamation case: NPR.

But it didn't last long. Last Tuesday, the trial judge, citing the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, reduced the punitive damages against Steyn to $5,000. But the hammer really fell Wednesday when the judge found that Mann and his attorney had lied about Mann's financial losses to inflate the jury verdict.

The Court determines that the appropriate sanction is to award each Defendant the approximate expenses they incurred in responding to Dr. Mann’s bad faith trial misconduct, starting with Mr. Fontaine’s [Mann’s counsel] redirect examination. The Court arrives at such a sanction because the misconduct of Dr. Mann and his counsel (1) was extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent; (2) subjected a jury not only to false evidence and grievous misrepresentations about a crucial part of Dr. Mann’s case, but also to additional trial proceedings for correcting the record and the jury’s impressions thereof that otherwise likely would have been unnecessary; (3) further complicated a trial already rife with convoluted and difficult legal and factual issues; and (4) burdened Defendants and the Court with the time- and resource-intensive task of ascertaining the true extent of the misconduct and determining appropriate remedial measures for the same, all without any meaningful acknowledgement of the nature of the misconduct by Dr. Mann or his attorneys.

Now Mann and his lawyer will be sanctioned.

I'd like to say that Mann lost this trial, but I'm not sure that's the case. He'll find deep-pocketed friends to pay off the money he lost. He's still employed at Penn State. Simberg and Steyn lost 13 years of their lives and have been largely sidelined from climate change debates. I have no knowledge of their finances, but I'm willing to bet they suffered a lot more than Mann. And Mann's suit has served the purpose for which it was intended. I didn't write about half of the very witty things I wanted to write about Mann because I don't have the time or money to fight off even a bullsh** lawsuit by someone with Mann's backing and resources. I'm sure others have made the same calculation. 

The sanctions for lying will be mildly embarrassing to Mann, but what survives are the two judgments for defamation he won, which will serve as a precedent in the future.

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