Court orders famed climate scientist to cut fat checks to organization, writer he sued

A Washington, D.C., court ordered University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann to pay nearly $500,000 in legal fees combined to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and writer Rand Simberg on Thursday, 13 years after Mann first filed a defamation suit against the writer and think tank.

In February 2024, Mann initially won his defamation trial against conservative writers Mark Steyn and Simberg, both of whom criticized his “hockey stick” climate model as flawed. However, Judge Alfred S. Irving of the D.C. Superior Court ruled Thursday that Mann must pay CEI and Simberg $477,350.80 in attorney’s fees within thirty days under the Anti-SLAPP Act, a law that provides legal protection to safeguard public speech.

Mann was previously ordered in January to pay National Review — another defendant in his defamation suit —approximately $531,000. Between the two orders, Mann is now on the hook for approximately $1 million in payments to people and organizations he initially sued.

Mann first sued Steyn, Simberg, CEI and National Review in 2012 for defamation over criticism of his work, particularly his climate “hockey stick” graph. Simberg initially compared Mann to convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky for Mann’s alleged data manipulation in his climate model in a blog post for CEI. Steyn referenced Simberg’s blog post in his own writing about the model for National Review, and editor Rich Lowry then wrote a follow-up post for the conservative outlet defending Steyn’s comments.

“Despite some claims proceeding, the Court of Appeals determined that some of Dr. Mann’s claims were indeed without merit, eliminating all of the claims against CEI related to its own speech that in turn significantly narrowed discovery and limited the remaining litigation to whether CEI could be held vicariously liable for Mr. Simberg’s blog post,” Irving’s ruling reads

D.C. Superior Court Judge Jennifer M. Anderson, who was previously on the case, ruled in 2021 that National Review could not be held to “actual malice” from Mann’s suit, but Steyn and Simberg were eventually found by a jury to have defamed Mann.

Notably, Irving determined in March that Mann and his attorneys had misled the jury in the defamation trial that concluded in February 2024. Specifically, Mann and his lawyers “each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information,” Irving wrote in his March 12 filing.

A 2012 email from Mann surfaced during the discovery process in the case, in which he said he hoped the lawsuit would “ruin” National Review, a publication he believed to be a “threat to our children” and servile to “greedy fat cat corporate masters.”

“The details of Mann’s conduct here remain shocking — especially in a nation such as the United States, which was built atop the foundations of free expression. All those years, all those words, all of that litigation, over … a couple of blog posts that criticized Mann for an argument that he had offered up during a quotidian political dispute,” National Review’s editors wrote in January. “Science — to which Mann is supposed to be devoted — inevitably involves disagreement. And yet, Mann proved incapable of handling dissent. Instead of engaging in debate, he sued us — for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. This, suffice it to say, is not how debate in America should work.”

Mann, CEI and Simberg did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

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