Mark Steyn: The Man Who Took Michael Mann to the Woodshed — and Endured Thirteen Years of Abuse to Do It

By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant

Mark Steyn: The Man Who Took Michael Mann to the Woodshed — and Endured Thirteen Years of Abuse to Do It

By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant

In the long, sorry annals of the climate wars, few stories cut closer to the bone than the one involving Mark Steyn and Michael Mann. One man wielded a sharp pen and an even sharper mind. The other wielded lawsuits, institutional power, and a determination to make dissent expensive.

For more than a decade, Steyn paid the price — in time, treasure, and relentless personal attacks — simply for refusing to bow to the new orthodoxy that says certain questions about climate science are now off-limits.

Steyn is no stranger to standing alone. The Canadian-born writer, bestselling author of America Alone and After America, and veteran broadcaster has spent years defending free speech against the soft totalitarianism of human-rights commissions, campus speech codes, and now the climate enforcers.

He guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, filled halls from Toronto to Sydney, and built a following by saying plainly what others only whispered. When he turned his attention to the climate debate, he did what good writers do: he followed the evidence and the emails where they led.

In 2012, Steyn wrote a short piece on National Review that quoted Rand Simberg’s observation about Penn State’s handling of Michael Mann. Simberg had noted the parallel between the university’s whitewash of Mann’s “hockey stick” work and its earlier, infamous handling of Jerry Sandusky.

Steyn called Mann’s famous graph “fraudulent” and said the Climategate emails had shown a scientist more interested in narrative than in the awkward decline hiding in the tree-ring data. That was enough. Mann sued Steyn, Simberg, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for defamation.

The case became a thirteen-year legal siege. National Review and CEI were eventually dismissed, but Steyn and Simberg stayed in the fight. Steyn represented himself for long stretches, later bringing in counsel for trial. He refused to settle on principle. He understood what was at stake: if a jury could decide the validity of a scientific claim and punish those who questioned it, then the First Amendment would be reduced to a parchment barrier against well-funded lawfare.

I saw Michael Mann up close in March 2017, testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He was at his bullying, uncivil best — name-calling, interrupting, denying under oath that he had ever called Dr. Judith Curry a “denier” in earlier interviews. Curry, sitting right there on the panel, dryly suggested he read his own remarks. Mann had no answer. No sense of irony. No sense of humor about his own contradictions.

Later, at a University of Michigan event, the same Michael Mann — now collecting ethics awards and Tyler Prizes and election to the National Academy of Sciences — gave a speech preaching for “the end of climate change debate.” The university president had just introduced him by praising Michigan as “an inalienable forum for discovery, debate, and discussion.” Mann apparently missed the irony.

He has spent years warning activists against “climate doomism” that might demotivate them, while simultaneously helping keep the movement balanced on a knife-edge of fear and controlled despair. Even the BBC, in Mann’s view, has sometimes been too alarmist.

That is the man Steyn took on.

For thirteen years Mann’s legal team kept the case alive through motions, appeals, and discovery fights. Steyn compiled and published A Disgrace to the Profession, a 300-page book of scientists in their own words questioning Mann’s methods, his data handling, and the damage done to the reputation of climate science itself. He kept writing, kept broadcasting, kept showing up.

The personal cost was enormous. Legal bills mount quickly when you are not backed by a university foundation or a network of activist donors. The emotional tax of living under a lawsuit that never ends is heavier still.

In January 2024 the case finally reached a D.C. jury. After twelve years, the panel awarded Mann one dollar in compensatory damages from Steyn — meaning they found no real economic harm from the 2012 post. They did award a million dollars in punitive damages. Post-trial motions changed the picture dramatically. The judge slashed the punitive award against Steyn from $1 million to $5,000, calling the original figure grossly excessive.

Mann and his lawyers were sanctioned for presenting false evidence to the jury about supposed lost grant funding. Mann was ordered to pay National Review more than $530,000 in attorney fees under D.C.’s anti-SLAPP statute. He later settled the remaining claims against National Review by dropping his appeals in exchange for the fees being waived. Small additional sanctions went to Steyn and Simberg for the trouble of disproving Mann’s exaggerated damages claims.

After all that time, all that money, all that public posturing about defending science, Mann walked away with a net loss and a badly damaged “victory.” The hockey stick and the Climategate emails remain exactly where Steyn left them: objects of legitimate, ongoing scientific and historical scrutiny.

Heins thinkings on this one run straight and plain.

First, you do not end debate by declaring it over from a university podium or a courtroom. Science that cannot withstand questioning is not science; it is dogma wearing a lab coat. Second, when a plaintiff spends thirteen years trying to bankrupt critics and then gets sanctioned for bad-faith evidence, the real story is not the original blog post. It is the abuse of process. Third, free speech is not free when only the well-funded or the institutionally protected can afford to exercise it. Steyn paid the bill personally because someone had to show that the price of dissent would not be silence.

Mark Steyn did not set out to become a climate martyr. He set out to write what he saw. In doing so he exposed the difference between a scientist who welcomes scrutiny and one who reaches for the nearest lawyer or ethics award to avoid it. He reminded us that the First Amendment was written precisely for the moments when powerful people decide certain opinions have become too dangerous to utter.

In my Tribute Series, I have honored many who refused to let alarmism crowd out abundance, reason, and human flourishing. Mark Steyn belongs at the front of that line. He took the hits, carried the fight for more than a decade, and never stopped telling the truth as he found it. That kind of courage is rare. In a world where too many choose comfort over clarity, it is worth remembering — and worth celebrating — the man who went to the woodshed and stayed there until the job was done.

The climate debate is not over. Thanks in part to people like Mark Steyn, it never will be. And that is the best tribute any truth-teller can receive.