Michael Mann’s Shrinking Credibility: From Hockey Stick Hokum to Desperate Defenses of Climate Alarmism By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant

“As someone who’s spent years advocating for energy humanism—the idea that we should prioritize human flourishing by unleashing abundant, reliable energy—I’ve watched with interest…”

Michael Mann’s Shrinking Credibility: From Hockey Stick Hokum to Desperate Defenses of Climate Alarmism

By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant

As someone who’s spent years advocating for energy humanism—the idea that we should prioritize human flourishing by unleashing abundant, reliable energy—I’ve watched with interest as the climate alarmist establishment crumbles under its weight. Few figures embody this decline more than Michael Mann, the once-celebrated creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. What started as a supposedly groundbreaking depiction of unprecedented global warming has devolved into a symbol of scientific overreach, legal embarrassments, and now, frantic pushback against commonsense reviews of climate policy.

Mann’s latest outbursts over the Department of Energy’s (DOE) A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate are just the latest chapter in his fading relevance, and they deserve a thorough debunking through the lens of practical environmentalism.

Let’s start at the beginning: Mann’s 1998 hockey stick paper flattened out centuries of natural climate variability to make modern warming look like a sharp, scary blade. It became the poster child for the UN’s IPCC reports and Al Gore’s apocalyptic slideshows. But cracks appeared almost immediately.

Critics, including statisticians like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, exposed methodological flaws—cherry-picked data, dubious statistical techniques, and a reliance on proxy records that conveniently “hid the decline” in tree-ring data when it didn’t fit the narrative. The 2009 Climategate emails further tarnished Mann’s image, revealing him as part of a clique more interested in silencing dissent than pursuing truth.

Congressional investigations and independent reviews, like the Wegman Report, confirmed the hockey stick’s unreliability, yet Mann doubled down, suing critics and branding them “deniers.”

Fast-forward to his recent court battles, where Mann’s credibility took a serious hit. In his long-running defamation suit against writers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn—who compared Mann’s work to the Jerry Sandusky scandal and called it “fraudulent”—Mann scored a nominal win in February 2024, with a jury awarding him $1 in compensatory damages plus punitive awards. But that “victory” quickly soured. By March 2025, a judge slashed the $1 million punitive damages against Steyn to just $5,000, citing constitutional limits on excessive punishments.

Worse, in May 2025, the court ordered Mann to pay over $477,000 in legal fees to his opponents, stemming from his failed counterclaims and discovery abuses. In fact, Judge Alfred Irving sanctioned Mann and his legal team for misconduct, specifically for presenting misleading grant funding data during the trial. Some outlets even reported the case as “overturned” in key aspects, highlighting how Mann’s aggressive litigation backfired. This isn’t the mark of a confident scientist; it’s the desperation of someone whose reputation is built on sand. Mann’s legal misadventures have cost him financially and professionally, reinforcing the view that he’s more wild-eyed litigator than researcher.

Now, enter the DOE’s July 2025 report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate—a much-needed “red team” assessment that challenges the exaggerated claims underpinning the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. Commissioned under an administration willing to question the orthodoxy, the report reviews peer-reviewed literature and concludes that alarmists have overstated the risks from greenhouse gases. It points out uncertainties in climate models, the benefits of CO2 fertilization for agriculture, and the minimal detectable impacts on U.S. weather extremes.

This isn’t denial; it’s a balanced critique to inform policy without the hysteria. Predictably, the climate industrial complex— that web of bureaucrats, subsidy-chasing green energy firms, and media amplifiers who profit from fear—has erupted in outrage.

Michael Mann, ever the attack dog, jumped in with both feet. On X (formerly Twitter), he decried the Trump administration’s “assault on climate action” and the “reversal of the Bush-era Endangerment Finding,” appearing on MSNBC and BBC to warn of “dangerous climate consequences.” He frames the DOE report as part of a sinister plot to deregulate emissions, ignoring that the Endangerment Finding itself was a political maneuver, not pure science.

Mann’s response is textbook propaganda from the climate complex: amplify doom, ignore trade-offs, and smear critics. But let’s apply some practical environmentalism here. Actual environmental progress comes from human ingenuity powered by energy, not from top-down restrictions that hobble economies.

Mann’s hysteria overlooks the real endangerment: energy poverty. Billions worldwide lack access to reliable electricity, clean water, and modern agriculture—problems solved by fossil fuels have lifted humanity out of misery for over a century. Restricting these fuels under the guise of “saving the planet” condemns the poor to continued suffering, all while the wealthy elite fly private jets to climate conferences. The DOE report rightly questions whether the projected harms justify such sacrifices, noting that adaptation through technology—fueled by abundant energy—is far more effective than futile attempts to control the climate.

This is energy humanism in action: We don’t demonize CO2, a plant food greening the Earth; we celebrate the fossil future that powers hospitals, farms, and innovation. Mann and his ilk represent the climate industrial complex at its worst—peddling fear to justify trillions in subsidies for unreliable wind and solar, which enrich cronies while raising energy costs for everyone else. Their propaganda has real victims: families in developing nations dying from preventable diseases because anti-fossil policies block power plants to provide life-giving electricity.

Mann’s reputation is in tatters, from the debunked hockey stick to courtroom humiliations and these knee-jerk attacks on honest scientific review. It’s time to move beyond alarmism toward a pro-human environmentalism that embraces energy freedom. The DOE report is a step in the right direction—let’s hope it leads to policies that truly benefit humanity, not just the egos of fading activists like Michael Mann.

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• STEPHEN HEINS
  on October 4, 2017 at 10:55 pm
  [A humble scientist is a wise scientist. Anyone making predictions should heed the words of the great philosopher Casey Stengel: “Don’t make prediction especially about the future.” This might be a great time to have a thorough discussion on climate change, without rancor or name-calling.
  Let’s admit that there are many, many people in the world who haven’t accepted the fact that the planet will always face an uncertain future, with imperfect measurements, and with imperfect knowledge, humans, and politics.
  Science is never settled. Steve]
  

• STEPHEN HEINS
  on October 4, 2017 at 11:24 pm
  P.S. Clearly, Michael Mann has no sense of humor, nor does he have a sense of irony. As an “Academic freedom lecturer,” he gave a speech preaching for the end of the climate debate at University of Michigan, after President Mark Schlissel introduced Mann by saying that UM will always be “an unalienable forum for discovery, debate, and discussion.
  
  

https://record.umich.edu/articles/academic-freedom-lecturer-takes-claims-climate-change-deniers/