Hockey Stick Shenanigans and Fraudulent Climate Science: Mark Steyn Has The Last Laugh

"I called the hockey stick fraudulent because it is in every sense, both in its construction, and in the uses to which it's been put...."

So said Mark Steyn, a well-known Canadian author, and a radio and television host and presenter, at a keynote speech at the Heartland Institute's 10th International Conference on Climate Change in 2015. The hockey stick he was referring is a temperature graph for the northern hemisphere for the past 1000 years, published in the “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC’s third assessment report in 2001. The graph is called a hockey stick graph because the shape somewhat resembles an ice hockey stick with a long, flat “shaft” and a big “blade” shooting up at the end.

Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, was a co-author of the paper which carried the original “hockey stick” graph published in the journal Nature in 1998. According to Mann, the paper showed that the Earth’s temperature had spiked upward during the 20th century, demonstrating this rise was “unprecedented” over at least the past millennium.

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of Mann’s “proxy reconstruction” of the Northern hemisphere’s average temperatures of the last millennia. It became the single most important icon of the modern “anthropogenic global warming” paradigm. In Mann’s own words, the hockey stick told a simple story. “There is something unprecedented about the warming we are experiencing today and, by implication, it has something to do with us and our profligate burning of fossil fuels.”

The “hockey stick” chart went viral and become a rallying cry for environmentalists and politicians who opposed fossil fuels and pursued a global climate agenda. Nearly every major newspaper and television news network covered the study as Mann himself notes elatedly in his own assessment of the article for Scientific American 20 years after it was published. As science writer Matt Ridley remarked, Mann’s hockey stick chart so “thrilled” the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change organized under the UN), that “it published it six times in its third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC chairman at his press conference.” Not surprisingly, it got star billing in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”.

If the blade of Mann’s hockey stick showed an unprecedented rise in global temperature coinciding neatly with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, its millennia-long relatively straight shaft also performed a critical function. The hockey stick in effect abolished the Medieval Warming Period (800 – 1300 AD) which was part of the previously accepted climatological record. By deleting reference to the MWP, the hockey stick persuaded people and politicians into thinking that modern global warming was unprecedented and hence entirely man-made.

Commentator Rupert Darwall points out that “the Medieval Warm Period presented a twofold problem to the new climate change orthodoxy. It implied a much greater amplitude of natural variability beyond the bounds posited by the new scientific consensus of human-driven climate change, and it challenged the catastrophist narrative of global warming. If the prosperity of the Middle Ages and Viking settlement of Greenland occurred during an extended period of unusual warmth, then modern societies, too, could survive and prosper in a period of rising temperature.”

Since the publication of Mann’s hockey stick paper, there have been many peer-reviewed temperature reconstruction studies using similar proxies (such as tree ring data) and statistical methods that have given results that diverge from Mann’s. Since 2019, there have been over 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers published showing no warming in the modern era and/or much warmer temperatures than today when CO2 levels ranged from 180 to 280 ppm. Well known climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry, writing in her capacity as an expert witness to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, gave her 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.”

Mann’s Litigation Against Critics

Michael Mann initiated a defamation lawsuit in 2012 against commentators Rand Simberg writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, who echoed similar sentiments in the National Review magazine. Both writers referred to Mann’s work as fraudulent, comparing him flippantly to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky, except that Mann “molested and tortured data.” Mr. Steyn had distanced himself from that comparison. After years of legal delays, the Washington DC court ruled in 2021 that while CEI and National Review could not be held liable for the defamatory statements, the evidence allowed Simberg and Steyn to be sued for damaging Mann’s character and reputation.

The trial finally commenced in January 2024, and in the following month, the jury unanimously found Simberg and Steyn guilty of defamation. Mann was awarded nominal damages of $1 from each of the defendants but was also awarded $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and an astonishing $1 million from Steyn.

It would seem that the massively higher punitive punishment the jury meted out to Mark Steyn can only be explained by the latter’s high profile as a conservative commentator. He has appeared in national media networks such as Fox News and as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh on contentious topics including the culture wars and Covid.

In a laudatory article published in the Wall Street Journal in the flush of his court victory, Mann said that he felt “vindicated by his court victory and hopes it will embolden other climate researchers to defend their work as vigorously as he has defended his own.” He is lionized in the Journal article as follows:

Soft-spoken in person, Mann can be a tiger online. He spars with critics on his X account, where he has more than 220,000 followers. He punches back in frequent newspaper opinion pieces, letters to the editor, television interviews and on podcasts. In 2024 alone, he has done more than 20 interviews with major news outlets, from CNN to Le Monde. His public message is simple: The climate is changing rapidly, but it isn’t too late to save the planet.

Super-star, planet-saving Mann, has however received some adverse – some would say well-deserved -- news this year. On January 10^th, in an article entitled “Pay Up, Mr. Mann”, the editors of the National Review reported that “a court in our nation’s capital ordered Mann to pay us $530,820.21 worth of attorney’s fees and costs, and to do so within 30 days.” As was made clear during the discovery process in the long legal battle, Mann’s explicitly stated intention was to use a “major lawsuit” as a vehicle with which to “ruin National Review.” The court order will go some way in restituting the news magazine for legal fees spent in the long litigation.

In even better news, it was reported earlier this week that Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia issued a Final Judgment Order, reducing the punitive damages charged against Mr. Steyn from the astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000. The order underscored the judiciary's role in preventing the legal system from being used as a tool to intimidate and silence critics of the prevailing climate narrative.

Charles Rotter of the Watts Up With That website gives a fair summary of the entire litigious affair initiated by Michael Mann:

For years, sceptics have watched this case with bated breath, fearing it could muzzle honest inquiry into climate science. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, central to his reputation, has long been a lightning rod—challenged by statisticians, researchers, and commentators like Steyn for its methodological flaws and data handling. Steyn’s post, while biting, was an opinion, not a factual falsehood, and the jury’s initial $1 million penalty seemed less about justice and more about punishing dissent. Today’s ruling overturns that injustice, ensuring that critics of public figures like Mann can speak without fear of financial ruin.

President Trump’s Second Term: Good for Scientific Integrity

Last week, the Trump administration halted the participation of US scientists, including NASA chief scientist Katherine Calvin, in the UN IPCC climate change meeting in China as part of its broader withdrawal from the global climate change agenda championed by the European and the UK governments. NASA also terminated its contract with a US-based group of scientists and staff who were working closely with Calvin on the IPCC’s next climate assessment, due to be released in 2029. The IPCC, as noted above, had enthusiastically endorsed Mann’s infamous hockey stick chart in its 2001 report. The IPCC, especially via its politically-tuned “Summary for Policy Makers” reports, has been a central actor in the UN’s frequent and hyperbolic warnings of impending climate catastrophe.

Scientific integrity also has a chance of being restored in biomedical research. In his Senate confirmation hearing for the position of Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Wednesday, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya made a strong plea in his opening statement for scientific research that should be “replicable, reproducible, and generalizable.” Asserting that much biomedical research fails this basic test, he said “Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover up, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differ from theirs.” He promised that, if confirmed, he would “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the NIH.”

The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary and Dr. Bhattacharya as Director at NIH -- two well-known critics of mainstream biomedical research who were themselves marginalized and de-platformed -- the tables have been turned on medical establishment alarmists like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx who ran the coercive lockdown and vaccination campaigns during the Biden years.

By rescuing climate and biomedical research from ideological capture by the climate industrial complex and big pharma lobbies, the Trump administration has begun the difficult process of restoring scientific integrity.

[A version of this article was first published in The Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/09/mark-steyn-has-the-last-laugh/ ]