"In Bad Faith"

A DC court sanctions climate scientist Michael Mann and his lawyers for misconduct “extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.”

Michael Mann and his lawyers preparing for a very fateful day in court. Jan 2024.

The DC Court that heard the defamation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding:

Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, 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 Court does not reach this decision lightly.

This ruling follows closely on the heels of the same court reducing the punitive damages awarded to Mann against one of the defedents from $1,000,000 to $5,000. That reduction follows the Court’s order that Mann pay $530,820.21 of legal expenses that his lawsuit resulted in for National Review — which Mann had also sued, but whose case was dismissed.

Today things went from really bad to a whole lot worse for Dr. Mann.

In today’s ruling the judge pulled no punches, writing of Mann and his two lead lawyers:

They 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.

That sentence has me thinking of RCP8.5, Billion Dollar Disasters, and the fake ICAT dataset, but I digress.

This case is part of a larger culture war in which research is distorted and the truth about the climate threat is dissembled

Michael Mann and Peter Fontaine in the NYT, 15 Feb 2024

The Court was none-too-pleased with the arguments put forward by Mann and his counsel:

Dr. Mann’s assertion that there was no falsehood or misrepresentation in his testimony or his counsel’s conduct borders on frivolity. Cf. In re Pearson, 228 A.3d 417, 424 (D.C. 2020) (“Ultimately, a position ‘is frivolous when it is wholly lacking in substance and not based upon even a faint hope of success on the legal merits.’” (quoting In re Spikes, 881 A.2d 1118, 1125 (D.C. 2005))). As detailed supra, the record plainly shows the deliberate and knowing misconduct of Dr. Mann’s counsel in eliciting false testimony from Dr. Mann and misrepresenting his grant funding.

The Court has awarded monetary sanctions:

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 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 misconductand determining appropriate remedial measures for the same, all without any meaningful acknowledgement of the nature of the misconduct by Dr. Mann or his attorneys.

The total amonut of these sanctions — based on my decidedly inexpert reading — is unlikely to be large (low $10,000s I’d guess).

The larger significance of this ruling is that a case which was widely celebrated within the scientific community as “a victory for climate researchers” reveals the putative hero to have engaged in misconduct involving the presentation of emprically-verifiable facts — Which was supposed to have been the focus of the case against the anti-heros.

The editor of Science, H. Holden Thorp, followed the original jury verdict with an impassioned defense of Mann’s long track record of egregiously bad behavior, arguing that it is misconduct, not passion that matters:

Although Mann has expressed strong—and even intemperate—emotions and words in political discourse, the finding of the District of Columbia Superior Court boiled down to the fact that it is not an opinion that determines when scientific misconduct occurs but rather, misconduct can be established using known processes.

The irony here is deep — The lawsuit Mann brought on the basis that he was intemperately accused of misconduct winds up revealing that Mann engaged in misconduct that was “extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.” It’ll be interesting to see what the climate science community does now.

You can read today’s judgment here. You can read the judgment reducing Mann’s jury award from $1,000,000 to $5,000 here. Note: I was a witness in the case, and you can read my commentary about it after appearing in the trial here. This case has plenty more room to run, with appeals underway.

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