Do we like them?

Do we like Michael E. Mann?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful found in his own words or company, and a long public fight for climate science, with one litigation stain.

Michael Mann is the climate scientist best known for the 'hockey stick' graph of temperatures over the past millennium. That work made him a target for climate-denial campaigns for decades. He now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and he's more a public fighter for science than a lab-bound academic.

His biggest stoush was a court fight over blog posts that attacked his research. In February 2024 a Washington DC jury sided with him against two writers and awarded him about $1 million. For climate scientists, who have copped years of organised abuse, it was a rare public win.

The story got messier afterwards. In January 2026 the Volokh Conspiracy reported that a DC judge had ordered Mann to pay roughly $1 million in legal fees to two other defendants, National Review and Rand Simberg, under the city's anti-SLAPP law. The fees came from the parts of his case that were dismissed. It's a real stain on the 'won in court' story, and it stops short of a pattern.

On the harm check, we found nothing from Mann himself that targets LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or anyone else, and we found nothing about the company he keeps that raised a flag. The reverse holds: his 2025 book with vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, Science Under Siege, argues for defending climate and health science from attack. Our search of his recent work was thin, so that's the limit of the record.

So where does that leave us? Nothing harmful from him, a good record of speaking up for the planet and for public health, and one expensive litigation stain. We couldn't read every source in full, so treat this as a solid yes on the evidence we have, not a deep dive.