The downfall of climate change poster boy Michael Mann

Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring.

Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – he’d become the poster boy for the alleged global warming apocalypse. Never before had a scientist demonstrated the threat of imminent climate catastrophe so graphically or dramatically.

But from the start, Mann’s thesis came under attack from an array of critics. They argued, for example, that the proxies he had used to recreate early temperatures (e.g. tree ring data) were unreliable; that his statistical methodology was flawed; that his algorithms were so corrupt that whatever data you input, you’d always get the same unscientific, politically driven hockey stick shape.

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And at last those critics have been vindicated. Not, unfortunately, by an official re-examination of Mann’s chart, which is never going to happen because there are too many vested interests at stake. But rather in the unlikely setting of a Jarndyce vs Jarndyce-style lawsuit, which Mann launched years ago with a view to impoverishing and immiserating his detractors, but which has recently backfired spectacularly.