Climate warrior Mann co-authors work funded in part by attorney with interest in key climate suit

Celebrity climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann is the co-author of an article published in the latest edition of the scientific journal BioScience. 

“The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink” concludes that the “climate crisis” is “a major driver of global instability.” “We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet's vital signs are flashing red,” the authors of the paper declared. 

While the paper’s conclusions are in line with Mann’s positions on climate change, the paper was funded in part by Roger Worthington. While this funding is disclosed in the acknowledgments, it makes no mention that Worthington is an attorney representing the plaintiff in a major climate lawsuit in Oregon.

The BioScience article is not the only climate research that the attorney has been involved with. In September, Chevron, one of the energy companies being targeted by the Oregon lawsuit, filed a motion to strike from the record two studies that the plaintiffs filed in support of their case. 

Chevron argues the county failed to disclose that their lawyer may have influenced the papers. In a hearing on the motion, which was ultimately denied, the court nonetheless rebuked the plaintiffs for the lack of disclosure. 

Chevron argues undisclosed involvement

Worthington is an asbestos trial lawyer and owner of the California-based law firm Worthington & Caron. He’s also lead counsel for Multnomah County, which is suing energy companies for $51 billion, alleging they contributed to a 2021 heat wave that caused over 100 deaths. 

In September, Chevron filed a motion in the case, asking the Multnomah County Oregon Circuit Court to disregard as evidence two climate studies published in the scientific journal Nature, which the county presented as peer-reviewed evidence. Worthington had undisclosed involvement in the studies, Chevron alleged.

One study published in May 2025 asserted that climate change contributed to 130 deaths and $160 billion in economic losses through wildfires. The article discloses that Worthington partially funded the study, but that article wasn't submitted to the court. Instead, one of the county's experts relied on the paper, and Worthington's connection to the research was not voluntarily disclosed by the expert, Chevron asserts. 

The motion also points out that a draft version of “Carbon Majors and The Scientific Case for Climate Liability” appeared on Worthington & Caron's website prior to publication. The paper provides a legal framework for suing energy companies for climate change-related damages and claims that Chevron’s emissions are solely responsible for between $720 billion and $3.1 trillion in heat-related damages. The county directly cited the article in court documents, and it was also cited by the county's expert. 

The prepublication study, the motion explains, contained a watermark stating “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE UNDER REVIEW.” While the link to the study draft on the firm’s website is now broken, the draft remains on an internet archive site. The fact Worthington had an advanced copy of the research, Chevron argues, suggests he may have been involved in the research. 

Worthington denies involvement with the paper

Just the News obtained a transcript of the hearing, which refers to a declaration by Worthington denying he had anything to do with the "Carbon Majors" paper. 

"You feel good about it? There is nothing wrong with it; you'd do it again?" the court asked Richard Schechter, another lawyer representing Multnomah County. 

"There is nothing wrong with that. He [Worthington] had no role to play in that whatsoever," Schechter replied. 

In their motion, Chevron asked the court to order discovery and an evidentiary hearing to determine the extent to which Worthington may have influenced the studies. When the court pressed Schechter on whether it could order discovery, a process to consider evidence in the matter, Schechter said the plaintiff would resist the process and the court wouldn't be granted it, either. 

"It's a little cute to argue on the one hand, there is no evidence of any shenanigans and also, the Court does not have the power, inherent, statutory, otherwise, to engage the mechanism that Courts usually use for the discovery of evidence," the court said. 

Just the News reached out to Worthington through the firm’s website and his personal social media account, but did not receive a response. 

Motion: ‘Part of a broader pattern’ 

Chevron's motion argues that the draft version of "Carbon Majors" acknowledges that the Environmental Law Institute's Climate Science in Judicial Education provided funding for the article, but mention of ELI funding is absent from the published version. While ELI claims to provide judges in its training with neutral education, it has come under scrutiny for allegedly biasing judges in favor of the plaintiffs in climate litigation. 

“Plaintiff’s counsel’s failure to disclose his involvement with the two Nature studies cited by Plaintiff and its experts does not appear to be an isolated instance, but part of a broader pattern confirming the lack of disclosure is intentional,” Chevron alleged in the court filing. 

The motion also pointed out that Worthington published opinion pieces in Oregon newspapers, but didn’t disclose the fact he was an attorney involved with climate litigation. Instead, it identifies him simply as the "owner of a brewery." 

Reader: "Transparency is a cornerstone of ethical advocacy"

One reader responded to one of these pieces that was published in a Sister, Oregon, newspaper, The Nugget Newspaper. The reader explained that, according to Multnomah’s contingency fee agreement, Worthington stands to benefit from the climate litigation he’s advocating for in the newspaper. 

“As a capitalist, I respect his right to earn a living through legal work, but transparency is a cornerstone of ethical advocacy,” the reader stated. 

According to the motion, Worthington’s op-eds originally appeared in other Oregon newspapers without disclosing his involvement in the litigation. 

Court calls it "hiding the ball" 

The court denied the motion to strike the studies, but not without criticizing Worthington’s failure to disclose his involvement in them.

During the Oct. 30 hearing, the plaintiffs called the charge that Worthington or anyone on behalf of the county engaged in fraud to be “both false and misleading.” Another attorney for Multnomah County told the court that they couldn’t find a case in the history of American jurisprudence in which a court ever held that a failure to disclose the funding of an article constituted fraud. 

“Perhaps that’s because no lawyer in the history of American jurisprudence thought it appropriate to submit an expert declaration on an article that the plaintiffs’ lawyers helped buy,” the court responded. 

In denying the motion, the court stated that when the court gets to the point of weighing the plaintiff’s evidence in the case, their expert’s reliance on an article with which Worthington was involved will not support the plaintiff’s arguments. 

“The entirety of that expert's opinion will be diminished because of this behavior. And so what has been achieved by this knowing hiding of the ball is beyond me. This is simply not an appropriate way to practice law in the courts of the state of Oregon,” the court said. 

Theodore Boutrous, Jr. of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP, counsel for Chevron, told Just the News that the court didn't deny the basis for the company's complaint, as demonstrated by the "hiding the ball" comment. 

“This confirms the Court agreed with the basis of Chevron’s motion that relying on research the plaintiff attorney helped fund, and then intentionally withholding that disclosure, harms the integrity of the judicial process," Boutrous said. 

Other studies funded by Worthington

Worthington has a history of funding research that supports climate activism and climate litigation. In February 2022, Worthy Garden Club announced it had received a $100,000 grant to Oregon State University professor Beverly Law to help “pinpoint which private and public lands in Oregon have the best potential for mitigating climate change.” Law authored the Nature study on wildfires that Multnomah County submitted. 

“Dr. Law has distinguished herself as the world’s leading scientist on common sense strategies for capturing and storing carbon in Western forests,” Worthington said in an announcement of the grant. 

At the same time, Worthington donated $600,000 to the University of Oregon Law School to help the school "address urgent climate challenges." The funding, according to the announcement, would support Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center and the work of Mary Christina Wood, who created the legal framework for the lawsuit in Juliana v. U.S. 

The lawsuit was filed by Our Children's Trust, which organizes young people to sue government entities, alleging that the kids' rights are being violated as a result of a failure to eliminate emissions from fossil fuel use. The case came to a close when the Supreme Court refused to review a lower court's decision to dismiss the case. 

Tactics in asbestos cases

Worthington was also the subject of a 2013 Wall Street Journal story that raised questions about the tactics he used to sign up plaintiffs in asbestos cases. Worthington and a surgeon established two nonprofits that helped patients of mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer. The surgeon, according to the Journal, relied on funding from Worthington to build two research labs. When mesothelioma patients would ask the surgeon to recommend an attorney, he reportedly would recommend, among others, Worthington. 

"It is an unusual alliance in the world of medicine that some ethics experts say blurs ethical lines. This is particularly true when doctors refer patients to attorneys who provide financial support for their medical research," the Journal reported. 

The Journal also quoted Dr. Jerome Kassirer, author of a book about financial conflicts of interest in medicine and a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, who called the relationship a "disgrace" and said it "has the taste of a kickback." 

Mann’s legal troubles

Mann and the lead authors of the BioScience paper didn’t respond to requests for comment, asking if there were any concerns about how taking funding from an attorney involved in climate litigation might bias the conclusions of the paper. 

Last May, the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. sanctioned Mann’s lawyers in part for having acted in “bad faith” in his libel suit against two bloggers who criticized his controversial “hockey stick” graph purporting to show a drastic rise in temperatures in the last century. 

According to the ruling, Mann’s attorneys “presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding.” 

The ruling came shortly after the same court reduced his award in the case from $1 million to $5,000. In January, Mann was ordered to pay the National Review $530,820, under "Anti-SLAPP" laws that protect people from retaliatory legal action in matters of public concern. The court ruled that, as a publisher, the publication was not liable for the blogger's posts. 

Last month, Mann dropped his appeals in exchange for the publication dropping its request for legal fees, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. 

It remains to be seen if Oregon courts will ultimately award Multnomah County the billions it claims to be owed. While the judge denied Chevron’s motion, the plaintiffs may have lost some standing with the court.