Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
National Post
more or less accusing Briffa of fraud: “Whatever is going on here, it is not science.”
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Internet echo chamber. That is all the justification that apparently is needed for commentators such as
pages of widely read daily newspapers. Some of the distortions were almost comical. James
Delingpole, for example, announced the episode as proof that global warming is a “MASSIVE lie”
[sic].
Horner and Delingpole both claimed that the Yamal revelations, by discrediting the hockey stick,
even undermined the dramatic scene in
An Inconvenient Truth
where Gore used a stair lift to ascend
to the tip of the spiking curve depicted. There were just two problems with that proposition: The
Yamal series was not used in the hockey stick, and Gore—in the stair lift scene—was showing the
dramatic recent spike in
atmospheric CO
2
over the past million years, not temperature over the past
thousand years. But in the climate change denial playbook, facts must never get in the way of a good
smear opportunity.
Serengeti Resurgent
Ben Santer provided an apt description of the phenomenon I've termed the Serengeti strategy:
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“There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science
into disrepute.” With no scientific leg to stand on, manufactured claims of incompetence and
malfeasance, ladened with innuendo and vilification, have emerged as the denialist weapon of choice.
The purpose is multifaceted: to subject climate scientists to intrusive demands for materials, making it
difficult or impossible, and at the very least less enjoyable, for them to carry out their work; to
intimidate climate scientists through public campaigns of ridicule and harassment; to thereby serve
notice to other scientists of what will be store for them if they too speak out on the topic of human-
caused climate change; and to keep alive the false notion that human-caused climate change is still a
matter of scientific controversy.
This strategy has increasingly involved the abuse of vexatious Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) demands to harass scientists and impede their progress in research and ideally to find
something, even if just a stray comment in personal correspondence, that can be twisted into a
weapon against them. FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Sometimes
referred to as “open records” or “sunshine” laws, FOIA allows members of the media and the public
access to governmental documents—that is papers, letters, private e-mail correspondence—within
certain restrictions. FOIA in principle applies to the documents of federal scientists—though a
number of exemptions exist that, among other things, exempt documents whose disclosure would
constitute a breach of privacy. Similar FOIA and open documents laws apply at the state level, in the
United Kingdom, and in some other countries such as Canada and Germany.
In November 2008 McIntyre filed a FOIA demand to NOAA requesting not only data used in a
recent paper by Ben Santer and coauthors (all of which was already, in fact, available in the public
intrusive demand for personal e-mail foreshadowed the tactics of climate change deniers that would
