The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 141

and environmentalists who were somehow getting rich. Borrowing from the great Oz himself,
Dreissen would have us ignore that multinational corporation behind the curtain! ExxonMobil was
setting new records for corporate profits with each passing quarter, but it was really climate
scientists (and their banker friends) who ostensibly were raking in the dough. The depressing fact is
that many of Dreissen's readers probably believed this.
Climate change deniers during this period bandied about groundless accusations of fraud and
malfeasance with reckless abandon. Though the charges struck us as defamatory, there was little or
nothing that scientists could do to protect themselves. The climate change denial machine is
bankrolled by some the nation's wealthiest and most powerful private interests, such as the Scaife
Foundations and Koch Industries. They fund their own public relations firms and even their own legal
foundations (e.g., the primarily Scaife-funded Landmark Legal Foundation 51 and Southeastern Legal
Foundation 52 ). For a scientist to take on an industry-backed adversary in court would be an all-
consuming task that would literally take over his or her life, and there would be little assurance of
victory in a long, drawn-out legal battle against deep-pocketed opponents. Indeed, the prospects for
successful legal recourse is made all the more challenging by the fact that scientists who have been in
the public spotlight—whether by choice or not—are considered, for legal purposes, “limited public
figures,” meaning that the threshold for establishing libel or slander is considerably higher than for a
typical citizen.
And so the reckless charges against climate scientists continued unabated. In the United
Kingdom, Douglas Keenan accused several climate scientists of fraud, including Phil Jones of CRU 53
and me. In late 2009, he sent me an e-mail warning 54 that he'd attempted (to no avail) to get the FBI to
investigate me—something that would be funny, did it not seem so mean-spirited. Even Stephen
McIntyre, who had been copied on the message, demanded Keenan desist in involving him in such
matters in the future. 55
Perhaps the most repugnant of Keenan's attacks, however, was reserved for the climate scientist
Wei-Chyung Wang of SUNY-Albany. In 2007 Keenan publicly alleged that Wang had committed fraud
in work that he had published two decades previously in two articles with Phil Jones (one in Nature ,
the other in GRL ) estimating the impact of urbanization on temperature records from China. In an e-
mail to Wang, copied to Jones, Kennan demanded: “I ask you to retract your GRL paper, in full, and to
retract the claims made in Nature about the Chinese data. If you do not do so, I intend to publicly
submit an allegation of research misconduct to your university at Albany.” 56 At issue were twenty-
year-old temperature station records that he had used to assess urbanization heat island effects in the
temperature record, and that formed the basis of the statement in his paper that “The stations were
selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation,
location or observation times.” 57
Keenan appeared to be arguing that because Wang couldn't produce the two-decade-old hard-
copy documentation of station metadata, he must be guilty of fraud. SUNY, as any academic institution
is essentially forced to do when confronted with allegations of misconduct on the part of a faculty
member (regardless of how dubious the charges may appear), conducted an investigation. They found
absolutely no evidence to support any claims of wrongdoing on Wang's part. However, that process
played out slowly. In the meantime, the controversial journal Energy and Environment and its editor,
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, allowed Keenan to use the journal to level the fraud charge against
Wang. 58