Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
attacks against Ben Santer in the 1990s, Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), had joined in. A December 2
hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, at which
Obama administration science adviser John Holdren and NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco were
called to testify, was indicative of the tone that would pervade many of these attacks. Sensenbrenner
hijacked the proceedings with trumped-up climategate charges: “These e-mails show a pattern of
suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit,” and
referred to “scientific fascism” and “an international scientific fraud.” Holdren calmly and politely
refuted Sensenbrenner's false allegations and mischaracterizations.
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In the movie
The Manchurian Candidate
, the McCarthyesque Senator John Yerkes Iselin
announces on the floor of the U.S. Senate that “There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the
Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time!” Inhofe couldn't find fifty-seven climate
scientists to investigate, but he did manage to come up with a list of seventeen (including me, my
collaborators, and leading American climate scientists such as Stephen Schneider, Susan Solomon,
Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, and Ben Santer) that he said should be criminally prosecuted, for
various reasons he outlined in a lengthy report he released on February 25, 2010, on the Senate
climate scientist?” is the way one commentator summarized it.
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A campaign of intimidation was meanwhile being waged against climate scientists by influential
forces outside the halls of Congress who helped direct hate speech, threats, bullying, and taunting at
individual climate scientists. Marc Morano's comment in March 2010 that climate scientists “deserve
had followed a litany of bogus allegations about the IPCC with the suggestion that climate scientists
punishment for Dr James Hansen. Climategate is high treason.”
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The use of such vitriol and invective
might be viewed as an effort to stoke the fires of irrationality, hate, and violence among sympathizers
in the general population.
It certainly appears that this dynamic was in play. In the wake of climategate, several climate
mails” calling him “a fraud, a cheat, a scumbag and much worse,” while Kevin Trenberth had a “9-
page document of 'extremely foul, nasty, abusive' e-mails” that he'd received in just a few months.
One colleague had been stalked by suspicious individuals and found a dead rat on his doorstep as the
perpetrator drove off in a large yellow Hummer. A number of climate scientists (myself included)
were accused of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to defraud honest Americans through a “climate
scientists were at the receiving end of death threats so credible they were provided security detail.
Was this harassment orchestrated? A number of pundits believed so. “The purpose of this new
form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to
participate further in the climate change debate,” in the view of Australian journalist Clive
and threatening emails aimed at intimidating climate scientists have all the signs of an orchestrated
campaign by sceptics groups. The links are well-hidden because mobilizing people to send abuse and
threats is well outside the accepted bounds of democratic participation; indeed, some of it is illegal.
And an apparently spontaneous expression of citizen concern carries more weight than an organized
