Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 157

simply because I was a coinvestigator on several recently funded NSF grants. 98 These absurd
distortions were—no surprise—promoted by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others of similar
persuasion.
Perhaps a mere coincidence, but two weeks earlier, on New Year's Eve 2009, a former CIA
agent named Kent Clizbe sent an e-mail message to dozens of my Penn State colleagues entitled
“Climate Research Fraud—Whistleblower Rewards Program—Confidentiality Assured.” In his
message, Clizbe promised my colleagues monetary reward in return for accusing me of fraud in my
government grant applications. 99 As far as I know, he got no takers.
The NCPPR, meanwhile, even managed to tap a reserve from the 1990s tobacco wars, Tom
Borrelli, the former manager of Corporate Scientific Affairs at Philip Morris. Borrelli attacked me in
an NCPPR-sponsored press release in mid-January 2010: “It's shocking that taxpayer money is being
used to support a researcher who seemingly showed little regard to the basic tenets of science—a
dispassionate search for the truth.” 100 The irony in this line of attack did not go unnoticed by Mitchell
Anderson of DeSmogBlog. 101 Anderson linked to a video, 102 released as part of the historic tobacco
industry legal settlement, 103 showing Borelli denying the health threat of secondhand tobacco smoke.
A few weeks later Deepak Lal, a senior fellow for the Cato Institute, 104 repeated false climategate
allegations against me in a commentary that appeared in the Business Standard . 105 Lal, it turns out,
also had a tobacco connection; he had been hired by British American Tobacco in the late 1990s to
try to discredit a World Bank report on the health benefits of policies to control tobacco use. 106
Leading congressional climate change deniers used their political clout to press this attack
further. In early February 2010, Darrell Issa (R-CA) declared Penn State's initial inquiry, which on
February 3 had reported 107 no evidence of scientific misconduct on my part, a “whitewash.” He
revived the campaign to have my NSF funding revoked, citing once again the climategate-related
allegations of scientific misconduct. Fox News 108 and the Washington Times 109 publicized Issa's
attacks. On February 16, Issa and Sensenbrenner joined forces to press the issue, complaining to the
NSF: “conversations with NSF staff on February 4 revealed that no steps have been taken to freeze or
withdraw the stimulus funds authorized for Dr. Mann's research … we encourage you to immediately
initiate an independent investigation into this matter.” 110
Apparently unsatisfied by lack of progress on this front, and still digging for dirt, two Scaife-
funded groups mentioned in the previous chapter, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the
Landmark Legal Foundation, had swung into action. The latter had already sued the University of
Massachusetts and University of Arizona to obtain copies of my personal e-mails with my two hockey
stick coauthors, while in May 2010 the former demanded extensive information from the NSF
regarding grants that had been made to me as well as to several of my colleagues at Penn State, the
University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, and Columbia
University. 111
It began to strike me as curious that so many of the demands that I be investigated could be
traced back to organizations with ties to the Scaife Foundations. 112 The Commonwealth Foundation, a
Pennsylvania organization that is the recipient of considerable Scaife largesse, 113 for example, had
been pressuring Penn State University to fire me since climategate broke in late November 2009. It
managed 114 to get the sympathetic Republican chair of the Pennsylvania state senate education
committee to threaten to hold Penn State's funding hostage until “appropriate action is taken by the