Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Foundation attacks that essentially forced Penn State to launch its initial inquiry into the various
allegations against me in December 2009 (similar inquiries and investigations of CRU scientists were
through a barrage of press conferences and press releases attacking me personally and criticizing
Penn State for its supposed “whitewash” treatment of any number of supposed offenses.
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It also ran
daily attack ads against me in our university newspaper
The Collegian
for an entire week in January
and helped organize a protest rally against me on campus.
118
It is likely that these attacks forced Penn
State's hand yet again, leading it, following the completion of the initial inquiry in February 2010, to
move to a formal investigation, despite having found no evidence of misconduct in the initial inquiry
phase.
119
If the first two fronts of the assault against me involved intimidating me and my family and
threatening my livelihood, the third was a related effort to discredit and humiliate me among my
Climate Depot Web site—financed by the Scaife-funded group CFACT—continued to spread
malicious and false allegations about me and other climate scientists.
121
The allegations inevitably
fringe news outlets. My friends, family, and colleagues, of course, could not help but hear or read the
various lies that were being spread about my climate change colleagues and me. A new group run by
fossil fuel industry advocate Steven Milloy even took out a sponsored Google ad that posed the
question “Michael Mann: Defamed or Declined by 'Hide the Decline?'” which would appear in
response to Google searches including either my name or climate change-related topics and key
words.
123
A YouTube video promoted by Koch and Scaife-funded groups was also created to ridicule me,
and through me, climate change science.
124
The video featured a caricature of me repeating the line
“Michael Mann thinks he's so smart totally inventing the hockey stick chart … hide the decline, hide
the decline.”
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The video was purportedly created by a “grassroots” group calling itself Minnesotans
for Global Warming, supposedly founded by a Elmer Beaureguard. A law firm giving me pro bono
assistance determined, after some investigation, that “Elmer Beaureguard” was a fake identity and the
Web site
minnesotansforglobalwarming.com
was the work of someone named Elroy Balgaar with, no
surprise, apparent ties to conservative causes and the Republican Party.
126
The episode evoked a similar event a few years earlier. In August 2006, a YouTube cartoon
video mocking Al Gore went viral on the Internet, promoted in part by ads on Google. In the video,
Gore is shown boring an army of penguins with his “An Inconvenient Truth” global warming lecture,
and farcically blaming global warming for just about everything. The film was ostensibly created by
an amateur twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker working out of his basement, but investigations by the
and lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C., which derived its funding from a variety of corporate
sponsors in the fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, fast food, and telecommunications industries, including oil
giant ExxonMobil. Curiously enough, Google ads for the video abruptly disappeared once the DCI
Group's role was exposed.
The law firm assisting me eventually sent a cease-and-desist letter to Balgaar informing him that
