Fighting Back - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 162

could either underestimate it or overestimate it. Within a few days, a retraction of the Hand's claim
was effectively issued by the committee. 19
Witch Hunt Redux
By spring 2010, climate change deniers had lost some ground. With the result of each new
exculpatory climategate investigation report, their narrative of alleged scientific malfeasance had
become increasingly untenable. 20 Attempts by deniers to find yet more e-mails to mine proved
fruitless. An attempt to break into the laboratory of prominent Canadian climate scientist Andrew
Weaver at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in order to steal e-mails and other materials
was foiled, for example. 21 And none of the efforts by the Scaife-linked Southeastern Legal Foundation
and Landmark Legal Foundation to obtain additional climate scientist e-mails, discussed in the
previous chapter, yielded anything useful. 22 Meanwhile, the Massey West Virginia coal mine disaster
in February and the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill disaster in April served as vivid reminders of
the extreme hidden costs of dirty fossil fuel energy. The dominant media narrative was now shifting to
the tactics of the climate change denial movement, its funding by big oil, and the harassment of
climate scientists. 23 The denial machine needed a new distraction to try to regain control of the
narrative. They got it—and perhaps far more than they bargained for—in the form of the newly
elected Virginia attorney general named Ken Cuccinelli.
In his first few months as Virginia's attorney general, Cuccinelli had pursued an eyebrow-raising
agenda that included questioning president Barack Obama's citizenship, instructing state colleges to
stop protecting gay students from discrimination, issuing a legal challenge declaring federal health
care reform as unconstitutional (which was lampooned on Comedy Central's Jon Stewart Show ), and
attacking the U.S. EPA's right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, claiming the underlying science
was fundamentally unsound. He had then sought to alter the state seal of Virginia, designed by George
Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, which had been adopted in 1776. The original
seal showed the Roman goddess Virtus, holding a spear, with her left breast exposed. Cuccinelli had
begun circulating among his staff a new “family-friendly” version of the seal with the off ending body
part covered by a breastplate. He dropped the plan abruptly when it was picked up by the media and
brought him widespread ridicule. 24
Following up on his petition of the EPA, Cuccinelli decided to turn his attention a little closer to
home. He demanded that the University of Virginia turn over essentially every e-mail, record, or
document it had that related to me from my time on the faculty there from 1999 to 2005. Cuccinelli
used a relatively new legal maneuver available to the attorney general known as a civil investigative
demand (CID). With a CID, the attorney general could seek to subpoena materials from any state
agency, including a university, by claiming that fraud concerning state funds might be involved. 25 This
must have seemed a clever way to seize materials that other groups, such as Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI), had been unable to obtain using standard state FOIA laws. Initially, the University of
Virginia indicated that it would comply; it perceived it had little choice, given state law. 26 That
would change, however, as Cuccinelli's attack became increasingly recognized as an abuse of power
that threatened the very bedrock principles of academic freedom that the University of Virginia was
founded upon.