Fighting Back - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 167

Wegman. Precisely one year earlier, I'd endured a Thanksgiving from Hell dealing with the aftermath
of the hacked CRU e-mails. I knew as well as anyone what sort of Thanksgiving Wegman was in store
for this year.
Wegman appears to have misled Congress in support of an agenda of policy inaction. 78 Where
were the calls for investigations by those who'd been so quick to demand them over the faux
climategate scandal? Here was a real scandal involving the use of taxpayer funds to support agenda-
driven pseudoscience at a public institution in Virginia. Why no interest on Cuccinelli's part? The
silence was deafening. In any case, the scandal was not going away any time soon 79 —something most
inconvenient for climate change deniers 80 at a time they'd been looking to press their own attacks.
A Turn in the Tide
The climategate and Cuccinelli affairs might have had the desired short-term effect of generating
further controversy over climate change. Both appear to have been long-term tactical errors by the
climate change denial machine, however. Relying on stolen e-mails and the questionable use of
political office to achieve their ends, these twin assaults were such an atrocity that they'd finally, to
quote one colleague, awakened a “sleeping bear.” No longer would scientists “stand by watching one
of their own being attacked.” 81 Perhaps in part recognizing that they were potentially vulnerable
themselves, but—more important, I suspect—sensing the responsibility of their role in what was
emerging as a monumental battle in which the stakes—the health of our planet—could not be higher,
my fellow scientists would no longer sit silently by as the Serengeti strategy of picking off scientists
one by one was deployed against their colleagues.
I first sensed a shift in the wind from the outpouring of support I received from colleagues,
fellow scientists, and academics—many of whom were pillars of the academic and scientific
communities—following the various exonerations over the East Anglia e-mail hacking affair. There
was the supportive phone call I received from Penn State President Graham Spanier, and the kind
notes of support from, among others, former Science editor in chief and Stanford University President
Donald Kennedy; science celebrity Bill Nye “The Science Guy”; Paul Ehrlich, a personal hero; and
Steven Soter, the astrophysicist who cowrote the classic PBS series Cosmos with Carl Sagan. More
than balancing the occasional coordinated bursts of hate mail were the thoughtful and supportive
messages from members of the public of all walks of life: Penn State alumni, friends from my distant
past, colleagues, ex-colleagues, and other citizens from all over the country who provided moral
support.
Some in the scientific community had, of course, shown real signs of fight in the past. There
were, for example, the numerous scientists and groups that came out to support my colleagues and me
during the height of the 2005 Joe Barton attacks and that had spoken out earlier in defense of James
Hansen, Ben Santer, and others subjected to similar attacks in the past. But now the community was
showing a new willingness to engage in full-out battle against the attackers of our science. Scientific
institutions such as AAAS, the American Meteorological Society, and Nature took
uncharacteristically aggressive stands against the attacks, alongside various nongovernmental
organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and
Pennsylvania groups such as the Clean Air Council and Penn-Future. These various organizations