The Origins of Denial - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 50

to manufacture an illusion of grassroots support. This can be achieved by hiring ringers to pose as
ordinary citizens, posting standard contrarian talking points and responses in online news threads,
blogs, and the like. Prominent climate change deniers have occasionally been identified making use of
a so-called sock-puppet (a “fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for
one's self, allies or company” 63 ) . Stephen McIntyre, for example, was found leveling online attacks
hiding behind the sock-puppet “Nigel Persaud,” while Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute,
perhaps best known for his attacks on environmental activist turned cinematic heroine Erin
Brockovich, was once discovered posting self-supporting comments as “Tracy Spencer.” 64
Swiftboating Comes to Climate Change
One of the more unseemly features of the climate change denial campaign has been its use of character
assassination as a tool for discrediting climate science itself. It is the art of the smear campaign that
has come to be known as “swiftboating.” The connection with the term is in fact remarkably direct.
Marc Morano got his start working for radio commentator Rush Limbaugh before moving on to
work for the ExxonMobil and Scaife-financed Conservative News Service (now Cybercast News
Service). 65 There, Morano was directly implicated in the original swiftboat attack on presidential
candidate Senator John Kerry in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. 66 That attack had taken
one of Kerry's greatest strengths—he had been awarded three Purple Hearts for his service in
Vietnam, while his opponent, George W. Bush, had avoided active duty—and, through a perversion of
revisionist history, turned it instead into a perceived weakness.
Morano went on to become the pit bull of the climate change denial movement, launching
swiftboat-like attacks as before, but this time directed against climate science and climate scientists.
Among his many unsavory aspersions, he called NASA's James Hansen a “wannabe Unabomber”
(suggesting it may be “time for meds”). 67 I too have been at the receiving end of Morano's smears,
having been called a “charlatan” responsible for “the best science that politics can manufacture.” 68
Beginning in 2006, Morano's efforts were funded on the taxpayer dime: He became a paid staff
member on the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee for Senate climate change
denier Senator James Inhofe. From this perch, Morano promoted climate change denial talking points
and launched attacks against climate scientists on the EPW Web site and through an e-mail listserv
reaching large numbers of journalists and politicos. Undaunted after his position with Inhofe was
terminated in 2009, 69 Morano headed back through the revolving door, this time hired by a Scaife-
and ExxonMobil-funded 70 entity known as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) to
run a new Web site called ClimateDepot.com . The site, which bills itself as “the Senate EPW website
on steroids,” 71 provides Morano with a platform from which he can continue his barrage against the
climate science community. In 2010, for example, he proclaimed that climate researchers “deserve to
be publicly flogged” for speaking out on the threat of human-caused climate change. 72
Shoot the Messenger
While the tactic of swiftboating or “shoot the messenger” may have been honed by people like Marc
Morano, it has a deeper history when it comes to environmental science in America. Rachel Carson,