Michael Mann, the author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and creator of the "hockey-stick" climate-change graph used in An Inconvenient Truth, writes in the the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the uniquely American "witch-hunt" he and other climate scientists are subjected to.
Is nearly all the rest of the world (excepting, perhaps, the UK and Australia, and the Canadian oilpatch), climate change is widely viewed as a settled question. As one climate scientist notes, "After my climate
change book came out, I had dinner with a Dutch minister from a right-wing, conservative party — and he sounded like a Greenpeace guy."
II was subject to what The Washington Post and The New York Times denounced as an 'inquisition' and a 'witch hunt' by politicians in the pay of fossil fuel inter- ests (Mann, 2012), looking to discredit my work.The former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Texas Republican Joe Barton, attempted in 2005 to sub- poena all of my personal records and those of my two 'hockey stick' co-authors, even though the vast majority of what he was demanding was already in the public domain. (Among the fiercest critics of Barton's behavior were two powerful senior members of his own partyÑthe chair of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert of New York, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.)
Subsequently, Ken Cuccinelli, the newly minted attorney general of Virginia, who'd received significant Koch brothers support (see Blumenthal, 2013; Cramer, 2013; and Vogel, 2011), attempted to obtain all of my personal e-mails with more than 30 scientists around the world from the 1999 to 2005 time period, during which I was a professor at the University of Virginia, under the aegis of a civil subpoena designed to root out state Medi- care fraud. After Cuccinelli was repeat- edly rebuffed by the courts all the way to the state Supreme Court, a Koch-funded group called the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought to demand the same e-mails through misuse of state open-records laws. The ATI too was rebuffed all the way to the state Supreme Court, which ultimately demanded that they pay both the University of Virginia and me damages for their frivolous peti- tioning of the court (Sturgis, 2014).
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines
The Serengeti strategy:
How special interests try to
intimidate scientists, and
how best to fight back [Michael E Mann/Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]
