The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines by Michael E. Mann

Author:Michael E. Mann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science/Global Warming &#x0026, Climate Change
ISBN: 9780231152549
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Serengeti Resurgent

Ben Santer provided an apt description of the phenomenon I’ve termed the Serengeti strategy:37 “There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute.” With no scientific leg to stand on, manufactured claims of incompetence and malfeasance, ladened with innuendo and vilification, have emerged as the denialist weapon of choice. The purpose is multifaceted: to subject climate scientists to intrusive demands for materials, making it difficult or impossible, and at the very least less enjoyable, for them to carry out their work; to intimidate climate scientists through public campaigns of ridicule and harassment; to thereby serve notice to other scientists of what will be store for them if they too speak out on the topic of human-caused climate change; and to keep alive the false notion that human-caused climate change is still a matter of scientific controversy.

This strategy has increasingly involved the abuse of vexatious Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demands to harass scientists and impede their progress in research and ideally to find something, even if just a stray comment in personal correspondence, that can be twisted into a weapon against them. FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Sometimes referred to as “open records” or “sunshine” laws, FOIA allows members of the media and the public access to governmental documents—that is papers, letters, private e-mail correspondence—within certain restrictions. FOIA in principle applies to the documents of federal scientists—though a number of exemptions exist that, among other things, exempt documents whose disclosure would constitute a breach of privacy. Similar FOIA and open documents laws apply at the state level, in the United Kingdom, and in some other countries such as Canada and Germany.

In November 2008 McIntyre filed a FOIA demand to NOAA requesting not only data used in a recent paper by Ben Santer and coauthors (all of which was already, in fact, available in the public domain), but all e-mail correspondence between Santer and his coauthors.38 This disturbingly intrusive demand for personal e-mail foreshadowed the tactics of climate change deniers that would follow some months later.

The assault against climate scientists intensified in 2009, especially as the December 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit approached, catching many scientists both bemused and unprepared for the character attacks to which they would be subject. While contrarians were going after Keith Briffa for his Yamal tree ring work in the latter half of 2009, they were also badgering Phil Jones and his colleagues at CRU with an escalating barrage of FOIA demands—sixty of them in one weekend alone.39 One colleague, Eric Steig—a climate scientist at the University of Washington specializing in polar climates (and fellow RealClimate blogger)—was bewildered by the blistering attacks he was subject to following publication in January 2009 of a paper in Nature on which he was lead author.40

The paper (of which I was a coauthor) used a combination of data analysis and model simulation results to conclude that Antarctica on the whole has warmed over the past half century.

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