The Climate Wars: Report from the Trenches

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on March 6, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

“They see scientists like me, who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public, as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest,” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, Penn., home of Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor.

It’s a brilliantly sunny day, and the light snowfall of the evening before is rapidly melting.

Mann, who seems fairly relaxed, has just spoken to a full-capacity, and uniformly respectful and supportive, crowd at the university.

It’s hard to square the surroundings with the description in the book of how an entire academic discipline has been made to feel under siege, but Mann insists that it is a given.

“It is now part of the job description if you are going to be a scientist working in a socially relevant area like human-caused climate change,” he said.

He should know. For most of his professional life he has been at the center of those wars, thanks to a paper he published with colleagues in the late 1990s showing a sharp upward movement in global temperatures in the last half of the 20th century. The graph became known as the “hockey stick” [PDF].

If the graph was the stick, then its publication made Mann the puck. Though other prominent scientists, such as NASA’s James Hansen, and, more recently, Texas Tech University’s Katharine Hayhoe, have also been targeted by contrarian bloggers and think tanks demanding their institutions turn over their email record, it’s Mann who’s been the favorite target.

He has been regularly vilified on Fox News and contrarian blogs, and by Republican members of Congress. The attorney general of Virginia has been fighting in the courts to get access to Mann’s email from his earlier work at the University of Virginia. And then there is the high volume of hate mail, the threats to him and his family.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t have to fend off some attack, some specious criticism or personal attack,” he said. “Literally a day doesn’t go by where I don’t have to deal with some of the nastiness that comes out of a campaign that tries to discredit me, and thereby, in the view of our detractors, to discredit the entire science of climate change.”

By now he and other climate scientists have been in the trenches longer than the U.S. army has been in Afghanistan.

And Mann has proved a willing combatant. He has not gone so far as Hansen, who has been arrested at the White House protesting against tar-sands oil and in West Virginia protesting against coal mining. But he spends a significant part of his working life now blogging and tweeting in his efforts to engage with the public — and fending off attacks.

On the eve of his talk at Penn State, a coal industry lobby group calling itself the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America put up a Facebook page demanding the university disinvite their own professor from speaking, and denouncing Mann as a “disgraced academic” pursuing a radical environmental agenda. The university refused. Common Sense appeared to have dismantled the Facebook page.

Click here to read the rest of this article at Grist.org.