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'Anatomy of a Smear' or 'How the Right Wing Denial Machine Distorts The Climate Change Discourse'
Several weeks ago, on June 17, I
provided testimony about the threat of human-caused climate change to the Democratic Party Platform drafting committee in Phoenix Arizona. Fittingly, my testimony was just one day before
record heat struck Phoenix.
At the beginning of
my testimony, I made the point, using slightly lofty language appropriate for the occasion, that the
impacts of climate change are now so profound that we no longer need sophisticated signal-detection machinery to see them:
I am a climate scientist, and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate model output and observational climate data, trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.
What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we've spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see the impacts of climate change playing out in real time on our television screens in the 24 hour news cycle.
Regardless of how you measure the impacts of climate change -- whether it be food, water, health, national security, our economy -- climate change is already taking a great toll. And we see that tool in the damage done by more extreme floods, like the floods we've seen over the past year in Texas and in South Carolina. We see it in the devastating combination of sea level rise and more destructive hurricanes which has led to calamities like "Superstorm" Sandy and what is now the perennial flooding of Miami beach. We see it in the unprecedented drought, like that which continues to afflict California, a doubling in the area of wildfire, fire burning in the western U.S., and indeed, in the record heat we may see this weekend in phoenix.
The signal of climate change is no longer subtle. It is obvious.
My point--that we don't need sophisticated techniques to identify the human fingerprint present in e.g. the
doubling of extreme heat or the
tripling (in fact) of western wildfire that we have seen in the U.S. in recent decades, ought to be clear to any honest observer.
It would be absurd to conclude that I was arguing that climate models and climate data are no longer necessary in climate science, especially given that they continue to form the bread and butter of my own scientific research (I've published
over a dozen scientific articles using climate models and climate data during the past year alone).
So you can imagine my shock--yes,
shock--that climate change deniers and conservative media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for them, would seek to convince their readers of just that.
It is an instructive ontological exercise to follow this particular affair--from its inception through the latest developments, sort of like observing a deviant version of the game "telephone" (or "Chinese whispers" for British readers) wherein the participants are actually
trying to distort the message as it is passed along from one person to the next.
It all started on Monday June 27th with
Steven J. Milloy and his outlandishly
untruthful claim "Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics."
Milloy, who actually calls himself the "junk man" with no apparent sense of irony, is a denier-for-hire who happily takes money from
tobacco interests,
chemical interests, and of course
fossil fuel interests to do their dirty work, attacking seemingly any scientist whose findings threaten their financial bottom line.
Milloy frequently
publishes columns in the notorious
Washington Times. Which brings us to the next stage of the affair...
Later that same day, the
Washington Times--a paper founded by Reverend
Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church,
ran a piece by one Valerie Richardson entitled "Michael Mann, scientist: Data 'increasingly unnecessary' because 'we can see climate change'".
Somehow 'tools' have become 'data'. It almost seems like they're going out of their way to misrepresent my statements, doesn't it?
Almost as if to demonstrate that they too have absolutely no sense of irony, the
Washington Times referred to me in the piece as a "Leading climate doomsayer" (the Unification Church, you see, is often considered a
doomsday cult). The
Washington Times also happens to be
closely tied to
ALEC--a
Koch Brothers-funded organization that promotes climate change denialism and subverts efforts to incentivize renewable energy.
Next up at bat,
Tucker Carlson's
The Daily Caller, which later that day
pushed the egregiously false headline "Famed Climate Scientist Claims Data Now 'Unnecessary' To Measure Global Warming".
Understand that we have now gone all the way from what I actually said (that climate change impacts have become so profound now that we often don't need fancy techniques to see them) to something so patently absurd I couldn't possibly have said it (that we don't need data to measure global warming).
The
Daily Caller, incidentally, is
so fully immersed in Koch cash that is is listed as a "partner organization" of the Charles Koch Institute.
Witness now, after a two week hiatus, the hand-off from the Koch Brothers to the
Scaife Foundations, the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, to be specific, which was founded by the now-deceased
Richard Mellon Scaife. On July 13, the
Tribune-Review perpetuated the smear with a
climate change-denying editorial containing the farcical howler "[Mann] says facts no longer are necessary to substantiate the climate change story line." Just when you thought the distortion couldn't get more egregious...
One day later, on July 14, the execrable Tribune op-ed was
republished on the right wing website GOPUSA, a website connected to--you guessed it--Richard Mellon Scaife (though a
bit of detective work is required to connect the dots).
Oil baron Richard Mellon Scaife and his empire were behind what Hillary Clinton famously referred to as the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to take down her husband, President Bill Clinton (for the record, she was
correct).
Certainly, you're thinking, it must be a coincidence that nearly every player in this latest episode seems to be tied in some way to either the Koch Brothers or Scaife Foundations.
Or maybe not so much...
Richard Mellon Scaife and the Scaife Family Foundations are, along with the Koch Brothers, the greatest private funders of climate change denialism, having stepped up their funding in recent years as fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil have come under
increased scrutiny for their funding of climate change denial.
As I discuss in my book
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars about the attacks against me by climate change deniers looking to discredit the iconic "Hockey Stick" graph my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (p. 64):
Wealthy privately held corporations and foundations with close interests in, or ties to, the fossil fuel industry, such as Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations, have become increasingly active funders of the climate change denial campaign in recent years. Unlike publicly traded companies such as ExxonMobil, these private outfits can hide their finances from public view, and they remain largely invulnerable to outside pressure. In recent years, as ExxonMobil has been pressured by politicians on both sides of the aisle to withdraw from funding the climate change denial movement, Koch and Scaife have stepped up, contributing millions of dollars to the effort.
Koch funding played a major role in the faux scandal known as 'climategate' which involved the misrepresentation of scientists based on out-of-context quotes (sound familiar?) taken from emails of theirs
that had been stolen off a university computer server in the UK (p. 220):
One report showed that twenty or so organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had "repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople" in stories about climategate.
Meanwhile, the Scaifes funded many of the personal attacks intended to discredit me and the "Hockey Stick" (p. 228):
In mid-January 2010, a group known as the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which receives funding from the Scaife Foundations, led a campaign to have my NSF grants revoked. The perverse premise was that I was somehow pocketing millions of dollars of "Obama" stimulus money simply because I was a coinvestigator on several recently funded NSF grants. These absurd distortions were--no surprise--promoted by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others of similar persuasion.
and (p. 229):
Two Scaife-funded groups.. the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, had swung into action. The latter had already sued the University of Massachusetts and University of Arizona to obtain copies of my personal e-mails with my two hockey stick coauthors, while in May 2010 the former demanded extensive information from the NSF regarding grants that had been made to me as well as to several of my colleagues at Penn State, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, and Columbia University.
It began to strike me as curious that so many of the demands that I be investigated could be traced back to organizations with ties to the Scaife Foundations. The Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania organization that is the recipient of considerable Scaife largess, for example, had been pressuring Penn State University to fi e me since climategate broke in late November 2009. It managed to get the sympathetic Republican chair of the Pennsylvania state senate education committee to threaten to hold Penn State's funding hostage until "appropriate action is taken by the university against associate [sic] professor Michael Mann." Indeed, it was the Commonwealth Foundation attacks that essentially forced Penn State to launch its initial inquiry into the various allegations against me in December 2009 (similar inquiries and investigations of CRU scientists were initiated in the United Kingdom). The Commonwealth Foundation kept the pressure on for months through a barrage of press conferences and press releases attacking me personally and criticizing Penn State for its supposed "whitewash" treatment of any number of supposed offenses. It also ran daily attack ads against me in our university newspaper The Collegian for an entire week in January and helped organize a protest rally against me on campus. It is likely that these attacks forced Penn State's hand yet again, leading it, following the completion of the initial inquiry in February 2010, to move to a formal investigation, despite having found no evidence of misconduct in the initial inquiry phase.
As we head into the 2016 presidential election, this is a reminder that polluting interest are mobilized, and in addition. They don't have the facts on their side, so they resort to distorting what scientists say (often based on a
single word in a scientific paper) in the hope that their followers will believe their twisted version of reality.
Vote climate.
__________Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and the recently updated and expanded Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change. His latest book The Madhouse Effect, with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles, is due out in early September.
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