My inspiration for this article was an interview I heard on public radio recently, in which Penn State climatologist Michael Mann talked about how his life had been threatened because of his research on climate change. 

It began when emails Mann and another climate scientist had exchanged in 2009 were stolen, distorted and then published on the Internet to undermine United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen. Mann subsequently wrote a book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines” (Columbia University Press, 2012) describing the many tactics that emerged to try to silence him. He warned, “Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation — not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats.”

Mann’s “Hockey Stick” derived from a graph he made showing small changes in temperature over the past thousand years until 150 years ago when there was a sudden jump. A colleague suggested the graph looked like a hockey stick. After his study was published in the magazine Nature in 1998, attacks began on his scholarship and on him personally. He even received emails with messages like, “You and your colleagues . . . ought to be shot, quartered and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families.” 

Mann, whose latest book, published in September, is “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet” (Columbia University Press) believes the sources of the attacks were the oil and coal industry and conservative groups. “That is the life of a climate scientist today in the U.S.,” he acknowledged.

Prompted by the vitriol, in July 2016, 19 senators condemned the “#Web of Denial” — interconnected groups funded by the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal that they accuse of misleading the public about climate change in order to protect their profits. DeSmog Blog has documented how these industries have spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute. These outfits in turn have paid for the research of a host of scientists who have discounted the role fossil fuels play in climate change. 

Sad that wealthy groups are putting corporate interests over public health