"Green Fascism": Let The Facts Speak

If you can’t win an argument, you can always use force—or so some of the more fanatical climate change deniers out there appear to feel. I’ve always believed that the truth will out—but these folks either don’t believe that, or don’t have confidence that they are really on the side of verity.

Well—I must be fair here--so far it’s not actually force--just the threat of it. Ideological firebrands on the right, people of the ilk of Rush Limbaugh, have long applied violent and defamatory language to scientists concerned about climate change. For example, on his November 24, 2009 show, Limbaugh stated that scientists involved in the global warming “hoax” should be “named and fired, drawn and quartered, or whatever it is.” (Drawing and quartering was a particularly gruesome Medieval torture/execution/mutilation.)

In the blogosphere, the scientists have been reviled (not always coherently) as frauds, fascists, socialists, murderers, parasites, and worse. Things turned particularly bad in the wake of the so-called Climategate hack (in which emails were stolen from the servers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)

Dr. Phil Jones, at the epicenter of the scandal, received over 200 threatening messages, according to Nature.com. The most troubling said things like “Someone, somewhere, will hunt you down,” or “Expect us at your door to say hello.” The result for Dr. Jones was depression, rapid weight loss, suicidal thoughts and a reliance on anti-anxiety medications—a decline that reportedly stunned his friends.

He wasn’t, however, the only one. A number of climate scientists reported this sort of harassment, and apparently some threats were deemed serious enough to merit police protection of one sort or another being put in place.

Attacks have also taken place in the print media: Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was falsely alleged to have profited from his position as head of the International Panel on Climate Change; and Dr. Andrew Weaver was similarly defamed by Canada’s National Post:

I asked the National Post to do the right thing, to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.

Both cases were settled favorably to the scientists who had been libelled, and the defamatory statements were retracted.

Official intimidation has been forthcoming, too. For instance, Dr. Michael Mann—a frequent target of denialist ire as the architect of the so-called “hockey-stick” graph, has for over a year now been the target of investigation by the Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli.

In April 2010, Cuccinelli issued subpoenas for a lengthy list of Mann’s papers while at the University of Virginia, including years worth of emails to 39 named individuals. The rationale was that Mann had received a state grant while on faculty at the University of Virginia, and though the work specified in that grant had been satisfactorily completed, Mann had used his professional resume in applying for the grant—and since the “hockey stick graph” was false (according to Mr. Cuccinelli) that meant that Dr. Mann had fraudulently applied for the grant.

On August 30, a Virginia judge rejected this theory, writing:

"The nature of the conduct is not stated so that any reasonable person could glean what Dr. Mann did to violate the statute."

On September 29, Cuccinelli offered a slightly redrawn “Civil Investigative Demand.” Five days later the University of Virginia revealed that it had spent $350,000 to that date in legal expenses—more than the original grant had been worth. It is not known how much the Attorney General's office has spent on the investigation so far.

The matter of the original ruling is before the Virginia Supreme Court, and the new Demand is unresolved. Costs continue to mount, despite widespread denunciations of the witchhunt as both expensive and chilling to academic freedom.

Political and fiscal intimidation is in play, too; the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has repeatedly tried to use the power of the purse against any hint of action that might help control carbon emissions. On February 18, for example, they voted to defund EPA efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and in March attempted to defund the EPA completely.

Currently, they are attempting (absurd as it may sound) to defend the incandescent light bulb, having just passed a measure to defund any promotion of energy-saving lightbulbs. Apparently it is our inalienable right to spend more lighting our homes.

But it isn’t only the enforcement arm that’s under attack; the House voted in February to defund US support for the International Panel On Climate Change, and may well force cuts to NASA satellite missions that provide essential data in understanding climate.

(What could more clearly demonstrate the will NOT to know the truth than this? Perhaps the GOP emblem should be not the elephant but the ostrich.)

But turning back from the institutional to the personal, Australia has recently suffered a spate of death threats against climate scientists. The Canberra Times reported that:

Australia's leading climate change scientists are being targeted by a vicious, unrelenting email campaign that has resulted in police investigations of death threats.

The Australian National University has confirmed it moved several high-profile climate scientists, economists and policy researchers into more secure buildings, following explicit threats to their personal safety.

June 17^th saw the publication of a report in the Canberra Times that said:

Two of the most shocking cases involved young women who have had little media experience or exposure. One was invited to speak on climate change at a suburban library. Her brief was simple - talk about everyday things people can do to cut their carbon footprint, talk about climate books available at the library (list provided), leave time for questions, and mingle afterwards. The other woman was asked by a local newspaper to pose with her young children for a photograph to illustrate an article promoting a community tree-planting event. She was briefly quoted as saying planting trees could help mitigate climate change. Two days after the article appeared, she received emails containing threats of sexual assault and violence against her children.

As for the woman speaking at the library, her car windscreen was smeared with excrement - animal or human, does it matter? - and the words ''climate turd'' written (also in excrement) across the car bonnet. Proof perhaps, of a climate dissenter with a Freudian complex indicating arrested development.

June 20^th saw a new incident, as reported in The Australian:

In the latest incident, Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies executive director Anna-Maria Arabia received an email today saying she would be "strung-up by the neck" and killed for her promotion of mainstream climate science.

The threat was emailed to her this morning before a "Respect the Science" campaign at Parliament House in Canberra today.

The most recent threat was caught on video—by the organization perpetrating it, the Australian LaRouchite group calling itself the Citizens Electoral Council. Their carefully placed video camera caught the incident and posted it to Youtube, along with an explanation that their target is a Fascist tool of the British Empire. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Members crashed a talk being given at the University of Melbourne by physicist Hans Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, presenting a shocked Dr. Schellnhuber with a noose. Of course, they disavow any intent to threaten; they’d be fools—or bigger fools—not to do so. But there is no doubt that Dr. Schellnhuber read the implied message quite clearly. The Australian quoted him:

"I was confronted with a death threat when I gave my public lecture," Professor Schellnhuber said. "Somebody got to his feet and showed me a rope with a noose. He showed me this hangman's rope and he said: 'Mr Schellnhuber, welcome to Australia'.

"As I tell my colleagues from time to time, 'Some day some madman will draw a pistol and shoot you'. It will happen -- to me or somebody else. I'm pretty sure about that."

Let’s hope that Dr. Schellnhuber is wrong about that. There’s a right and a wrong way to win a debate—or ‘debate,’ as it’s questionable that the climate controversy really merits that term. Subtle or not-so-subtle intimidation and overt threats are not the right way to win. And they are more than bad enough. I’m hoping it doesn’t get worse.

It’s ironic that Dr. Schellnhuber, Dr. Jones and others have been branded by some of the extreme ideologues opposing the mainstream science as being “green fascists,” “eco-Nazis,” proponents of “the Big Lie” and so on. What does Wikipedia say about Fascism?

"Fascists promote violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality. Fascists view conflict as a fact of life that is responsible for all human progress. Fascists exalt militarism as providing positive transformation in society, in providing spiritual renovation, education, instilling of a will to dominate in people's character, and creating national comradeship through military service. Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on political opponents, people whom they oppose, or overthrowing a political system."

Doesn’t sound much like Drs. Schnellnhuber, Jones, Weaver or Pachauri—nor even like Dr. James Hansen, who was arrested June 23, 2009, for trespassing as part of a non-violent protest against mountain-top removal for coal-mining.

Perhaps that description sounds like someone else altogether? Someone who presents speakers with nooses, who smears excrement on cars, who threatens children with rape?

Note: Ironically, the mine Dr. Hansen trespassed upon belonged to Massey Energy, later to become famous for its callous disregard of miner safety in the aftermath of the Upper Big Branch disaster.

Interestingly, Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia AG investigating Dr. Mann, is alleged to have received $10,000 worth of campaign contributions from Massey; he has not only declined to investigate Massey’s activities in his state—it is headqurtered there and operates one Virginia mine--he has allegedly worked cooperatively with Massey on a lawsuit against the EPA!

Unfortunately, events compel an update—Anders Breivik, as the world now knows, bombed and shot 77 people to death on July 22, 2011. Breivik serves admirably as a poster child for the facets of fascism described above, which may be summarized as a systematic glorification of violence, domination and force.

Although climate change was not Breivik’s primary focus—islamophobia and anti-Marxism provided that--his manifesto reveals that he, too, believes that ‘greens’ are a threat to Western civilization, and that climate change is a hoax they have invented to further their sinister political agenda:

You might know them as environmentalists, enviro-communists, eco-Marxists, neo-Communists or eco-fanatics. They all claim they want to save the world from global warming but their true agenda is to contribute to create a world government lead by the UN or in other ways increase the transfer of resources (redistribute resources) from the developed Western world to the third world. They are using our trust and faith in science to spread lies and hysteria that will allow Marxists to implement socialist ―solutions to a problem that never actually existed.

And:

. . . top scientists conspired to falsify data in the face of declining global temperatures in order to prop up the premise that man-made factors are driving climate change.

Prominent climate change denialists echoed, quoted or linked by Breivik include James Dellingpole, Steve McIntyre (by way of Alex Jones), and Lord Monckton.

For more on this aspect of Breivik's views, see:

http://www.desmogblog.com/norwegian-terrorist-anders-breivik-reveals-climate-denial-influences

Another incident of harassment and intimidation has come to light.

Dr. Charles Monnett, who had been under investigation with respect to his 2006 paper documenting polar bear mortality and with his administration of a cooperative study of polar bears carried out jointly with the University of Alberta, appears to have been un officially vindicated. Yesterday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), who have been representing Monnett, released emails showing that he had not acted improperly in any way.

They also noted that, unfortunately:

Finally, the fact of the investigation has subjected Dr. Monnett’s family to harassment, especially from climate-change skeptics who have, for example, posted his wife’s work email address on the web and invited readers to flood her inbox at her workplace which lead to a number of hateful and threatening messages.

Sadly, they are correct. I personally verified on 9/15/2011 that Climate Depot website had indeed done just that. Their post, date-stamped August 1, 2011, repeated the false claim that Dr. Monnett's wife (a respected scientist in her own right) had served as peer reviewer to her husband's paper, and publicly posted her work email address.

The post also commanded readers to:

Contact Monnett's wife [name redacted] with questions/comments about the Polar Bear paper: [email redacted.]

The reaction of some climate change denialists was apparently as predictable as it was regrettable, but PEER has drawn a merciful veil over the specific threats and insults that were hurled.

The latest victim of anti-science repression is Katharine Hayhoe, an Evangelical Christian who is also a climate researcher at Texas Tech University.

Dr. Hayhoe had been tasked in 2007 with writing a chapter on climate change for a forthcoming book by Newt Gingrich on environmental issues. She is well-known for engaging with the public, and particularly with religious conservatives, on the issue of climate change. She told the UK paper, The Guardian:

I really, really deplore the politicisation and polarisation of this issue. There are these increasingly unprincipled attempts to polarise the science when the science is fact – like the sky is blue, the grass is green and the temperature of our planet is increasing.

With the Iowa caucus in full swing, that represented a juicy target for anti-Gingrich partisans. Predictably, this 'scandal' was leaked to Rush Limbaugh, who waded in in his usual style:

Katharine Hayhoe is one of Newt's experts, and is a person who, when asked if the science was settled regarding global warming, she said, "Among climate scientists, people who spend their lives researching our world, there's no debate regarding the reality of climate change and the fact that humans are the primary cause." This woman is writing Newt's chapter on climate change in the new book. She says, "It is primarily laypeople like talk show hosts who are perpetuating the idea that there is no scientific consensus." Marc Morano, our man in Washington, claims that Newt's new book has a chapter written by a babe named Hayhoe -- no offense, Reverend Jackson -- that man-made global warming is happening, caused by man.

Gingrich quickly went into damage control mode, throwing Dr. Hayhoe under the bus:

That's not going to be in the book. We didn't know that they were doing that and we told them to kill it.

It is not known whether Dr. Hayhoe will be compensated for her wasted work in writing the chapter, which she had been told on December 7 would be accepted without major changes. It is known that she found out otherwise from a reporter, who was seeking her reaction. In a later Tweet she expanded upon her initial phlegmatic resonse:

. . .so much 'spare' time wasted I cd've spent w family, & 2. what an ungracious way to find out, eh?

However, the Gingrich chapter does not represent the end of Dr. Hayhoe's troubles. The Guardian reported that she has become a target for harassment:

. . .in the past six months or so, Hayhoe's growing prominence has also made her a target of opinion makers like Limbaugh, and of the shadowy network of well-funded thinktanks. In addition, "the hate mail has gone off the charts", she said.

Such thinktanks – though registered as non-profits – are often funded by the oil industry and conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers.

One such group, the American Tradition Institute, has been waging a legal battle to force the University of Virginia to hand over all emails from climate scientist Michael Mann, who used to work there.

Now the American Tradition Institute is coming after Hayhoe. On 10 December the organisation wrote to Texas Tech asking the university to turn over all Hayhoe's emails with even the most glancing reference to Gingrich or Maple.

One of the less-spectacular, but perhaps most socially-corrosive tactics of Fascism is the Big Lie technique. As reported in the New York Times, that is now being directed at Dr. Michael Mann.

A planned speech at Pennsylvania State University by Dr. Mann has become the object of a multi-media smear campaign. Deriding him as a "disgraced academic" of "questionable ethics and motives" who is guilty of "extreme political activism, disguised as academics," two groups urge the University to "disinvite" him.

The reality is, of course, that Dr. Mann is anything but disgraced: despite severe (and in some cases malicious) criticism his research has held up, and continues to be widely cited today. Moreover, investigations into allegations against him stemming from the so-called Climategate email hack have repeatedly exonerated him of any wrong-doing.

It is true, of course, that some continue to cry "whitewash," and continue to impugn Dr. Mann; but being subject to hysterical accusations unbacked by any real substance does not amount to 'disgrace.'

The groups themselves appear to be Astroturf groups fronting for the Bituminous Coal Operator's Association. They claim to be for those poor, down-trodden coal miners, and for America's energy security. Noble aims, no doubt--but do they really have to resort to slanderous disinformation to make their case?

Another instance of intimidation came last month, when Dr. Kerry Emanuel of MIT suffered a spate of particularly virulent hate mail after addressing a meeting of Republicans who have the courage to believe that climate change is real. As reported in The Guardian, the emails "are laced with menacing language, expletives and contain personal threats of violence." Particularly contemptible is the fact that threats extended to Dr. Emanuel's wife:

Emails contained "veiled threats against my wife," and other "tangible threats," Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of M.I.T.'s Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, said in an interview. "They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive."

As in the Monnett case, which also involved the wife of a scientist, the website The Climate Depot was responsible for publicizing emails for the convenience of hatemailers.

The Australian leg of this story has a new development: climate 'skeptic' (ie., denialist) websites worldwide are hailing the 'debunking' of the story of death threats at Australian National University. (Hat tip to "Charlie," a reader who brought this to my attention--though I rather think he takes this more at face value than I do.)

There is, however, less to this 'debunking' than might appear at first glance. A Freedom Of Information request to see ANU correspondence and documents relevant to this topic from January to June of 2011 eventually resulted in the publication of 11 emails. Only one contained an actual threat, and that was second-hand, and implied rather than explicit. Rather weak beer, one would be inclined to agree.

However, note that the original stories were not limited to ANU--the threats to the anonymous women in the incidents described above, to Ms. Arabia, to Dr. Schellnhuber, and in fact to "at least 30 climate scientists at institutions across [Australia]" were quite real. Moreover, the threats at ANU were not limited to a six-month period in 2011; in fact, the Climate Unit's "move to more secure quarters" came in the spring of 2010, roughly a year before the period specified in the FOI request.

Ironically, this 'debunking' is a pretty good example of denialist technique: minimize the seriousness of one thing, ignore a bunch of other stuff completely, and then claim that since the result doesn't add up to the original any more, one's opponent is deceitful.

Of the 39 Hubs I have published to date, this has been by far the toughest to write—not in the sense of effort or time, but emotionally. The topic leaves me with a metaphorical bad taste in my mouth, literally with a physical sensation of heaviness in the pit of my stomach, and intellectually with doubts about whether addressing this issue so forthrightly is the right thing to do, and about whether I have done so fairly and appropriately. Let me address some of those doubts.

Some will feel that I am ignoring extreme speech on the other side of the issue—and there has been some, though I am not aware of any specific threats to, say, Marc Morano, Roy Spencer or Lord Monckton. It does not appear to me that the use of intimidation is anything like symmetrical in the climate ‘debate,’ which makes sense given the style and content of commentators such as Limbaugh, for which there is no functional equivalent on the side of the mainstream science.

Others will object to my mentions of the US House of Representatives: clearly, they are operating within the bounds of the law and their constitutional duty when they undertake to set funding priorities. Why, then, it might be asked, do I implicitly associate their actions with those of fringe groups and (to put it plainly) nuts? Yet the public statements of a number of the Representatives make abundantly clear that, not only do they not understand the science they are in effect attempting to suppress, but they have not made the most elementary attempt to understand it. In that, they are (in my opinion) derelict in their duty, and they fall under the rubric of attempting to settle by force—fiscal force, in this instance—what they are unwilling to attempt to settle by reason.

Still others may feel that by mentioning threats and intimidation, I encourage them. They may be right; terrorists issue press releases for the good reason that their outrages are most effective in intimidating a populace when that populace actually knows about said outrages. But will ignoring this issue help the situation? I feel deeply that we must name what is happening. This, too, is a form of responsibility to the truth.

Lastly, I must acknowledge that as an individual I do not have the capacity directly to verify the information which I transmit in this Hub. I believe it to be accurate, but I am forced to rely on my sources. Some of those sources are named at the very bottom of this Hub; others, more widely reported, I consider to be well-established in public discourse.

Additional information from readers is welcomed.

Limbaugh “drawn and quartered” quote:

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200911240029

Phil Jones response to Climategate:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101115/full/468362a.html

Cuccinelli witchhunt:

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/va-ag-timeline.html

(A useful timeline of the Cuccinelli affair; note that it is given in reverse chronological order—most recent events first.)

Australian death threats:

The best single source for this is the climate blog Deltoid; in each case I have followed the blog links back to the original newspaper coverage. The first of the Deltoid posts is here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/06/australian_climate_scientists.php

Cuccinelli links to Massey energy:

http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2010/04/better-use-of-the-coochs-time.html

http://bluevirginia.us/showDiary.do?diaryId=3919&view=print

(Avowedly partisan sources, but campaign donations are in the public sphere, so that portion of the substance ought to be relatively easy to check. I was able to confirm that the Cuccinelli campaign has received donations from “Massey Wood & West Inc.,” an energy company headquartered in Richmond, which I understand to be the Virginia office of Massey Energy. I was not able to verify that Cuccinelli has received $10,000, as reported; the 2009 campaign for AG apparently received $1300. Searching via the contributor name does not work, or did not for me; one must trawl separately through the reports. Those with the time to pursue the reports for every year Cuccinelli ran for state office—2001 on--are invited to report back. The link is given below.)

http://www.sbe.virginia.gov/cms/Campaign_Finance_Disclosure/View_Disclosure_Reports/CF_Reports_Cidate.asp