The changing focus of climate denial: from science to scientists

One morning in July 2012, climate scientist Michael Mann woke up to a short email from a fellow scientist.

“Holy crap,” read the post from Phil Plait, an astronomer and science communicator. “This is truly the most horrible thing I have ever heard said about a climate scientist. If someone wrote this about me, I would call a lawyer.”

A conservative media outlet and a right-wing research organization had published commentaries in which Dr. Mann, then a professor at Pennsylvania State University, was compared to Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach convicted of sexually abusing several children. The writers claimed that Dr. Mann had created fraudulent charts and accused the university of mishandling investigations into both the coach's crimes and the scientist's research.

Dr. Mann did indeed call a lawyer. He sued the writers and their publishers for libel and slander. Now, twelve years later – after a pinball journey through the obstacle course of free speech and defamation law – the case is headed to trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court. Only the two writers are on trial as individuals. A ruling is expected as early as Wednesday.

“Being compared to Jerry Sandusky, as the father of a six-year-old girl, was perhaps the worst thing I have ever experienced,” Dr. Mann in court on January 24. a pariah in my own community.”

The lawsuit comes at a time when outright denial of climate science has waned, but the integrity of scientists has become a bigger target.

“The nature of climate denial has changed,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the advocacy group Center for Countering Digital Hate. The group recently published a report analyzing YouTube videoswhich found that personal attacks on scientists are now one of the most common forms of online content dismissing climate change.

The lawsuit has attracted the attention of climate scientists and legal scholars, among others. The lawsuit is one of the few cases in U.S. courts where a climate scientist has taken the stand to defend his research, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

“It's rare for a climate scientist to fight back against climate deniers,” said Mr. Gerrard, who also serves on the board of directors of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which includes Dr. Mann previously helped with another legal file. conflict.

Because Dr. Mann is legally considered a public figure, he has to clear a higher bar than most people to win a defamation lawsuit. He faces the difficult task of proving that the authors he has indicted knowingly lied in their writings. The authors have argued that their posts merely reflect opinions. Their publishers also unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and professor at Texas Tech University, said Dr. Mann resonates with other climate scientists. “I can't go one day without being attacked,” she said. “He fights for all of us.”

In court, Dr. defends himself. Mann's most famous research, namely published in the late 1990s and showed that average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have risen so sharply in recent decades that the graphs do resembled the shape of a hockey stick.

The research came under fire in 2009 in an incident known as 'Climategate', when hackers broke into a computer server at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and released thousands of emails between scientists, including Dr. Man. Skeptics seized on the emails, claiming he manipulated data to exaggerate the hockey stick graph.

Penn State investigated his research, as did the National Science Foundation, the Commerce Department and others. All have Dr. Mann cleared of wrongdoing. Both before and after the outrage, other scientists have replicated his findings using various data sources and statistical methods.

The case seemed resolved until 2012, when Mr. Sandusky was convicted and the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation published a report saying the Penn State administration had failed to stop the coach's criminal actions.

The day after that report was published, Rand Simberg, then an adjunct scientist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, published a blog post on the think tank's website comparing Dr. Mann with Mr. Sandusky. “You could say Mann is the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of harassing children, he has misused and tortured data in the service of politicized science, which could have serious economic consequences,” Mr. wrote Simberg.

A few days later, Mark Steyn, an author and then guest host of conservative radio and television shows, republished part of Mr. Simberg's post. on National Review online. “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent 'hockey stick' graph of climate change, the ringmaster of the tree ring circus,” Mr Steyn added in his own commentary.

Within a short time, Dr. Mann files his lawsuit.

The scientific consensus on climate change has been clear for twenty years. An article from 2004 that reviewed more than 900 scientific studies on climate change, I haven't found any research that rejects the idea that human activity produces greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

But public acceptance of that fact has fluctuated.

In 2008, 71 percent of Americans recognized that climate change was happening a long-term six-monthly study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University. But between 2008 and 2010 – the years before and after Climategate – the share of Americans acceptance of climate change fell to 57 percent.

It has since been restored. A 2023 survey by Yale and George Mason found that 72 percent of Americans accepted that climate change is happening.

Recent years have also seen progress in research on climate skepticism, denial and campaigns to delay climate action. In 2021, an international group of researchers trained a machine learning model to sort climate-related claims across 255,000 documents collected over the past two decades from conservative think tank websites and popular blogs. This data set included Mr. Simberg's message about Dr. Mann.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, sorted the claims into five broad categories: no global warming is happening; human greenhouse gases do not cause global warming; the climate impacts are not bad; climate solutions won't work; and the climate movement/science is unreliable.

The model labeled the claims in Mr. Simberg's blog post under the category “climate movement/science is unreliable,” according to an analysis by Travis Coan, a computational social scientist at the University of Exeter and author of the study.

Within this category, scientists are even bigger targets than activists or politicians, says co-author John Cook, a psychology researcher at the University of Melbourne. Attacks on scientists are “actually one of the most common forms of climate disinformation,” he said.

Claims that “climate solutions don't work” have also gained prominence and now make up more than half of the claims made by conservative research organizations, his group's research shows.

Regardless of the form, all these claims share the goal of delaying climate action, said Dr. Cook. “They try to get there through different routes.”

The recent report builds on the 2021 research of the Center for Combating Digital Hate used the same methods to analyze 12,000 YouTube videos posted over the past six years. The researchers found that what they call “old denial” – claims that global warming is not happening or not caused by humans – now makes up only 30 percent of all dismissive claims, down from 65 percent in 2018. “New Denial,” including attacks on scientists and misinformation about solutions, now makes up 70 percent of these claims, up from 35 percent in 2018.

A spokesperson for the Competitive Enterprise Institute declined to comment on the lawsuit. Mr. Simberg's lawyer, Mark DeLaquil, said: “We don't think this case is really about climate science. We believe it is about the right of individuals to express their opinions freely, even if they disagree with government reports of the type that Dr. Mann claims to exonerate him.” A lawyer representing Mr Steyn, who is representing himself in court, also declined to comment for this article. When asked for comment, National Review said chief editor Rich Lowry pointed to an editorial published at the start of the trial in January.

Regardless of the outcome, legal experts say this lawsuit is important not only for climate science, but also for defamation law and freedom of speech.

“The case is at the intersection of some of our toughest questions,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. The courts must balance people's rights to express their opinions freely while preventing lies that damage people's reputations, she said.

If Dr. If Mann wins, his case would show that “there really is some teeth in defamation law,” said Sonja West, a law professor at the University of Georgia. If he loses, the case “could contribute to this larger debate about how strong our First Amendment rights are.”