“It's anti science,” says Michael E. Mann PhD, distinguished atmospheric scientist and director of the Earth Sciences Center at Pennsylvania State University. “It’s a concerted, agenda-driven effort to communicate non scientific, unscientific beliefs. That's what's so dangerous today. That's what vested interests have been advocating, have been pushing forward, have been spreading.” 

This isn’t what he signed up for. Mann is a scientific researcher. He’s not a politician or a spokesperson. He does experiments in the lab. But after publishing the famous hockey stick graph which laid bare that the exhaust from burning coal, oil and gas was warming our atmosphere at an alarming rate, Mann found himself on the receiving end of the fossil fuel industry’s public relations war against science. And he’s been chronicling how the strategic communications efforts of inaction have been systemically blocking climate action policy for their own selfish ends ever since.

These are the people who are lying about climate change for oil & gas companies who fund them, says @MichaelEMann at @PSUClimate https://t.co/sOp2XHy26r #climatechange #climateaction #climatecrisis #globalwarming— EricSchwartzman (@ericschwartzman) February 15, 2021

Here’s the hockey graph. The green line projects the direction global temperatures are heading. This is what got the fossil fuel industry so upset, and what propelled them into the war against science.

Caption: Red line: rescaled IPCC 1990 Figure 7.1(c), based on Lamb 1965 showing central England temperatures; compared to central England temperatures to 2007, as shown in Jones et al. 2009 (green dashed line).[17] Also shown, Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 40 year average used in IPCC TAR 2001 (blue), and Moberg et al. 2005 low frequency signal (black).

Like the temperature inside a car with the windows rolled up in a hot parking lot, exhaust from spent fossil fuel was getting trapped in our atmosphere, effectively rolling up the windows around our planet. We the people are like trapped dogs inside. But rather than heed the call of science and roll down the windows, those that profit from harvesting and selling fossil fuel-based products kicked into high gear, using the conservative media and the GOP to maliciously weaponize their base.

https://youtu.be/9SPjlDA1ftY

Watch the full interview: https://youtu.be/4AdJAumtIRo

The Saudis are significant News Corp shareholders, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal went to work energizing their conservative base against scientists like Mann “...who are getting rich off of promoting the scare, the hoax of climate change, and often providing our email addresses and out our physical addresses.” These bold faced lies resulted in credible death threats against Mann and his family, even prompting an FBI investigation.

Republican politician Joe Barton representing the Dallas suburbs, who was also known as “Smokey Joe” for his consistent effort to block pollution control in congress and who admitted to sending a sexually explicit picture of himself, went on the attack. “But he's just one of rogues in a gallery of right wing politicians. Ken Cuccinelli, former Attorney General of Virginia went after me. James Inhofe, climate change denying senator subpoenaed my emails. All these people, of course, were basically doing the bidding of the fossil fuel interest groups who funded them,” says Mann.

But rather than back off and step down, which is what the fossil fuel industry had hoped he would do and why they sicked their media and political attack dogs on him, Mann decided to lean in. “The effort to discredit me and to intimidate me is intended to cause me to withdraw from the public conversation. And my instincts have been to do just the opposite,” says Mann. “If these powerful interests really don't want me out there talking about this, maybe I've got something important to say.”

But now,