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  This was merely a beginning. As he explains in his poised and well-tempered Science as a Contact Sport, Stephen Schneider was a target throughout his career. In 1971, he had speculated about the possibility of global cooling. Forty years later, the know-nothing denialist and conservative columnist George Will dismissed him as the “environmentalist for all temperatures”. More damaging was the persistence in cyberspace of a calumny based on the distortion of a comment Schneider had made in 1989 in an interview for the magazine Discover. He had spoken about the tension between his obligation as a scientist towards nuanced truthfulness and his responsibility as a human being to fight for the future wellbeing of the Earth. One passage of the interview read: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” A journalist published the first sentence and omitted the second. For twenty years, on this basis, Schneider was defamed on denialist websites as a self-confessed liar.

  He got off lightly. The attacks on James Hansen have been remorseless and ruthless, especially once he became politically active. Michael Mann chronicles the process in fine detail in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. After his “hockey stick” graph morphed from an illustration in a scientific paper to an icon of the climate change campaign, Mann became the sworn enemy of the denialists, the subject of a politically inspired Congressional investigation, never-ending vicious lampooning, public heckling, constant email abuse and a plausible death threat. What was interesting in all this was the steady rise in the degree of the verbal violence. Santer was merely accused of deception and fraud. After the “Climategate” scandal broke in November 2009 – the leaking of over a thousand emails between climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – Marc Morano, the denialist operative and the political friend of our own former senator Nick Minchin, argued that the climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged”. Even he was outdone by an ultra–right wing blogger, the late Andrew Breitbart, who called for “capital punishment for Dr James Hansen. Climategate is high treason.”

  Naturally in a matter where so much was at stake for the fossil-fuel industry, if doubt was to be manufactured and inaction engineered, serious money would be needed. The money was found both directly through fossil-fuel interests and indirectly through wealthy conservative foundations whose involvement was as much a matter of libertarian anti-regulatory ideology as it was of commercial considerations. During the 1990s, probably the most important sources of denialist funds were American coal and electricity corporations like the Western Fuels Association, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association or the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of fifty or so corporations and trade associations. In the late 1990s, this alliance fell apart, beginning with the defection of BP. The largest source of funds for the denial campaign was now probably ExxonMobil. By 2006, its support for climate change denial had become so notorious that it was chastised in a letter from the head of Great Britain’s Royal Society, which was leaked to the press. Although in 2008 ExxonMobil announced that its funding of denial had ended, evidence soon emerged that this was not entirely true. Nonetheless, in recent years the most important sources of funds for climate change denial have most likely not been fossil-fuel corporations but vastly wealthy and profoundly conservative foundations like Scaife and John M. Olin.

  The earliest study of climate change denial – Gelbspan’s The Heat Is On – offers a fairly simple and rather characteristic materialist explanation of the funding: “A major battle is underway: In order to survive economically, the biggest enterprise in human history – the worldwide oil and coal industry – is at war with the ability of the planet to sustain civilization.” Such an interpretation probably underestimates the importance of ideology – the anti-regulatory, anti-state market fundamentalism that shapes the funding agendas of the conservative foundations.

  In recent years, massive financial contributions to climate change denialism and many other conservative causes have been made by the three foundations managed by Charles and David Koch. In the case of the Kochs, there is no need to choose between the material and ideological explanations of the millions they have injected into the cause of climate change denial. On the one hand, their vast fortune comes originally and still predominantly from oil and gas. On the other, as the sons of a right-wing oil man who did business in the Soviet Union, whose anti-communism was grounded in his firsthand observation of the terror under Stalin, and who became, following his return to the United States, a founding member of the John Birch Society, they have remained faithful to their father’s heritage: deeply ideological anti-socialist, anti-regulation, anti-statist, low-tax libertarians.

  The corporations and the conservative foundations sought to conceal their direct involvement by funding anti–global warming organisations, such as the dozens of market fundamentalist think tanks that became a vital dimension of the American political landscape during the Reagan era and beyond, and are at the centre of the climate change–denial campaign. A study called “Defeating Kyoto”, by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, showed that in the build-up to the 1997 Kyoto conference, these think tanks – Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Marshall Institute – produced a large amount of denialist material on their websites, described with unusual wit as “consciousness lowering activity” and “the social construction of non-problematicity”. Another study, “The Organization of Denial”, whose lead author was Peter Jacques, looked at all the anti-environmental books published in the United States between 1972 and 2005. Of the 141 such books, 132 were connected to one of the right-wing think tanks. These books were published at an ever-accelerating pace – six in the 1970s, fourteen in the 1980s, seventy-two in the 1990s, and forty-nine between 2000 and 2005. The conservative think tanks also provided fellowships for many denialist scientists and helped arrange their access to the media.

  Even more powerful than the right-wing think tanks were critically placed members of Congress who could assist in the prosecution of the anti–global warming struggle. Three names stand out: Dana Rohrabacher and Joe Barton, both members of the House of Representatives, and Senator James Inhofe. Inhofe’s greatest claim to fame is his description of climate change science as possibly the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. After Climategate broke, in imitation of an earlier senator, Joe McCarthy, Inhofe called for the criminal prosecution of seventeen climate scientists. Rohrabacher was chairman of the committee on Energy and Environment following the resurgence of the Republican Party in the 1994 Congressional elections. As George E. Brown, the ranking minority member of the committee, demonstrated in a prophetic article, “Environmental Science Under Siege”, at the 1995 hearings of this committee it was Rohrabacher who was primarily responsible for the partisan politicisation of climate science and for the injection of the voices of denialist scientists into the centre of American national debate.

  A decade later the situation had further deteriorated. At a time when Republican environmentalists were fast becoming a “vanishing tribe”, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, Joe Barton, summoned Michael Mann to appear before Congress in 2006 and then acted as if he had summoned not a climate scientist but a criminal conspirator. Barton demanded detailed records covering every aspect of Mann’s scientific career – financial support, data archives, computer codes, evidence of his attempts to replicate research. He then commissioned an inquiry into Mann’s science by a politically friendly statistician, Edward Wegman.

  Climate science was by now one of the most fiercely contested fronts in the increasingly bitter American culture wars. As in all such battles, the role of the media would prove critical. In “Balance as Bias”, a 2004 study that became famous because of its appearance in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, Maxwell and Jules Boykoff showed that by adhering to the journalistic convention of
balance, between 1988 and 2002 the American prestige press had unintentionally aided the denialist cause. They had provided their readers with a misleading impression of a more or less equal divide between the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who were convinced that human-caused climate change was occurring and the handful of mavericks who were not. Maxwell Boykoff replicated the study later in the decade. He found that by 2005 and 2006, the prestige press, as opposed to the tabloid press, had replaced its earlier “balanced” coverage with accurate reports of the state of the science (though he had missed the drift towards denialism of the Wall Street Journal via its opinion pieces and editorials). However, when he surveyed American television, he found that denialist voices were common. With the ever-expanding influence of the Rupert Murdoch–Roger Ailes innovation, the 24/7 conservative populist propaganda cable channel, Fox News, they would become increasingly so.

  More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet. A number of influential websites, like Watts Up With That?, Climate Skeptic and Climate Depot, were established. One of this online network’s early victims was Michael Mann. For this reason, he developed an excellent understanding of how the denialist disinformation distribution system operated. In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars he analyses in some detail the attempted debunking of the paleoscientist Keith Briffa’s Yamal tree-ring analysis by one of the most remorseless denialists, the retired Canadian mining executive Stephen McIntyre:

  First, bloggers manufacture unfounded criticisms and accusations. Then their close allies help spread them … Ross McKitrick writes an op-ed piece in the right-wing National Post more or less accusing Briffa of fraud … Individuals such as Marc Morano, Anthony Watts … UK Telegraph blogger James Delingpole … spread the allegations through the Internet echo chamber. That is all the justification that apparently is needed for commentators such as Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun to eventually propel the unfounded accusations onto the pages of widely read newspapers.

  By the process Mann describes, a confected controversy of utter obscurity about ancient tree rings was presented within hours in living rooms on the other side of the world as knockdown proof that all of climate change science was a fraud.

  Through the denialist websites a simple, endlessly repeated standard narrative had by now taken shape. Climate scientists, who were called “warmists”, were involved in a sinister conspiracy. They were deliberately conjuring an environmental panic that they knew was mendacious, and were lining their pockets with research grants at taxpayers’ expense. In addition, on the more extreme edges of the denialist movement, people like Marc Morano and Lord Monckton argued that climate scientists were engaged in an international conspiracy to destroy capitalism and to impose socialism and world government upon the unsuspecting masses. On some websites the Jewish ethnicity of some climate scientists was duly noted.

  By now an ugly and altogether unrestrained language appeared on websites and in comments responding to articles that criticised denialists or merely accepted the conclusions of the climate scientists. This verbal violence is to the personal computer what road rage is to the motor car. No one knows how much is spontaneous and how much is somehow organised.

  What is known is the demographic profile of the main contributors. A fascinating academic study of the American Gallup poll over ten years called “Cool Dudes”, once more by McCright and Dunlap, showed that ageing conservative white males are many times more likely than any other segment of the population to be denialists. The denialism has nothing to do with lack of education or ignorance. The more such people think they know about climate change the more convinced they are that the orthodox science is a fraud. To judge by the flood of vitriol that inevitably follows any online defence of climate science or criticism of the denialists, a goodly part of this group is very angry indeed. They seem to dislike being told that industrial capitalism is threatening the wellbeing of the planet and – to choose my words deliberately – that man’s ambition to achieve mastery over the Earth has spiralled out of control.

  The aim of the verbal violence is clearly intimidatory. Morano – the inspirer of the “swift boat” advertisements that converted presidential candidate John Kerry from Vietnam hero to coward – routinely published the email addresses of climate scientists on his website, Climate Depot. By the time of Climategate, most had become accustomed to frequent deranged abuse and occasional death threats.

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  As late as 2009, most writers on the politics of climate change were convinced that the denialist movement would fail. In 2005, Ross Gelbspan told James Hoggan “the denial campaign was kaput”. In 2006, George Monbiot wrote in Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning: “After years of obfuscation, denial and lies about climate change, all but the most hardened recidivists in the US government are re-branding themselves as friends of the earth.” In 2008, Gwynne Dyer argued in Climate Wars “the denial industry is in full retreat”. Shortly after, in Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway concluded: “Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate … Maybe now the tide is turning.” Mann tells us that by 2009, even among the climate scientists, a “troubling complacency” could be observed; many believed that “the climate wars had been won”.

  This turned out to be a mistake. Towards the end of 2009, two principal events occurred. The first had nothing to do with the denialists – the abject failure of the Copenhagen conference, where rational hope that the Kyoto Treaty would be replaced by some more effective international agreement died. The second was all their work. By that time, a new breed of denialists, most importantly Stephen McIntyre, had been pursuing several leading climate scientists remorselessly, searching for methodological or empirical mistakes in their work and demanding from them, frequently with a blizzard of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, the raw data from which their conclusions had been drawn and even the computer codes they had devised. As a result, a small number of minor errors were unearthed – in Michael Mann’s statistical work, for example, or in the Chinese weather station data that had been used in a seminal study of the urban heat island effect. As soon as a real or supposed error was discovered, an article was published in a journal as prestigious as could be found. And as soon as it was published, the error’s existence became known to the world through the denialist echo chamber. The political logic was captured perfectly by Johann Hari in the Nation: “The climate scientists have to be right 100% of the time, or their 0.01% error [is used to show] they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01% of the time for their narrative … to be reinforced by the media.”

  This strategy was highly effective. For the climate scientists, pursuit by McIntyre was probably a greater source of frustration and anxiety than Morano’s vile abuse or even Joe Barton’s attempted Congressional inquisitions. One of those pursued by McIntyre was Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit. On the eve of the Copenhagen conference more than a thousand private emails to and from climate science colleagues were somehow acquired and published on denialist websites. This coup immediately made its way to the front pages of the newspapers and the television news in countries where the long denialist campaign had already raised questions in the public mind about the reliability of climate science. The actions of the denialists had been very carefully planned. They had already found damaging sentences in the emails – like the one concerning the need to “hide the decline” in temperature, or the one which said, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” – whose meaning could be twisted to suggest the fraudulence of climate science. Some of the emails revealed the intense frustration of the scientists. One email suggested that if peer-reviewed journals published denialists, the status of those journals should be reconsidered. In another, anxiety about McIntyre-style FOI harassment led to Phil Jones’s foolish suggestion t
hat certain emails might need to be deleted.

  Many journalists accepted the language that denialists had used as their frame – Climategate, the “smoking gun”, the “final nail in the coffin”. Even the best informed climate-change journalists – like Andrew Revkin of the New York Times and Fred Pearce of the Guardian – treated the accusations of the Climategate conspirators with a far greater seriousness than they deserved. George Monbiot even called for Phil Jones’s resignation. Months later, when the political damage was already done, Jones was exonerated by three separate inquiries (Monbiot duly published a retraction: “It was unfair to call for his resignation”). In a culture war of this kind, where the enemy is so ruthless and the stakes are so high, ill-judged overscrupulousness by decent people anxious to appear fair can do real harm.