Today Charlie Pierce clued me in to a must-read piece in his magazine, Esquire, by John H.
Richardson. The article, When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job profiles many leading climate scientists and describes their frustration, anger and sometimes, despair at the growing evidence of disastrous climate change and the furious barrage of lies and personal attacks directed against them by the climate deniers.
As Pierce puts it,
This really should be the only issue in 2016—that the planet is dying and half of our political process is being paid to pretend that it's not happening at all.
Global warming denial may be the most serious symptom of the larger disease infecting the political and media world -- denying that half of the political process not only is fighting climate change (and established progressive programs), but the media's refusing to point out this "radical derangement" of the Republican Party, as
Driftglass puts it.
Richardson's article profiles Jason Box, who moved from the US to Denmark, and though he is relieved to have escaped the denial barrage here, he "is still amazed how few climatologists have taken an advocacy message to the streets, demonstrating for some policy action." Richard writes that scientists:
have been the targets of an unrelenting and well-organized attack that includes death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment, and intrusive discovery demands so severe they had to start their own legal-defense fund, all amplified by a relentless propaganda campaign nakedly financed by the fossil-fuel companies. Shortly before a pivotal climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, thousands of their e-mail streams were hacked in a sophisticated espionage operation that has never been solved
In particular, Michael Mann:
was investigated, was denounced in Congress, got death threats, was accused of fraud, received white powder in the mail, and got thousands of e-mails with suggestions like, You should be "shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families." Conservative legal foundations pressured his university, a British journalist suggested the electric chair. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe's committee called him to testify, flanking him with two professional climate-change deniers, and in 2011 the committee threatened him with federal prosecution, along with sixteen other scientists.
And just yesterday, we learn that Exxon scientists knew about and acted on the basis of climate change as
early as 1981.
Read the whole article. It's not cheery, but it's worth it to be reminded of what we are up against.