David Schnare has had a weird career. Back in the late 70’s and early ‘80s, as he was getting his start at the EPA, Schnare was a scientologist, and produced multiple reports justifying Scientology’s detox procedures that have since proven potentially fatal.
After a few decades as a mild-mannered but conservatively-minded career staffer at the EPA, Schnare started a coal-funded group that attacks climate scientists by suing for emails. After the election of Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt’s rise to power, it looked like Schnare was poised to make the changes to the EPA in line with his conservative ideology and climate skepticism. Instead, he clashed with Pruitt and flounced out of the EPA in a huff.
But that wasn’t the end of the drama. As the Daily Beast reported in April, and NY Times expanded on in June, Schnare has been embroiled in a scandal regarding the financial situation and leadership of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, leading to a unique situation where the group was both plaintiff and defendant. Schnare apparently accidentally registered the clinic as an LLC, which prevents it from taking tax-exempt donations from dark money groups like Donors Trust, who had an interest in the case.
After these eventful two years, we’re betting Schnare must be thrilled to finally have a win. An Arizona court ruled this week that two climate scientists must turn over their emails to Schnare’s coal-funded Energy & Environment Legal Institute. The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund’s Lauren Kurtz told us in an email that this is “a really disappointing and perplexing result, especially since Arizona has a law to protect scientific research in situations like this.” She also told us that “it also puts Arizona at odds with most other states that have instituted specific legal protections to prevent against these sorts of abuses.”
But whether or not it actually ends up a win depends on whether or not the media has learned anything since Climategate in 2009, when they uncritically and breathlessly covered climate scientists’ emails that had been carefully curated by deniers to allege wrongdoing. In the aftermath, eight different investigations cleared the scientists, but by then the damage had been done and the dramatic but empty accusations scuttled an important international climate negotiation. (If this sounds like another instance where hacked emails were misleadingly presented as salacious in order to influence an impending political decision, you’re right.)
Over at WUWT, they’re calling it “Climategate 4.” If you knew about Climategate but are wondering about editions 2 and 3, don’t worry, it’s just more of the same.
Which is why Climategate 4 isn’t apt to make any real headlines. But still, deniers will try. The target of this case are emails from Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes, and in them Schnare is hoping to find evidence that Michael Mann’s hockey stick was the product of some sort of shady conspiracy in which Overpeck and Hughes participated. (Hughes was a co-author on the original hockey stick paper.)
We’re pretty confident that the deniers won’t find anything actually incriminating. We’re even more sure that if they did, it still wouldn’t matter. Over the last 20 years, Mann’s hockey stick has been replicated by others. Although it was certainly an important and pivotal work of science, the PAGES 2k project laid to rest any doubts about its validity.
Our prediction? Schnare won’t find anything actually bad, but will still cherry-pick, quote-mine and otherwise misrepresent the emails to try and make his seven-year fight worthwhile. He’ll fail.
And because this isn’t a Star Wars or Sharknado movie, the fourth installment of Climategate will pale in comparison to the original. Which itself was stupid. But we’re now in the stupidest timeline, so who knows.
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