Internet trolls and other net knaves, usually writing under the anonymity of pseudonyms, are nothing new. But let us discuss a category that does stand out. About a week ago we got a tip – from the author thank you very much – to a revealing set of reports at E&E's Greenwire service. They provide fresh detail and example on a long-running feature of life for the modern scientist: emails from strangers attacking one's research conclusions and character with often vicious language. If the researcher is a woman, the comments may be particularly vituperative. Climate scientists get the worst of it but one supposes that evolutionary biologists get a good share too. And, no doubt, skeptics get some pretty nasty stuff in reply into their own email in-boxes.
It may be just as well not to have posted immediately. It turns out that a few other outlets have recently covered the issue.
Here are the two that first came to the trackers attention. The first deals with a corollary challenge to climate researchers, the insistent demands for personal emails going back months or years so that they might be audited for anything that puts the science or scientist in a bad light, and the second with just plain harassment via insult.
- ClimateWire – Stephanie Paige Ogburn: (Jan 21) Climate scientists, facing skeptics' demands for personal emails, learn how to cope; and (Jan 22) Targets of climate hate mail rally to support one another;
Writer Ogburn covers these intertwined issues well. She chooses for her lead examples of hate mail campaigns several directed at specific women whose climate research triggered alarms in the climate-conservative blogosphere. She balances the story, in a worthy sense, by reaching out to one of the ringleaders of public climate change skepticism: Mark Morano. He freely tells her his reasons for unleashing the troops on offending mainstream researchers. Morano has no regrets and says he gets plenty of equally offensive blowback. She captures the mood within the academy well, including two mock-rules for how to avoid being a target. The first is to hide – never let any press officer put out a press release on your work if it moves the science of climate change toward verification that we have a problem, and number two never let on that you have any association with the perhaps most hated-by-the-crackpots of all climate scientists, Michael 'hockey stick' Mann.
Most distressing to women on the receiving end of internet hate and contempt campaigns is that the language often takes a specifically gender-based tone. One recipient was told "When people like you attempt to rape honest people with integrity we will come for you, with our firearms in hand…"
My guess is that most reporters, expecially science and environment writers who have received their own share of such dreck, are reluctant to report on this issue. Not from fear, but disgust and boredom. There is a distressingly tedious and depressing sameness to the mutterings of climate trolls.
Nonetheless, here are other, related accounts from recent weeks:
- The Guardian (Jan 9) Richard Schiffman: Harassment of climate scientists needs to stop ; Starring Michael Mann, with an update on the suits he has filed against his harassers.
- The Conversation (Jan 22, Australia & New Zealand) Jim Salinger: An Insider's Story of the Global Attack on Climate Science ; The author, a university researchers, relates the deep muck into which he was plunged after his efforts to maintain calibration of temperature records in New Zealand ran afoul of a "global climate change denial group." He even, from way down under, brings the US's Heartland Institute in. Incidentally but important, check the comments. They are unusually sane and civil. Hmmm. Perhaps it is that, from the looks of them, the site moderator insists that the reactions be posted under the real names of their writers.
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