f you go back a couple of decades, as we sometimes say, the signal was still emerging from the noise. The science very clearly established that we were warming the planet and changing the climate in various ways. But in terms of public understanding, the public wasn’t really seeing it yet in the form of the sorts of unprecedented extreme weather events that we’re now seeing and the coastal inundation and droughts and heatwaves and wildfires and floods. It wasn’t yet that apparent. There was still a window of opportunity for climate polluters and those promoting their agenda. There was really an effort to discredit the science, often by discrediting the scientists. And I found myself at the receiving end of personal attacks that were intended to discredit the hockey stick curve because it was perceived as such a threat.
What kind of attacks?
I received a white powder in the mail. The FBI had to come to my office. There was police tape over my office. They had to send out the sample to the lab to have it tested. It turned out it was cornmeal or something. It was intended to intimidate and scare me. And demands from conservative politicians that I be fired from my job at the University of Pennsylvania. Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, vilifying me to their audiences. It was a full-throttle effort to discredit me because of the threat of the hockey stick curve that I had published.
Okay, 25 years later, are you still being bullied?
Well, the battle has largely moved on. We’ve really evolved mostly past denialism because the impacts of climate change are staring us in the face. They’ve become so obvious we can see them play out in real time. And there is a resurgence, a superficial resurgence of denial, like on social media, Twitter, for example. But it’s not real in the sense that the actual public survey work that’s been done shows that it remains a fairly small fraction of the American public, roughly 10 percent, who are climate dismissives. So in reality, most people have moved on. The vast majority of the public gets it. They understand because they can see it, they can feel it. It’s not like the fossil fuel industry has given up. They’re still doing everything they can to prevent us from moving on. But they’ve largely moved away from [outright] denialism toward these softer denialist tactics.
How to recognize the new climate change denial, explained by a climate scientist - Voxhttps://www.vox.com/platform/amp/climate/23885799/climate-change-denial-fossil-fuel-companies-exxon-mobil