Many of the leading scientists working on climate change research around the country have found themselves targeted by David Schnare, an attorney working for a coal-industry-backed nonprofit. In recent years, Schnare has hounded academics with lawsuits and voluminous record requests as part of a campaign the Union of Concerned Scientists has called “harassment” designed to “chill their speech, and discourage them from tackling contentious topics.”
Now, Schnare is working for Donald Trump.
On Monday, the Trump transition team named Schnare to the team revamping the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency that oversees climate change and pollution-related research and science. Schnare is one of many operatives with fossil-fuel ties to join Trump’s EPA team, but his name stands out as someone who has gone beyond mere advocacy by actively working to intimidate individual scientists.
Schnare, the general counsel for the Environment & Energy Legal Institute, a group formerly known as the American Tradition Institute, has gone after climate scientists for the last five years.
Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist whose 1988 congressional testimony brought national attention to the dangers of climate change — and who in 2006 revealed that the Bush administration was censoring climate change research — was among the first targets. In 2011, Schnare filed a lawsuit demanding years of Hansen’s records, and in the accompanying press release, claimed that Hansen was engaged in “‘global warming’ activism” as a ploy to enrich himself.
That year Schnare also joined the legal battle against former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann, filing a request for Mann’s personal emails and other correspondence, and suing UVA to force disclosure. Mann, an award-winning scientists whose research has shown earth’s temperature rise, had long been a target of the fossil fuel industry, had faced death threats for his work on climate change.
Schnare lost the Mann lawsuit; a Virginia court ordered his group to pay Mann $250 in damages.
Schnare and his organization have filed similar requests against University of Arizona scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes, NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, and Katharine Hayhoe, a scientist at Texas Tech University.
Gretchen Goldman, the research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that Schnare’s “E&E Legal does the dirty work that fossil fuel companies don’t want to associate themselves with, including harassing and attacking scientists.”
Goldman also noted that a former fellow with Schnare’s organization worked to help pass legislation in North Carolina to ban state agencies from using scientific research showing sea-level rise.
“They literally tried to outlaw sea level rise,” says Goldman. “What kind of scientific analysis do you think they are going to try to ban at the EPA?”
Last year, The Intercept was the first to report that Schnare’s colleague, Christopher Horner, had received funding through a sister organization from Alpha Natural Resources, a major coal mining company. A subsequent filing revealed that Peabody Coal, the largest private sector coal firm in the world, has directly supported Schnare’s E&E Legal.
The time has come for American scientists in a number of fields, but especially in Earth Sciences, Biology, and Climatology, to emigrate.
Many scientists immigrated into the US over the years because the political environment in their country of birth made it impossible for them to pursue their research goals. Now the situation has reversed itself, and the US is no longer a nation respectful of knowledge and the advancement of science.
Things change, it is America’s turn now to undergo the brain drain other nations went through for a long time.
Honestly I think that it’s the climate consortium that’s doing the intimidation most of the time. At least that’s what I see with my own two eyeballs.
I can assure you the more scientific among us prefer NASA data to anyone’s “eye-witness weather,” and most also don’t give a shit about the poor wittle hurt feelings of a predatory lying fossil fuel industry.
You got to love it though (snark) when anti-science climate-change deniers like some in these comments – point to a spot on the globe and say, “See, it’s colder here than last year so decades of NASA measurements data means nothing.” And you can bet, as OUR planet dies many of those will invariably look to the sky and lament, “God, why have you forsaken us.”
I can tell you’re emotionally invested in this climate change scam. Unfortunately snark doesn’t equate a good argument so try and come up with some facts to back up your narrative instead.
Whoa! All of you ‘reasonable folks’ who deny the existence of global warming should snap up coastal property and build big old houses to live in; nothing to worry about, it’s all a hoax, enjoy the seaside. If anything goes wrong, blame the Chinese.
The oceans temps have risen 35 degrees to the point of cooking coral reefs! Are all of you people willfully ignorant or just plain st$pid???
-> “The oceans temps have risen 35 degrees.”
And you’re delusional.
_”CCGS Amundsen re-routed to Hudson Bay to help with heavy ice”_
“Worst ice conditions in 20 years force change of plans to icebreaker research program”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/ccgs-amundsen-re-routed-to-hudson-bay-to-help-with-heavy-ice-1.3162900
I think that “35 degrees” claim is wrong, because it sounds completely implausible. (Is it 3.5 degrees maybe?)
But you should know better than to use regional weather fluctuations to try to argue against the long-term global trend.
That’s not to say weather fluctuations are irrelevant. You need to look at the trend in extreme weather events and damages, and the trend is clear.
NO there are no climate scientists who agree with your religion.
All the actual experts such as John Christy say you are an idiot and you theories have already been disproved by the measurements.
It has been 30 years since you made your predictions. The data is in and your feedback loop theories were wrong
John Christy on Global warming:
Anybody who can make an analogy such as that part of his argument must be right, eh?
You are either a deluded moron or a liar.
Is this a joke. The only ones being targeted are people who are true scientists, who question the “science” of AGW. Not one prediction has come true, and the only “proof” for the theory is the models, which , again nothing predicted has come true. AGW , as put forth by the AGW alarmists, reads more like science fiction than real science.
Lots of things predicted by global warming have come true: Sea level rise (actually more pronounced in reality than predicted), glaciar melt, stratospheric cooling, etc.
Sorry but that tiny bit of anecdotal evidence isn’t very convincing. The earths temperature has always fluctuated and were actually in a cooling period at the moment.
What is this article?
Are you striving to normalize AGW.
And authenticate the lies and propaganda of Hansen and Mann. This is a hoax you purport…
A money grabbing hoax, a new religion of the status quo. The sky is falling. Educate yourself before it too late, Mr Fang…of course your scribbling could be about readership. So you push a button and see what happens.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/05/despite-denial-data-shows-global-temperatures-are-dropping-fast/
Hansen can barely keep his story straight, from doom and gloom in 1988…’the artic is melting and seas are rising…to his prediction that by 2008 manhatten would be flooded’.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/03/shock-the-father-of-global-warming-james-hansen-dials-back-alarm/
I could writing 10,000 words with fact, and it still would not crack the walls of this new religion.
So, you trust Anthony Watts – a former TV meteorologist-turned-blogger, who couldn’t finish college – over 100% OF THE WORLD’S ACTUAL SCIENTISTS UNBEHOLDEN TO FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY INTERESTS?? … Is that what you’re telling us? To put it politely, buddy, you are one big moron.
That’s a myth. Hansen predicted that in 1988 about West Side Highway. It was a 40-year back-of-the-envelope prediction, assuming a doubling of CO2. (A subsequent article fudged the time frames, and that’s where the myth comes from.)
The Warmist agenda is what these Denier forces are attacking and they have good reasons for investigating people like Hansen who is a quisling of the Nuke power industry.
The science of GW may be settled but the Big Green agenda and the scientists who promote it have already shown they will cook the data to sell their agenda as we saw in the UK. The Deniers will fight to protect their fossil fuel industry because they know that the Big Green agenda is just another industrial growth plan that intends to displace them while doing little if anything to reduce or stop GW.
The irony is that both these forces should know that there is no technological growth fix for GW, only dramatic reduction in consumption will even slow its effects. While the Deniers fight to protect their industry and its millions of jobs and the Big Green forces try to sell their techno fantasy solutions the End of Growth may trump both their plans by at least slowing our burning of the planet.
@wayoutwest
“The irony is that both these forces should know that there is no technological growth fix for GW, only dramatic reduction in consumption will even slow its effects. ”
Bullshit…there is no scientific connection between Global Warming and a reducyion in consumption.
Did you know that average global temperature plummeted 1 degree…what Global warming are tou talking about.
Solar cycle 24 was a rather cool one, and the lack of sunspots is the possibility of a Maunder minimum for the next few cycles. were is this global warming.
Why, no, I didn’t, actually. When did this happen?
Citation, please.
Ridiculous. When? Even from one year to the next, 1 degree is a lot. In fact, the last time the global annual temperature was below the 1950-1981 average was in 1976.
Your claims are false
Stop being tricked by fake news and laughably bogus GISS graphs
There are infact no measurements of global surface temperature until 1978 with the advent of satellites. Anything before that is a wild estimate with a huge margin of error
No measurements until 1978? Really?
Actually it was many satellite measurements that were in error until it was leaned how to correct them.
More idiocy and delusion, Joe. Might think about checking yourself in.
The world saw the highest record setting temperatures for the last year.
We did cool.
Data compiled by NOAA documented Pacific Northwest, region, close to Alaskan border has seen a 4°c rise in temperature in the ocean.
Not may. Will. Inevitably.
However, given that we have seven-plus humans (and counting) already using a third of the planet’s net primary production; rapidly exhausting the supplies of non-renewable energy while (many are) fantasizing that renewables can provide net energy at even a significant fraction of that we’ve enjoyed during the century-and-a-half oil age; similarly exhausting supplies of safe water, industrial minerals, arable land, etc.; filling the Earth’s sinks to overflowing with poisons; and show no sign of doing jack shit to take the (radical) steps that everyone who has been paying attention has know to be essential for 50 years. . . the biosphere may survive and revive, in some new iteration (it depend upon how many of the nukes we launch in the final resource wars), but human civilization as we know it is toast — and the outlook for humanity itself is pretty iffy.
I = P*A*T
St. Matthew Island reindeer.
The nukes you mention may be the only effective way to counter the already existing greenhouse effect but nuke winter is also possible. I’ve read that the aerosol pollutants in the upper atmosphere mostly from China, India and other emitters is masking one degree of latent GW so even if big polluting economies retract dramatically there could be surprises waiting.
I doubt that humanity can be exterminated it’s too much like a virus and there are millions of poor people who still know how to survive without modern civilization. Much of the rest of the civilized and dependent people of the world wouldn’t last very long if there was an acute disruption of our distribution systems. Two weeks and most food stores would run out or be inaccessible and six months would see many survivors eating their neighbors.
some lawyers will do ANYTHING for money.
America needs a law that prevents the consequences of lawyers fone wild.
But that wont happen because anything for money is the new American way. Torture, kidnapping, droning, wmd, forever wars, russia didits, TTP, nato crazy, murder at guantanamo, NDAA…. WELCOME TO HELL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGR4SFOimlk
Excuse me, what is new about it? How is it associated with America anymore than most other places in the world?