Climate scientists have been harassed since long before Trump’s rise, much of it personal and internet-based: Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has said that after a media appearance, she receives up to 200 emails and letters a day filled with threats and accusations. “One email I got said something like, ‘I hope your child sees your head in a basket after you’ve been guillotined for all the fraud you climate scientists have been committing,’” Hayhoe told InsideClimate in 2015. Personal attacks exist off the internet, too. Climate scientist Ben Santer famously found a dead rat left on his doorstep, a story he told most recently to talk show host Seth Meyers.

Climate scientists working inside and outside the government have been subject to more than just internet trolls, though. Conservative organizations, some with ties to fossil fuel interests, have for years filed lawsuits against them seeking e-mail communications and unpublished research under various open records laws. The point, Kurtz says, is “to embarrass them”—indeed, in one ongoing lawsuit against University of Arizona researcher Jonathan Overpeck and climatologist Malcolm Hughes, the coal-funded Energy & Environment Legal Institute admitted it was seeking emails that “embarrass both Professors Hughes and Overpeck and the University.” The conservative group Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Commerce, seeking the communications of former NOAA scientist Thomas Karl and former director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren. Their purpose is to see whether these scientists “mishandled scientific data to advance the political agenda of global warming alarmism.”

Those groups are still at it. The difference, Kurtz said, is not that lawsuits have increased, but that the attorneys who perpetrated them have more political power. E&E Legal Institute General Council David Schnare, for instance, has sued several universities to gain access to climate scientists’ emails. He was named to the Trump transition team for the EPA and then joined the so-called “beachhead” team there, before eventually resigning because of differences with Pruitt. E&E Legal senior fellow Christopher Horner was also a member of Trump’s transition team.



Personal attacks persist as well, though it seems to rise and fall with the news. Hayhoe told me the amount of hate mail she’s received “spiked noticeably for two weeks” after Trump announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. (Hayhoe had spoken out against the decision.) “I mentioned it to quite a few people, [the spike] was so marked,” she said. Mann says he receives less hate mail too, and thinks the dip has to do with the fact that targeted trolling is less effective than it used to be. “The favorite approach of the climate change denial machine used to be to go after individual scientists, to try and make it seem like the consensus all depends on one person,” he said. “But I think now that the consensus has become as strong as it has, it feels like there’s been less aimed at me personally, because it’s just no longer credible to say that it’s all based on the work of Mike Mann.”