 These days to get attacked all we have to do is step foot off campus and tell anybody even a local Qantas club or a local church or even a group of elementary school kids that climate change is real and then the angry letters start to flood in. Typically the attacks are not really about the science. The attack on the science is a proxy for what is really an effort to discredit science that may prove inconvenient for certain special interests. That's when I started getting attacked and that was when life sort of changed. It was a bit like you know going through the looking glass. I started getting hate email. What happened then was I mentioned to a couple of colleagues what was going on and one of my colleagues at Scripps at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said to me you should talk to Ben Sander. Something sort of similar happened to him. I remember sitting in a bar in Madrid with Stephen Schneider at the late Stephen Schneider immediately after the final sentence had been agreed on in the 1995 report a sentence that's forever engraved on my memory. The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate and here we are at this bar and Steve says to me this changes everything you know your life is going to be changed forever and I had no idea what he was talking about I really didn't. There is definitely a pattern of what happens. Nasty emails, complaints to your university, requests for your emails and a lot of attacks online. Often it takes the form of an attack on individual scientists. There's a part of you know the strategy of ad hominem attack. Go after the scientist, go after their integrity, go after their funding, make life miserable for them. I have received letters in the mail in that in one case contained a white powder that I had to actually report to the FBI they had to come to my office and investigate this and send this off to a lab to make sure that you know it wasn't anthrax or some very dangerous substance that my entire department would have been subject to because of this. Then there's the power of the Internet which really was not available back in 1995 to harness your supporters to go after individual scientists send them threatening emails or worse and let them know we're watching you and we don't like you we don't like what you do. One of the tactics that you see in sort of climate change denialism is an effort to spin and misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific studies. So often studies that say one thing for example show that you know some aspect of climate change is you know even worse than we thought will somehow be spun by climate change deniers as if it you know doesn't provide evidence for concern. Clearly misrepresenting scientific information, cherry-picking scientific data. One egregious example that we talk about in the book is an early work by Jim Hansen that Bill Nirenberg, Bob Jastrow and Fred Seitz take out of context and use it to argue that climate change is caused by the Sun when in fact if you go back to the original paper Hansen is arguing exactly the opposite. I think an additional weapon in the arsenal is a freedom of information act requests which are being used not really to advance understanding or again shed light on complex scientific issues but as a tactic to threaten to intimidate to throw a spanner in the works to take up your time. They will bully editors to try to get them to retract articles that are a threat to their case, their case being that climate change isn't real it's not something to worry about. The weirdest day of my whole life practically was the day I got a phone call from a reporter in Tulsa, Oklahoma who said to me are you aware of the fact that Senator James Inhoff is attacking you? At that time I honestly didn't even know who Senator Inhoff was in fact I think I'd been to Oklahoma maybe once but I mean so yeah and I said no I have no idea why I mean I first I thought he was making a mistake like this was some other well I have a very unusual name so it didn't seem plausible it was some other Naomi Areskas you know yeah and then he had he read to me from the speech that this that Inhoff was making you know and it was part of what we all are very familiar with now that I was part of the global conspiracy the scientific conspiracy to bring down global capitalism and I remember thinking conspiracy scientists are not that organized. Hacking emails releasing them all of these things yeah the technology has moved on since 1995 but it's the same playbook don't really focus on the science and advancing understanding contributing but tear down destroy. Well I think the best we can do is shield ourselves from the attacks and try not to dwell on them unless it's a safety issue in which case we take appropriate steps and try to move on focusing on what we want to achieve rather than what's trying to hold us back. So if you are a prominent scientist if you participate in the public discourse as I've often said you better develop a thick skin because you will be attacked personally. So my number one rule of thumb is do not Google myself I don't want to see my number two rule of thumb is do not read the comment section I don't want to know. One of the things that I think is really important is that by writing about these things and by documenting it and by writing about it in a scholarly way you know with high standards of documentation we can explain to our colleagues or institutions editors a journal and the public and the media what this is because this is not a scientific debate I mean if I have one message that's what this my message has been all along and still is this is not a scientific debate it's a political debate but it's a political debate being made to look like a scientific debate. We now know why people do that because it's a very very effective strategy because if you can make people think it's a scientific debate then people think it's too soon to act but if people see the truth if they realize that this is certain if it's a political debate that it's related to people's ideologies to their value structures that gives a whole different cast so it's very very important for people to understand the character of what this thing is. Some things are worth fighting for and that perhaps was the most profound lesson for me back then that a clear public understanding of the science doing the kind of thing that you're doing here that was truly worth fighting for.