Stunningly clueless ClimateGate article by Stephanie Pappas

How Scientists Cope as Climate Debate Gets Personal | ClimateGate & ClimateGate 2.0 | Global Warming & Climate Change Politics | LiveScience

"You realize there is this Internet doppelganger that has your same name and your same place of work and your same publication list, but who is a monster who believes in terrible, terrible things," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "It isn't anything to do with anything you've actually said or done."

...Other researchers were, as Schmidt puts it, "dragged kicking and screaming into the public realm." A prime example is Mann, whose famous "hockey stick" graph, showing a sharp uptick in Northern Hemisphere temperatures in the 1900s (a graph that was shaped like a hockey stick), became the center of a firestorm after its publication in the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report"That really propelled it onto the world stage as an icon in the climate-change debate," said Mann, whose upcoming book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (Columbia University Press), recalls the controversy. "Any icon in the climate-change debate is immediately attacked by professional climate-change deniers. So we have been in the crosshairs of deniers ever since."

Mann said he was caught off guard by the amount of attention his work received, but said he quickly developed a thick skin.

"Early on when we were subjected to these attacks, a hero of mine, Steve Schneider of Stanford, who sadly passed away far too early a year ago, he took me aside and he said, 'You know, don't take this personally, what these attacks are is a testament to the importance of your work,'" Mann said.

Mann said that advice helps remind him that the debate over climate change is political, not personal. He says he sees most attacks coming not from grassroots efforts, but from industry consortiums trying to protect their economic interests."These attacks, they don't represent the feelings of actual people," he said. "They are so-called 'astroturf' organizations that will bus people in to try to create the false appearance of grassroots support."
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[comment]Willis Eschenbach
Michael Mann? Your poster boy for the oppressed scientist is Michael Mann? Really?

Clueless doesn't even begin to describe our dear Stephanie Pappas, who doesn't seem to get out much, and who clearly cannot recognize a scientific scam artist like Mann...