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“Calling Michael Mann’s work fraudulent is just patently false,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a group that helped defend scientists facing legal attack in 54 cases last year. Mann, she added, has been “exonerated” of wrongdoing by multiple investigations into his work.

Mann has “been attacked in all the ways that a climate scientist can be attacked,” Lauren Kurtz, the executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, told DeSmog. “He’s been remarkably public about what’s happened to him, [and] willing to fight back in ways that other scientists haven’t necessarily wanted to take on.”

“Climate scientists have a responsibility to untangle fact from fiction and to communicate with society clearly about the dangers of climate change,” he said. “If we do not actively take on that role, others will fill the vacuum that our silence creates.

Thirty-odd years ago, Mann published the famous "hockey stick" graph that charted global temperatures through the ages. This made the urgency of the climate crisis much more easily understood by the general public. This got up the noses of the extraction industries and their various sled-dogs in politics and the media, and they launched an assault on Mann and his work.

The first revamped agency scientific integrity policy crafted under a Biden initiative leaves a lot to be desired, according to comments submitted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a coalition of ten public health, transparency, and environmental groups.

The undersigned 136 organizations committed to good government principles across political affiliations are united by our desire for accountability for taxpayer-funded government activities. We support credible free speech rights for whistleblowers who expose fraud, waste of funds or abuse of authority in federal spending.

Most state and local officials worked tirelessly — often at risk to their own health and lives — to protect the public. But as was true at the federal level, senior state and local officials repeatedly failed to live up to the trust the public placed in them. Across the country, state and local leaders meddled in research and data and retaliated against experts in order to improve their political standing and cover up mismanagement.

The first agency within the Biden administration to rewrite its policy to protect career federal scientists from political influence as required by the White House has taken some positive steps, according to a conglomerate of watchdog groups, but is still falling short of ensuring its workers do not face reprisal and bad actors are held accountable.