The Client had no objection to my delving into this area—he called it a “side gig”—so I began adding to my public appearances, speaking not only on solar irradiation and climate fluctuations, but also on topics of interest to adherents of Intelligent Design—who were also, I came to understand, very receptive to the idea that climate change was a hoax. I learned from Eric, and sometimes the Client, in our rare phone calls, that there were ways to frame the climate change issue that would appeal to the deepest fears and biases in human nature. I found this fascinating. We began to capitalize on the mistakes of the environmental movement, which seemed unable to effectively raise the alarm about the changing climate. We countered the science that indicated the arctic ice and permafrost were melting, and found more and more people rallying to our cause. Such ideas gave them hope that polar bears had a future. In fact, hope was our top commodity.
It would be going too far to say I began to believe in the research as a whole, but there were elements of the science that I found convincing enough. I spent more and more time with Representatives Bayless and Calhoun, and was eventually hired by both campaigns as a “senior science policy advisor.” I was made to understand that the demographics in Bayless’s district had been changing in ways that could be considered unfavorable to him—the population was younger, “browner,” in the words of one of his aides. The only way to counter this was to “double-down” and “fire up the base.”
My first ever television interview was with Fox News. According to the media consultant hired on behalf of the Group, I played well to my strengths. I had appeared awkward, she said, while also managing to underscore the talking points we had gone over prior to arriving at the studio: the scientific weaknesses of current climate research; the importance of airing a full range of scientific views; the lack of consensus among scientists regarding not just the cause of climate change, but its very existence (consensus was the term favored by climate scientists, a mistake upon which we capitalized—its inherent imprecision allowed us a thousand ways to move); and, most important, the obvious bias demonstrated by the National Science Foundation’s refusal to fund any climate change research that did not take man-made causation as its starting point.
My blond interlocutor was outraged on my behalf. “I find it interesting,” she said, tapping her pen on the desk separating us, “that the very same scientists who bemoan political interference in their own work are so blind to their own biases.” No less than four minutes after the interview concluded, as Eric, the media consultant, and I were sitting in the green room, a CNN producer called.
Over the next week, I became so comfortable giving interviews that Eric warned I was losing my awkward demeanor. The Washington Times invited me to pen an op-ed about political interference in science. I wrote about the National Science Foundation’s rejection of my grant application in detail.
The Client was pleased with our progress.
Soon after my initial media appearances, Representatives Bayless and Calhoun began joining me on camera. Eric warned me that as the story picked up speed, Democratic political operatives, along with enterprising journalists, would begin to dig into my past and reveal the plagiarism charges. This of course made me uncomfortable, but he assured me that it was part of the narrative, and that the mainstream media’s refusal to allow me, a man of faith, to be “born again” would only increase the public’s support. Again and again, the media underestimated the importance of the lost lamb to the churchgoing American.
*
I was not entirely surprised to receive Annie’s e-mail asking for a divorce, but it marked one of only two times during my preparations for South Pole when I doubted the wisdom of this entire endeavor—the first being the hours after Fred Zimmer’s unexpected visit. I found myself unable to focus on my papers. The research that had so engaged me now seemed uninteresting. Instead, I thought a great deal about Annie, and naturally dwelled upon our happier years. Again and again, an image of her walking out of the Electricity and Optics building at Stanford, talking to Sal Brennan, came to me. She was beautiful, with a gap between her two front teeth.
Later, I found Sal in his father’s lab, and asked about the girl with whom he’d been talking after class. He told me her name was Annie and that she was a classics major who sometimes took science classes as electives. He said he’d introduce us—“I happen to know she has a weakness for idiot savants,” he’d said. He added: “Too bad I’m not an idiot.” I appreciated the offer very much, but I was wary. Sal and I had only known each other for a year, but we already had a fraught history. He was John Brennan’s son, a beloved professor emeritus at Stanford, and was quite popular on campus himself because of his own extreme erudition, his good looks, and his easy manner. This was not a combination often found in the physics and applied physics departments. To complicate matters, the year prior we’d had a falling out, and although Sal was no longer ignoring me when he saw me on campus, he was uncharacteristically reserved when we spoke. At the time, Sal’s father had spent a great deal of energy trying to convince me to join the astrophysics department. Although John Brennan was one of the world’s foremost scientists, I’d demurred for many reasons, but the most salient had been the fact that Dr. Brennan was clearly suffering from early-onset dementia. I suspected Alzheimer’s, and I had made the mistake of saying so to Sal.
Despite this, Sal, it must be said, was as good as his word about Annie. A week after I saw her laughing with him on campus, I was sitting across from her at the Student Union, talking about Ovid and Apuleius. She was smiling at me, as if she was glad to be there. Later, she told me I was staring stupidly at her the whole time. I imagine I must have been, because I don’t remember a word she said, only the look on her shining, happy face. After we were married, I asked her why she’d agreed to a second date. Because, she told me, “you were brilliant, and unabashedly weird and yet completely oblivious to it.”
When he heard that Annie had filed for divorce, Eric visited me at my campus apartment. He tried to convince me that these domestic developments only deepened the theme of the misunderstood scientist. He suggested leaking to the media the fact that Annie was a professed atheist. At the look on my face, Eric fell silent. A few minutes later, he suggested another tack—the marriage could be framed as a casualty of a coordinated attack against my professional research interests. I admit that at this point I was beginning to fatigue of the falsity of the endeavor—what had initially appealed to those darker impulses that had pushed me toward plagiarism now seemed too costly. When I mentioned this to Eric, he told me he had the perfect solution: “Begin to believe in it. Stop acting. Buy in.”