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Executive director Lauren Kurtz and climate scientist Michael Mann discuss attacks on science in the Trump era.

The fear has pushed some agency scientists to seek advice from outside sources. Lauren Kurtz, executive director at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, says several federal climate scientists have asked her about their legal options for speaking out. "One researcher just called to say hey, my boss has made it really hard for me to do my job. What can I do?" she said.

Other lawyers are stepping up to protect dozens of climate scientists who have been targeted by private conservative groups demanding their personal emails and other documents... The law professors who came to New York for training attended classes taught by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

"People can get very dogged in attacking climate scientists, and they can do things you would never think of," Lauren Kurtz said in an interview with the HPR. She's the executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, based out of Columbia University, which defends scientists like Hayhoe from legal attacks.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund has asked the District of Columbia federal District Court to safeguard roughly 8,000 pages of privileged correspondence between nine climate scientists.

The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the group's founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. "There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress," Wolfe told me in an e-mail.