Energy Efficiency

Often I pondered on why the Arabs called the USA the great Satan and because Yanks look like me more than Arabs and speak the same language as I do, it was easy to dismiss them; however, after a previous story I wrote earlier today about how the Obama adminstration is to spend $50 million on a media campaign to make the USA appear palatable plus spend over $1.5 billion in aid to Pakistan, I wonder ….

Climate Cover-Up – The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is a new book by James Hoggan (Chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Canadian Climate Project), which provides a timely and alarming overview of a global propaganda campaign that has – for over two decades and largely funded by the oil and gas industry, successfully – made the public believe that climate science is controversial, unproven and unworthy of united global action.

These industry funded PR campaigns represent a fundamental breach of public trust Hoggan argues and have meant that we have lost two decades when we should have taken much strong climate action – two critical decades. His book charts a litany of scientists and right wing think tanks who have been paid off by the energy industry to become the mouthpieces of climate confusion and denial.

In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute (API) created a `Global Climate science communications plan’ aimed at convincing the media and public of `uncertainties’ in climate science, as opposed to promoting a genuine understanding of the science. Among the key aims of the communications plan was the intention, working on behalf of industry, to change conventional wisdom regardless of science and to overwhelm the media by injecting `balance’ into coverage – regardless of whether that balance reflected the true nature of the science.

We have obviously forgotten how the cigarette industry lied and bribied its way for years as did many chemical companies invloved in GM, so it comes as no surprise to know that the API communications plan begins with the mission statement that: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of conventional wisdom (and) Media understands (recognises) uncertainties in climate science.”

Following this, Hoggan documents how influential think tanks took on the call of promoting this uncertainty, largely funded in doing so by ExxonMobil. In November 2006, conservative think tanks began offering cash to scientists who would agree to write critiques of the IPCC fourth assessment report. Ken Green of the American Enterprise Institute (who received significant funding from Exxon) offered US$10 000 plus expenses for such a critique, at a time prior to the IPCC Report being released. The AEI were clearly determined to criticise the findings of the IPCC report, whatever those findings were.

Meanwhile, the Climate Science Coalition (who have chapters in USA, New Zealand and Australia) were responsible for submitting a stream of sceptic articles to mainstream newspapers in an organised campaign of spreading oped’s around the world. The transparent purpose of this organisation is not to debate science, but to plant seeds of doubt in the public mind.

While the think tanks were doing their dirty work, the tactic spread all the way to the US congress. In 2007 the Republican Party pollster and spin doctor Frank Luntz wrote a memo advising the Bush Administration on how best to deal with the environmental movement; on climate change, he wrote, ‘the party should remind voters (sic) that scientific debate remains open; voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to the scientists and other experts in the field…. The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.”

In January 2007 the Fraser Institute, a Canadian Think Tank, released an Independent Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC report which concluded “there remains an unavoidable element of uncertainty as to the extent that humans are contributing to future climate change, and indeed whether or not such change is a good or bad thing.” The Fraser Institute is also a recipient of Exxon funding.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace USA started to expose the impact Exxon was having on the climate debate. Greenpeace set up an ExxonSecrets website which found that in the ten years after the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon had invested more than US$20 Million in think tanks dedicated to questioning climate change science.

Shortly after, two academics from the University of Central Florida, Peter Jacques and Mark Freeman, released a paper entitled `The Organisation of Denial: Conservative think-tanks and Environmental Scepticism’ found that 92% of 141 books had recently been published downplaying the importance of climate change received funding from ExxonMobil. [The Exxon Valdez oil carrier of ExxonMobil is still the largest oil spill polluter and have not paid the original penalty for gross pollution of some otherwise pristine environment and wiped out a complete fishing community]

Finally, the UK Royal Society contacted Exxon and asked them to stop funding think tanks that undermined climate science. In 2007 Exxon reported that it had stopped funding organisations `whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion of how the world will secure energy the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.’ However, shortly after that, a new denier think-tank came to the fore – the Heartland Institute.

In 2008, Heartland offered an all expenses paid trip to New York and a US$1000 honorarium to any scientist willing to “generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science.” They brought these scientists together for major international climate sceptic conferences in 2009.

One strategy of Heartland has been to generate public `petitions’ of scientists who refute climate change science. However, many of these petitions have been found to contain names that are either fictional or of scientists who do not endorse the positions espoused. Many of these scientists have written to Heartland expressing their dismay at the use of their name, but Heartland refuses to remove them.

For example Dr. Svante Bjorck, a geo Biosphere scientist from Lund University, whose name was included in a Heartland Paper prepared by Dennis T. Avery and published on Heartland’s website under the headline `500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-made Global Warming Scares’ wrote in a letter to Heartland “please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical !!” Despite this and many other similar complaints, the article and the list of names remains on Heartlands website. No apology. No correction.

A trend that Hoggan identifies in his book is that of the `echo-chamber effect’ among climate deniers. It relies on the echo chamber model of PR – sending out messages that reverberate through a series of think tanks, blogs, and sympathetic media outlets. This means that false claims made on climate denier websites are often repeated until they slip into the mainstream media.

A good example is UK Botanist David Bellamy writing in New Scientist that `555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Gracier Monitoring Service in Zurich have been growing since 1980′. When Guardian columnist George Monbiot contacted the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich to verify the claim he was told “This is complete bullshit.” Monbiot later tracked the figure to the denier website Junk Science and globalwarming.org and discovered it was written by long time industry funded denier Candace Crandall.

Another key example is that of the Hockey Stick graph designed by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, and used in the third IPCC Report. A retired Mining executive and investor, Stephen MacIntyre, launched his attack on the Hockey Stick Graph in 2003 in an obscure Journal Energy and Environment after more reputable journals refused to publish it.

Although Mann rebuffed most of the criticisms, he did add a clarification for the record, and this was enough for the news to spread through the deniers echo-chamber that the graph was discredited. By the time the story was spun back into mainstream media, it was often used by right wing columnists to discredit the entire science of climate change. That was despite the National Academy of sciences affirming the legitimacy of the Hockey Stick graph.

Also identified in Hoggans book are a new category of climate sceptics – the nondenier denier. These people, typified by Bjorn Lomborg, put themselves forward as reasonable interpreters of the science, even allies in the fight against climate change, but then undermine the public appetite for action. Despite Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist being heavily criticised by the Danish government for `fabricating data’, as well as being `misleading’ and containing `plagiarism’, Lomborg became the toast of the sceptics movement, receiving awards from conservative think-tanks in the US and UK.

The problem is that in the interests of traditional journalistic balance, people like Lomborg can appear to be `centrist’ voices. Falling between the environmental side of the debate and industry funded lobbyists who were regularly overstating the anti-warming side, people like Lomborg who might argue – there is warming but we need to direct money to more pressing issues like AIDS – were given a large space in the media.

James Hoggan refers to the work of a number of researchers who have tried to find peer-reviewed papers doubting the science of climate change, but is those cases, researchers such as Benny Peiser in the US and Lawrence Solomon in the UK could not find a single peer-reviewed article in the past 15 years denying anthropogenic climate change or a single well qualified “denier” of the human contribution to climate change.

In this climate of deliberate manipulation and misinformation James Hoggan concludes that the alleged controversy around global warming should now be identified for what it is – a carefully constructed ruse to keep people from supporting the kinds of actions that will compromise the profit potential of large energy organisations, including the largest corporation in the world – ExxonMobil.

The book is essential reading.