Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (10 page)

Such is the caution of the professional scientist that the IPCC now speaks about human-induced global warming as “very likely,” leaving a margin of doubt that allows people like Frank Luntz to point helpfully to the remaining element of doubt. Interestingly, however, no one on the Luntz team ever mentioned the obvious: that if scientists told you there was a 90 percent likelihood that your plane would crash, you would assuredly forego the trip. But when the conveyance of choice is planet Earth, as Luntz said, “You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” Again, his concern was perception and political advantage, not consequences.

In fairness, at the time Luntz wrote his
Straight Talk
memo, he was still relying on the results of the IPCC’s previous assessment report, from 2001, which had stated that the science could only pronounce that the human influence in changing the world climate was “likely.” That in part was what allowed Luntz to proclaim that “the scientific debate remains open.”

Luntz’s analysis was impressive from a technical standpoint. It is very sharp, very clever, and it’s clear from President Bush’s re-election in 2004 that he and his party dealt well with this, one of their weakest issues. It’s also worth noting that this kind of work is relatively common in public relations. Many corporations, trade associations, and politicians employ pollsters and analysts to run focus groups and test words, phrases, and key messages. Until you do so, it is sometimes very difficult to know whether your target audience is hearing and understanding what you
think
you are saying. But there is a presumption that what you are saying is either objectively true or fairly represents a legitimate opinion.

That presumption may have been too optimistic when the Western Fuels Association was working the ICE file, a process that also involved a significant front-end investment in testing words and messages. As Naomi Oreskes writes in a chapter titled “My Facts Are Better than Your Facts: Spreading Good News about Global Warming,” the Western Fuels Association even tested the name of their new Astroturf group. They thought ICE was a good acronym, but couldn’t decide whether to call their organization the “Information Council for the Environment,” “Informed Citizens for the Environment,” “Intelligent Concern for the Environment,” or “Informed Choices for the Environment.” Oreskes writes, “The focus groups indicated that American citizens trusted scientists more than politicians or political activists—and industry spokesmen least—so Western Fuels settled on
Information Council for the Environment,
because it positioned ICE as a ‘technical’ source rather than an industry group.”
³

As I mentioned in Chapter 4 , some of the Western Fuels Association’s messages were aimed primarily at making the notion of climate change sound silly (“Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.”), but they also tested others that were “fact” specific. For example, they tried out, “If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?” and they tested, “If the Earth is getting warmer, why is the frost line moving south?”

Again, the first test for these messages should have been whether they were true. Minneapolis was
not
getting colder. The frost line was
not
moving south. And all but the scientists whom the Western Fuels Association was paying to say otherwise seem to have agreed, even then, that the Earth was getting warmer and that people were to blame. But the Western Fuels Association was not testing for facts. It was testing the tolerance and responsiveness of its target audience. It was also clear in its agenda, which it summed up in three points:

1. To demonstrate that a “consumer-based awareness program can positively change the opinions of a selected population regarding the validity of global warming”;

2. to “begin to develop a message and strategy for shaping public opinion on a national scale”; and

3. to “lay the groundwork for a unified national electric industry voice on global warming.”

The target audience in question was nested in four cities: Chattanooga, Tennessee; Champaign, Illinois; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Fargo, North Dakota. These were chosen because they got most of their electricity from coal, they each were home to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce or Ways and Means Committees, and they had low media costs, which meant that it was going to be cheap to test the national campaign.

These are all wonderful details. They show a real degree of thoughtfulness, even professionalism, on the part of the people who designed the program. As with the Luntz analysis, you can see the intelligence, even tactical brilliance, that went into the campaign. What you cannot see is any evidence that anyone, at any time, asked whether what they were doing was right— whether, for example, the messages they were testing could have been incorrect and ultimately harmful.

Luntz, in the previously quoted radio conversation with the National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, continued throughout the interview to defend his use of language—even to suggest that what he was doing was a good and necessary thing. He said, “Corporations, trade associations, and politicians have a responsibility to communicate in a way that makes it most likely that the public will support where they stand.”

Really? Don’t corporations, trade associations, and politicians have a responsibility to communicate in a way that is fair, honest, and in the public interest? Do we assume that because it proved effective in the Western Fuels Association focus group testing, presenting incorrect information to the public about the actual details of climate change is a
responsible
option?

Luntz himself recanted on the climate file in 2006. He told the BBC: “It’s now 2006. I think most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place and that the behavior of humans is affecting the climate.” When the BBC reporter said, “But the administration has continued taking your advice; they’re still questioning the science,” Luntz responded, “That’s up to the administration. I’m not the administration. What they want to do is their business. It has nothing to do with what I write. It has nothing to do with what I believe.” That seems tantamount to saying, “I just work here” or, in the dark Orwellian version, “I was just following orders.”

I might have hoped for something more. When the President of the United States asks you to prepare a briefing note about communicating on the environment, I would argue that you have a responsibility to answer honestly—to inform yourself about the issue and to ensure that you are working in the service of your political master
and
in the service of the people who put your master into office. The “just following orders” defense was never a very good one, but it sounded more convincing coming from people who added an apology—even after the fact. Luntz apparently believes that he owes no apology, that he has done nothing wrong. That might give you fair warning the next time you hear that someone is buying his advice.

[
seven
]
THINK TANK TACTICS
Moving public policy into private hands

I
n November 2006 a senior academic and climate scientist at a major U.S. university passed on a letter that had been distributed with the signature of Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Green was offering cash to scientists who would agree to write a critique of the anticipated Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. The thrust of the letter is evident from this paragraph:

The purpose of this project is to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC process, especially as it bears on potential policy responses to climate change. As with any large-scale “consensus” process, the IPCC is susceptible to self-selection bias in its personnel, resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work of the complete Working Group reports.
¹

The American Enterprise Institute is one of a battery of think tanks that have in the past decade or more received significant funding from ExxonMobil and have, perhaps coincidentally, taken a highly public position challenging the consensus that human activity is causing climate change. In this instance Green was offering any willing scientist US$10,000 plus expenses to write a critique. Green also suggested that American Enterprise Institute would be happy to host a “series of small conferences and seminars in Washington and elsewhere” and indicated a further willingness to pay additional expenses and honoraria to any scientist willing to participate. Long before the Fourth Assessment Report was released, the institute had apparently decided that it was not going to like the result and was eager to find scientists who would help criticize the findings, whatever they might be.

By way of background, the IPCC was founded in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme in cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization, with a stated goal of assessing scientific information relevant to the following concerns:

1. Human-induced climate change;

2. The impacts of human-induced climate change; and

3. Options for adaptation and mitigation.

As the Nobel committee noted when it gave the IPCC (along with former U.S. vice president Al Gore) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, the panel is one of the most impressive collaborations in global scientific history—basically a blue-ribbon review panel comprising the very best talent from every corner of the world. At intervals of three to four years these scientists, almost all of whom are currently engaged in leading-edge climate research, pull together the most reliable peer-reviewed scientific information and, in separate working groups dealing with different aspects of the issue, hammer out reports that are written to the most exacting standards. These reports are then condensed into a
Summary for Policymakers,
which is subject to a review by participating governments as well as by participating scientists.

The latter process is largely to be blamed for opening the IPCC up to legitimate accusations of political interference. The consensus format tends to give the greatest influence to the most resistant parties. If there is the tiniest grain of doubt in any specific piece of science, it is likely to be dismissed, either in the last scientific review or in the first political one. When you consider that among the reviewers you have the governments of oil-producing giants such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina, you can imagine a degree of foot-dragging. Add to that the fears of India and China that they will be prohibited from lifting their nations out of poverty, and, perhaps worse, the intractability over the past eight years of the Bush administration, and you have a review process that was indeed highly politicized and that strained the scientists’ ability to put a sensible and accurate document before the people of the world.

In that light, it is—what’s that phrase again?—Orwellian in the extreme to suggest that the IPCC was biased toward overstating the risks of selling and burning oil, coal, and natural gas. But that was the unavoidable inference that an impartial reader might draw from Ken Green and his Exxon-sponsored think tank compatriots. After receiving a copy of Green’s letter of solicitation, the researchers at the DeSmogBlog started watching for evidence that any scientists had taken up the challenge.

Round two began at the end of January 2007, barely a week before the scheduled release of the first, and potentially most controversial, section of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. A Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, announced that it was about to release an
Independent Summary for Policy Makers
(
ISPM
).
This seemed like more than a passing coincidence. Ken Green’s last job before moving to the American Enterprise Institute was Director for the Centre of Studies of Risk and Regulation at the Fraser Institute. And the Fraser Institute is also listed on Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets Web site as a recipient of direct funding from ExxonMobil and other energy interests.

Although the Fraser Institute had promised to release its summary on February 5, 2007, Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog obtained a copy on January 31, 2007. It had been circulated for its own informal “peer review,” and one of the potential reviewers was sufficiently concerned about the content to pass it along for early release. We obliged, posting it on DeSmogBlog for a somewhat wider public review.

The report itself was unsurprising. Although it stated that “the ISPM was prepared by experts who are fully qualified and experienced in their fields, but who are not themselves IPCC chapter authors,” the actual credits showed that the project coordinator was an economist, Ross McKitrick (a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute), and the lead author was the Weather Channel’s retired chief meteorologist, Joseph D’Aleo, a man who had had been working on a Ph.D. at New York University when he chose to leave academia.

The
Independent Summary for Policy Makers
was long (more than fifty pages), convoluted, and obsessed with uncertainty. Its most enthusiastic argument addressed the so-called Mann hockey stick graph, which had appeared in an earlier IPCC document but was not part of the
Fourth Assessment Report
purportedly under review. The summary’s overall conclusion, which had been telegraphed by Green’s original letter of solicitation, was this: “There is no evidence provided by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report that the uncertainty can be formally resolved from first principles, statistical hypothesis testing or modeling exercises. Consequently, there will remain 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.”

Notwithstanding that actual climate scientists—the best in the world—had judged there to be a more than 90 percent chance that our spacecraft is headed for trouble, the American Enterprise and Fraser institutes, and the “scientists” who were prepared to take their money, recommended that we embrace that less than 10 percent “unavoidable element of uncertainty” and continue apace.