Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (13 page)

• He discovered that two of the signatories had financial ties to the German coal industry or the government of Kuwait (Robert Balling and Patrick Michaels).
²

A disturbingly successful Canadian petition was launched in 2006: sixty “accredited experts” published an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the April 6 edition of the
Financial Post,
dismissing as meaningless any argument that “climate change is real” and insisting that “allocating funds to ‘stopping climate change’ would be irrational.” This list of sixty included a full selection of the usual suspects drawn from all over the world, but thanks to a well-funded rollout the letter received a surprising amount of positive news coverage. The strategy really showed its value a week or two later when an outraged group of Canada’s foremost climate scientists responded with a letter of their own, demanding that Prime Minister Harper set aside the list of sixty and start taking the issue of climate change seriously. Well-intentioned though the second letter clearly was, its principal effect was to reinforce the notion that there was a lively scientific debate. Tom Harris of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project later drove the point home with a national radio advertising campaign touting the letter from the original sixty.

The first letter, however, inspired the DeSmogBlog to begin building a database of the people involved. Our researchers found that only twenty of the scientists on the list were Canadian. The remainder were international players, including people like Fred Singer and Arthur Robinson, whose connection to the denial movement or the energy industry was already well established. A loyal DeSmogBlog reader put together an ExxonSecrets graphic showing the most famous twenty deniers’ connections to Exxon-backed think tanks. A few new names made the list, but some, such as the University of Alberta mathematician Gordon Swaters, said later that they had been convinced to sign the petition on the understanding that they were urging the Canadian government to invest more in climate research,
not
that they were denying that climate change is occurring and in need of attention.
³

Undeterred by the attention, the Heartland Institute sponsored another bigger petition-style attack the next year, this one penned by Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Avery’s paper, published on Heartland’s Web site, was titled “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares,” and it credited the five hundred signatories as “coauthors,” implying that each of the five hundred had a hand in Avery’s report or, at the very least, signed off on its conclusion. Not.

We got suspicious at the DeSmogBlog, in part because there were so many new names. This was not a collection of people we recognized from previous petitions or serving on the scientific advisory panels of the Exxon think tank brigade. Many of these new scientists also appeared to be respected leaders in their fields. Kevin Grandia set about getting in touch with those for whom we could easily find contact information, asking whether they had participated in Avery’s process and whether they challenged the scientific consensus on climate change. Within forty-eight hours we had forty-five responses, all expressing a similar type of outrage. The following are emails received by Kevin Grandia during the last week of April 2008:

“I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have
spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.”
—DR. DAVID SUGDEN,
Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

“I don’t believe any of my work can be used to support
any of the statements listed in the article.”
—DR. ROBERT WHITTAKER,
Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford

“I’m outraged that they’ve included me as an ‘author’ of this
report. I do not share the views expressed in the summary.”
—DR. JOHN CL AGUE,
Shrum Research Professor,
Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University

And here are two more email messages sent directly to Dennis Avery and copied to Kevin Grandia, again during the last week of April 2008:

“Please remove my name. What you have done is
totally unethical!!”
—DR. SVANTE BJORCK,
Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lund University

“I have NO doubts . . . the recent changes in global climate
ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my
name from this list since I did not give you permission
to put it there.”
—DR. GREGORY CUTTER,
Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

Despite this reaction, at the time of writing (a year after these complaints were lodged), the original article and the links to the “coauthor” list remain on the Heartland Institute Web site. No apology. No correction. No acknowledgment that the list of five hundred purported deniers is largely if not entirely misrepresented.

Another example of the science-by-petition method fell from the hand of Marc Morano at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008. Morano made his name in Republican circles while still working for Cybercast News Services (owned by the conservative Media Research Center). Cybercast and Morano were the first source in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack launched against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.
⁴
Later Morano signed on as the communications director for U.S. Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, who, as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, received more funding from the oil-and-gas sector than any other senator.
⁵

It was Senator Inhofe who invited climate “experts” like the fiction writer Michael Crichton to brief his committee, and it was Morano who set up the meetings and made sure the committee Web site was well-supplied with stories and reports denying the likelihood of climate change. By 2008, however, the Democrats were in control of the committee (California senator Barbara Boxer is the new chair), and Inhofe was left as the ranking minority member on the committee. Morano, however, continued his Web-based activities, and he was able to hitch a ride as part of Boxer’s “staff” when the senator attended the international climate conference in Poznan.

In Poland, on December 10, 2008, Morano began distributing a news release announcing, “More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.” The short list of “experts” attached to the release didn’t include any of the names that have grown recognizable as participants in the think tank campaign. But a look at the complete list showed many familiar names (Fred Singer, Tim Ball, Sallie Bali-unas). Fred Seitz was there too, though he had died more than a year previous—as were three or four other “senior scientists” who were no longer alive to agree with Morano or to correct the record.

The beauty of this tactic as a method of keeping the debate alive is that none of these “scientists” ever have to conduct any actual research or put their views forward to be tested in the scientific peer-review process. They don’t even have to be experts in a related field. And they certainly don’t have to win the argument. As long as groups of scientists are seen to be disagreeing, the public continues to assume that the science is uncertain. That’s why this entire conversation occurs in mainstream media rather than in scientific journals, where you have to prove the veracity of your argument to the satisfaction of a panel of experts in your field. On newspaper opinion pages you can say what you like, knowing that the editor has no relevant expertise. And if you are called on a mistake after the fact, you can insist, as the
Washington Post
did in defense of George Will during a controversy that arose in February 2009, that you are just standing up for free speech.

Will had written, incorrectly, that global sea ice was advancing, when it is in fact in retreat. When critics, both internal and external, called for a correction, the
Post
’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said this to the
Columbia Journalism Review:
“It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject—so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.” Critics responded that this is not a matter of opinion; it’s a point of fact. But Will didn’t apologize or correct the mistake, and the
Post
stood by him.

The target audience for the endless flow of “petition science” isn’t the community of climate scientists. The target audience is the increasingly confused general public, and politicians who are either similarly bewildered or seriously beholden to special interests. As long as people believe that the science of climate change is uncertain, still a topic of legitimate debate in the scientific community, they will shrink from supporting policies that demand or even suggest a significant change in habit. Few people will want to give up their car or spend money retrofitting their home heating system if they believe that scientists are still arguing over the truth of global warming. And few politicians are going to risk introducing dramatic policy proposals to change the way society treats fossil fuels when the public is skeptical that this is necessary. So Arthur Robinson and company never have to win this argument. If they wanted to, they would have to act like scientists, spending their time in the lab and writing papers in science journals, rather than acting like public relations people—spending their time on the speakers’ circuit and writing opinion-page articles in venues where every fact is open for debate.

[
nine
]
JUNK SCIENTISTS
An expert for every occasion;
an argument for every position

T
he notion of a “junk scientist” is necessarily pejorative. It suggests that some science is “sound”—that it is based in good research and excellent practice—and other science is slovenly, suspect, and unreliable. My scientist friends don’t make a distinction. To them, there is only science—pure and evidence-based, even when it evolves as our scientific knowledge and understanding increase. But there are people who have made a career of the discussion of “junk science.” Primary among these is Steven Milloy, introduced in Chapter 4 as an early executive director of TASSC, a coauthor of the American Petroleum Institute’s “Global Climate Science Communication Action Plan,” and the proprietor of the Web site JunkScience.org.

But Milloy isn’t a scientist and doesn’t present himself as such. He is a public relations person, a lobbyist, and a sometimes-journalist. He is employed as a regular columnist on the Fox News Web site and is periodically featured in Fox TV coverage as a “junk science expert”—a title they give him without ever mentioning that he is a registered lobbyist for many companies whose businesses would be affected by regulations governing, say, greenhouse gases or genetically modified foods.

By my definition, junk scientists are people like Dr. Fred Seitz, who leverage their scientific credentials in order to speak out as scientific experts even when the topic on which they are speaking is outside their field of expertise. These are the kind of people whom the API action plan targeted for identification and media training, people willing to throw themselves into the middle of the public debate about climate change whether or not they are trained in the field or currently engaged in climate change research.

Take Dr. Benny Peiser as an example. Peiser is a senior lecturer in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool’s John Moores University. He is a social anthropologist whose undergraduate work was in English studies and sports science. If you wonder why, of the thirty-thousand-odd signatories to Arthur Robinson’s petition, I would single out Benny Peiser, it is because he opened up hostilities in January 2005 by attacking Dr. Naomi Oreskes and attempting to discredit her study on climate change consensus, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” published in
Science
the previous month.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Oreskes had searched the databases of published peer-reviewed science for articles on “global climate change,” and found that of 928 articles published between 1993 and 2003, none disagreed that human activity was causing climate change in the world. Less than a month after
Science
published Oreskes’s article, Peiser weighed in with a serious complaint. He wrote
Science
to say that a search of the literature reveals not 928 articles but more than 12,000. He asked why Oreskes had limited her sample: “What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and that climate modeling is highly uncertain?”
Science
did not publish Peiser’s letter, so he posted it to his Web page at John Moores University.

Score a point for Peiser: while Oreskes said in her original article that she had used the search term “climate change,” she had actually specified “
global
climate change,” and thanks to Peiser’s intervention, she had to clarify this “error” in a later edition of
Science.
Oreskes also searched only for peer-reviewed documents—that was her whole point—while Peiser had thrown the net wide enough to include all articles, peer-reviewed or otherwise. He therefore wound up with a larger sample, and he reported finding “34 abstracts reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years.’”

Peiser had actually submitted a contradictory paper, which
Science
rejected as too long for a correction, inviting him to submit a letter to the editor. This he did, setting in motion a further fact-checking flurry that lasted almost two more years. Scientists around the world demanded to see these thirty-four abstracts. If legitimate, peer-reviewed studies contested the consensus view on climate change, no one else could find them, so they asked Peiser to share his sample.