Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (14 page)

A leading interrogator in this period was Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Lambert writes an amazingly articulate and often-courageous blog called Deltoid (scienceblogs.com/deltoid), specializing in exposing scientific silliness, especially the errors, irrelevancies, and inaccuracies of those who challenge the science of climate change. After several months of Lambert asking, Peiser finally provided the list, which Lambert posted—commenting on the obvious: contrary to Peiser’s claims, none of the abstracts took specific issue with the global climate consensus.

Peiser refused to back down, insisting that some of these papers must surely be “ambiguous” at the very least and claiming that he still had a paper in hand that contradicted the global climate science community. And he did. After sixteen months of further nagging, he provided the particulars and finally admitted that this single contrarian piece was, in fact, not peer-reviewed. It was an opinion piece printed in the journal of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

You might well ask, who has the time to keep track of all this stuff, anyway? And then you might take a moment to think a kind thought about Tim Lambert for his persistence. You might also ask, what difference does it all make? And then you might shudder. Because while
Science
reacted gingerly to Peiser’s criticism, the think tank echo chamber was bouncing his erroneous information around the Internet and spilling it into mainstream media reports as frequently as possible. The most famous citation of Peiser’s work occurred on September 5, 2006, in a speech (“Hot & Cold Media Spin: A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming”) that Senator James Inhofe delivered on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Although Peiser had admitted almost a year earlier that his thirty-four abstracts were shaky at best and fictional at worst, the Senate’s foremost recipient of campaign funding from the oil-and-gas industry presented Peiser’s work as a standing devastation of Oreskes’s earlier work:

On July 24, 2006, the
Los Angeles Times
featured an op-ed by Naomi Oreskes, a social scientist at the University of California San Diego and the author of a 2004
Science
magazine study. Oreskes insisted that a review of 928 scientific papers showed there was 100 percent consensus that global warming was not caused by natural climate variations. This study was also featured in former vice president Gore’s
An
Inconvenient Truth.

However, the analysis in
Science
magazine excluded nearly eleven thousand studies, or more than 90 percent of the papers dealing with global warming, according to a critique by British social scientist Benny Peiser.

Peiser also pointed out that less than 2 percent of the climate studies in the survey actually endorsed the so-called “consensus view” that human activity is driving global warming, and some of the studies actually opposed that view.

There is no record of Senator Inhofe ever correcting the record or apologizing to the Senate for promoting Peiser’s work long after it was proved to be inaccurate.

No warning is attached to a Ph.D., and no gradations exist to suggest that one Ph.D. is relevant and another less so. For example, there is no quick and easy marker showing that Benny Peiser claims credit to a single book chapter on climate change, in the 2003 book
Adapt or Die,
or that his lifetime list of peer-reviewed publications on all topics amounts to three—none of them in climate science. In his spare time he is an advising member of the U.K. Scientific Alliance, an organization that was started by gravel-pit owner Robert Durward in a fit of anger about “all this environmental stuff.”
¹

But if Peiser’s bona fides are not immediately in evidence, you don’t have to search far for his name. He’s on the Canadian list of 60 scientists quoted in the previous chapter. He’s on Marc Morano’s list of 650. And he was on the Heartland Institute’s guest list as a speaker at the “2nd International Conference on Climate Change.”

For the record, Naomi Oreskes is incredibly accomplished and widely admired. She received her B.Sc. in mining geology from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, University of London, in 1981. She taught and conducted research in geology, philosophy, and applied earth sciences at Stanford beginning in 1984 and received her Ph.D. in the Graduate Special Program in Geological Research and History of Science from that prestigious school in 1990. She also won a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994 . Today she is provost of the Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. And for three years at least, every time she was quoted or interviewed anywhere in the world, Peiser would pop up offering a counterpoint, even though he could not prove his claim.

IF ORESKES HAD not discounted papers that were later proved to be incorrect, she might have listed one paper challenging the consensus on climate change. It was published in 2003 by the astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon in the journal
Climate Research.
Titled “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 100 Years,” the paper gathered up the work of more than a dozen other climate scientists and concluded, “Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.”

The scientists cited in the paper reacted first in confusion and then in anger. They argued that Baliunas and Soon had misrepresented or misinterpreted their data, they wrote hasty counterpoints, and they issued a news release through the American Geophysical Union reinforcing the validity of their earlier work. Ultimately, the publisher of
Climate Research,
Otto Kinne of Inter-Research, wrote a note in a subsequent edition of the journal, saying that “CR [
Climate Research
] should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication” and that “CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.” But news got out afterward that Kinne wrote the critical note only after half the editorial board of the journal had resigned in protest over how the Baliunas article had been handled.

Baliunas, though a much more impressive scientist than Peiser, is still, interestingly, out of her element in climate science. She has published more than two hundred peer-reviewed papers in prestigious astrophysical journals, mostly on the sun and sunlike stars. Lately she has added half a dozen publications vaguely related to climate change, primarily in second-tier journals such as
Energy and Environment.
Yet despite—or maybe because of—the dustup over her CR paper, Senator James Inhofe chose her to brief the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Baliunas has also enjoyed an increase in income and attention since emerging as a climate contrarian. Aside from accepting research funding directly from the American Petroleum Institute, Baliunas is also listed on ExxonSecrets as a former board member and advisory board chair at the George C. Marshall Institute; environment/science editor at Tech Central Station; a past contributing editor to the Western Fuels Association publication
World Climate Report;
a member (with Benny Peiser) of the advisory board of Robert Durward’s U.K. Scientific Alliance; a former expert for the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and a science expert working on behalf of the National Center for Public Policy Research and the Hoover Institution. All of the foregoing (except the Western Fuels Association
World Climate Report
and the gravel magnate’s Scientific Alliance) are on record as having accepted funding from ExxonMobil.

ONE OF THE most recognizable names among the actual climate scientists who continue to downplay the risk of global warming is that of Patrick Michaels, a frequent spokesperson on behalf of the coal industry since the days of the Western Fuels Association ICE campaign. We know about Michaels’s history in part because of Ross Gelbspan’s landmark books exposing the climate confusion campaign,
The Heat Is On
(1998) and
Boiling
Point
(2005). Gelbspan had documented as early as the mid-1990s that scientists including Michaels, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling, and Fred Singer were carting away tens of thousands— sometimes hundreds of thousands—of dollars from sources ranging from the Western Fuels Association to the British Coal Corporation, the German Coal Mining Association, OPEC, and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences.

By 2005, when we were working to launch the DeSmog Blog, Ross Gelbspan had done so much reporting on the fossil fuel funding to contrarian science that he thought the story was over. He told me at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Montreal in December 2005 that the public and the politicians already knew that people like Pat Michaels and Sallie Baliunas were no longer credible. Surely, Gelbspan said, it was time to move on—to start talking about solutions.

Not quite. Six months later a sputtering Gelbspan was on the phone, reporting the kind of scoop that he had hoped would no longer be relevant. Someone had leaked him a memo, now posted on DeSmogBlog, from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association—a cooperative comprising mostly coal-fired electrical generating utilities. The memo reads like a script from the old ICE campaign: “Al Gore and others state that the scientific community has reached a consensus and that the debate is over. That is simply not true. Disputing this contention are climatolo-gists, meteorologists and astrophysicists like Richard Lindzen, William Gray, Fred Singer, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Craig Idso and the 17,000 signatories to Arthur B. Robinson’s Petition Project.”

Here again we see someone questioning the risk of global warming, not by criticizing the science, but by lining up a list of contrarian scientists and insisting that this constitutes a legitimate debate. We also see evidence of what appeared to be a continuing effort to rework the meaning of the word “consensus,” which the
Oxford English Reference Dictionary
defines as “general agreement”—not unanimity. The memo’s author, Intermountain Rural Electric Association general manager Stanley Lewandowski, then went on to urge his members to join the public debate: “I am enclosing copies of a fact sheet that, if you are inclined, you could print copies for your employees and ask them to mail these to friends, relatives and acquaintances. The information could also be used for informing your members, the local media and local and state elected officials. We plan to contact unions, other social and business groups, as well as industrial corporations served by the investor-owned utilities. We cannot allow the discussion to be monopolized by the alarmists.”

Lewandowski writes about the pro-carbon dioxide ad campaign produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and financed by GM and Ford. He talks about the involvement of coal-consuming giants including American Energy Power and the Southern Company, and he notes the great cooperation that he and his collaborators are getting from the National Association of Manufacturers. Finally, he notes that his association has just paid Pat Michaels US$100,000, and he urges others to do the same: “We . . . believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion.”

Recognizing all the talking points from the mid-1990s Western Fuels Association campaign, Gelbspan couldn’t believe that the industry was still doing the same thing a decade later, shamelessly and transparently (although Stanley Lewandowski likely had not written the memo thinking that it was going to be quite so widely circulated). Dubbing his scoop the “Vampire Memo,” Gelbspan said he was obviously wrong about the campaign of denial being at an end. “Apparently,” he said, “it just won’t die.”

THE SUCCESS OF the junk science campaign rests on three factors. First, the “science” conversation most often occurs outside the institutions of science. The Intermountain Rural Electric Association isn’t funding Pat Michaels to go back into his lab and do research helping the world to a better understanding of how human activities are affecting the climate. The coal-fired-utility owners are paying him to “stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion.” And again, Sallie Baliunas, though congratulated in certain circles for having published a much-maligned contrarian paper in a peer-reviewed journal, is employed by Exxon service providers such as Tech Central Station and the National Center for Public Policy Research not to pursue research in astrophysics, but to speak about global warming.

The second factor contributing to the success of this public relations campaign is the skill and talent of the practitioners. If you google videos with people like Robert Carter from James Cook University in Australia or Tim Ball, once a professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, you will see charming and entertaining men, practiced lecturers who can string together a good story and stand up to a bit of media grilling. Knowing how difficult that can be—knowing from a public relations perspective how much time goes into preparing senior executives to talk to crowds or face the media—it seems likely that, just as the Western Fuels Association ICE campaign suggested, these people have been selected for their skills or trained for the task.

The third factor that contributes to the junk science campaign’s effectiveness is something known in the public relations business as an echo chamber. That’s the reverberating network of think tanks, blogs, and ideologically sympathetic mainstream media outlets that distribute and circulate contrar-ian information.

For no issue has the echo chamber been used more effectively than in the “debunking” of the so-called hockey stick graph by the amateur climate science expert Stephen McIntyre. I use the term “amateur” not as a pejorative but to indicate that McIntyre, a retired mining executive and an investor, is not a professional scientist. Nor is he so obviously employed by industry-funded think tanks, though ExxonSecrets lists him as a George C. Marshall Institute “expert.” But McIntyre has brought a dogged professionalism to his criticism of certain very narrow points of climate science and in the process has made himself famous in denier circles. Working with a University of Guelph, Ontario, economist named Ross McKitrick, McIntyre launched an attack in 2003 on what has come to be known as the Mann hockey stick graph—a reconstruction of Earth’s temperatures over the last one thousand years. Created by a team led by Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, it was one of the principal images used in the
Summary for Policymakers
from the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. Perhaps obviously, it comes out in the shape of a hockey stick, with temperatures running relatively flat for nine hundred years or more (the stick) and then spiking up in the latter half of the 20th century (the blade).