Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2 page)

I started doing a lot of reading and was surprised by what I discovered. Where I expected a blistering controversy, I found an overwhelming scientific consensus. Mainstream media had been reporting that doubt lurked in every report, that for every scientist warning of global warming there was another saying it was all bunk. But when I started reading reports from the world’s leading science academies, I found that everyone seemed to be speaking with one voice. Every science academy in every major developed country in the world had stated clearly that the world’s climate is changing dangerously and humans are to blame. Why, I wondered, were people so confused? Who had started this public debate?

The great U.S. journalist Ross Gelbspan had the answer. In two early books,
The Heat Is On
(1997) and
Boiling Point
(2004), Ross had uncovered the first hard evidence of an organized campaign, largely financed by the coal and oil industries, to make us think that climate science was somehow still controversial, climate change still unproven. I had always known about the potential for public manipulation, but I had never conceived of a campaign so huge, well-funded, and well-organized. Ross is anything but a conventional environmentalist. He’s a reporter, skeptical to the bone. And when I flew to Boston to meet him, he told me that when he had started looking into climate change, he actually thought the “science skeptics” had it right. He thought the science was truly stuck in uncertainty. Then Harvard oceanographer Dr. James McCarthy showed Ross how the deniers were twisting the data to mislead people, and he posed what for Ross became an important question: where were these purported skeptics getting their money?

The answer to that question formed the backbone of
The Heat
Is On,
and what Ross found struck me as a revelation. Denier scientists were being paid well, not for conducting climate research, but for practicing public relations. As I looked around, I started to notice evidence of the campaign everywhere I looked. To a trained eye the unsavory public relations tactics and techniques and the strategic media manipulation became obvious. The more I thought about it, the more deeply offended I became.

I also found that the same sense of indignation was common among my friends and colleagues. For example, the senior writer at Hoggan & Associates and my collaborator on this book is Richard Littlemore. A veteran newspaper guy, Richard is like Ross Gelbspan, another ink-stained skeptic accustomed to steering a wide berth around anyone who is passionately committed to a cause. But he had been worrying about climate change since 1996, when he took a freelance contract to write a public education package on the topic for the David Suzuki Foundation, Canada’s leading environmental organization. Even then, Richard says, reading through the material, “it was clear we were in trouble, and obvious that some people were trying to deny it.” In 1998 Richard was selected to be a part of the Canadian government’s Kyoto Implementation Process, which he describes now as “a sham,” a “vast public relations exercise designed only to waste time—an effort that never had a chance of success.”

Richard found himself distraught and disillusioned at the scope and nature of the big lie (in this case, that the Canadian government was serious about reducing national greenhouse gas emissions). It was, he says, built on a foundation of what he came to think of as little insults to democracy, incremental efforts to ensure that government did nothing to disrupt the profitable status quo.

My own gathering horror probably came to a head one day when I started sharing my newfound knowledge with my old friend John Lefebvre, a burly lawyer turned musician who along the way had made his fortune by helping to build an Internet banking empire. John has the kind of money that makes the worries of the world drift into the distance, but he also has a conscience. We were chatting during the summer of 2005 about this corruption of the public conversation when John said, flatly and urgently, “What can we do about it?”

That’s how DeSmogBlog was born. We decided to start doing this research in a more organized way and share it with everyone we could find. With a generous stake from John we launched
www.DeSmogBlog.com
, an unfamiliar but promising Internet platform that we hoped would give us access to a larger audience. Richard started collecting information. He identified people who seemed to be making a living by denying climate change, and he asked a few obvious questions: Were these climate “skeptics” qualified? Were they doing any research in the climate change field? Were they accepting money, directly or indirectly, from the fossil fuel industry? Finding that the most vocal skeptics were
not
qualified, were
not
working in the field, and all too frequently
were
on one or another oily payroll, we started publishing our results online.

From that modest beginning we have built a popular Web site and an active team of researchers and collaborators. We hired Kevin Grandia as a manager early in 2006 and began attracting volunteers such as Emily Murgatroyd—a woman who proved so passionate and determined that we made her part of the team. We engaged brilliant contributors, including the authors Ross Gelbspan, Bill McKibben
(Deep Economy),
and Chris Mooney (
The Republican War on Science
and
Stormworld:
Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle over Global Warming
). We found established journalists like Mitch Anderson and hot up-and-comers like Jeremy Jacquot and Nathanael Baker.

More to the point, we assembled the body of research that we share with you here. This is more, however, than a collection of posts or a greatest hits album. We have tried to pull together the whole story, to give you a complete sense of how the public climate change conversation was pushed so badly off the rails.

I suspect that you will find the results offensive, even infuriating. We are at a critical juncture in human history. By mastering technology and by (so far) outperforming every other species on the planet, we humans have achieved global domination. We can remake landscapes, defeat diseases, extend life spans, and expand the scope and scale of human wealth by almost every measure. We can also trash whole countries, pollute streams, rivers, lakes, and perhaps ultimately whole oceans, to a disastrous extent. We can kill one another more quickly than ever in human history, and we can change the world’s climate in a way that scientists say is threatening our ability to survive on Earth.

The question, as yet unanswered, is whether we can stop. Can we as a species rescue ourselves from a threat of our own making? To do so will take personal restraint, political courage, and a degree of global cooperation unprecedented in human history. Even more, it will take a clear understanding of the risks—an understanding that we will only achieve if we expose the climate cover-up. That’s been our goal, and you may judge our success in your own time. After which, I hope that you will join us in our effort to restore integrity to the public conversation about science, about governance, and about saving the world.

That sounds melodramatic, but I believe two things absolutely. First, I believe that scientists have been telling us the truth when they’ve said that the world is at risk. And second, even if countering the risk will be difficult, even if the tasks seem overwhelming or the solutions are dismissed by the deniers as impractical, I believe, absolutely, that the world is worth saving.

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one
]
LEMMINGS AND LIFE GUARDS
Keeping humankind from crashing on the rocks

W
e are standing at the edge of a cliff. Behind us is a considerable crowd, 6.7 billion people and counting, and below is a beckoning pool. Some people say that you can jump into that pool without risk. They say that humans have been doing so for ages without any problems. But others say that waves have been eating away at the foot of the cliff, causing big rocks to fall into the water. They say that the risk of jumping grows more frightening by the day. Whom do you trust?

That’s a tricky question because here, on the climate change cliff, some of the lifeguards are just not that qualified, some have forgotten entirely whose interests they are supposed to protect, and some seem quite willing to sacrifice the odd swimmer (or the whole swim team) if they think there is a good profit to be made in the process. That’s what this book is about: lousy lifeguards—people whose lack of training, conflicts of interest, or general disregard have put us all at risk of storming off the cliff like so many apocryphal lemmings.

I’m not saying that all of the lousy lifeguards are evil or ill-intentioned, although some may shake your faith in humanity. Rather, the whole lifeguarding institution seems to be failing, and not necessarily by accident. In the past two decades, and particularly on the issue of climate change, there has been an attack on public trust and a corresponding collapse in the integrity of the public conversation. The great institutions of science and government seem to have lost their credibility, and the watchdogs in media have lost their focus. Here we are, standing on the most dangerous environmental precipice that the human race has ever encountered, and we suddenly have to take a fresh and frightening look at the lifeguards in our midst.

The view is not reassuring. Take, for example, the case of Freeman Dyson. Dyson is an incredibly impressive character, a physicist who many people believe should have been given a Nobel Prize for his early work in quantum field theory. Later in his career he also distinguished himself as a good writer with a talent for simplifying and popularizing science. His 1984 antinuclear analysis,
Weapons and Hope,
won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson was always a contrarian, but at age eighty-five (he was born on December 15, 1923), he has become fully argumentative. He is, for example, an outspoken skeptic of many aspects of modern climate science, and he has become a popular expert among those who would like to ignore or deny the risks of global warming.

That’s all well and good. It makes sense that skeptics would seek out other skeptics to try to bolster their—perhaps delusional but perhaps sincere—opinions about climate change. It’s also entirely reasonable that Dyson should want to keep up his profile and keep commenting on issues of scientific interest. But it doesn’t explain why, on March 25, 2009, the
New York Times
Magazine
would have presented an eight-thousand-word cover story on Dyson, lauding him as “the Civil Heretic.” Neither does it explain why the
Times,
certainly one of the most respected sources of journalistic information on the continent, sent a sportswriter (Nicholas Dawidoff) to write the story. No criticism of Dawidoff: he’s a wonderful writer, the author of some particularly excellent baseball books. But it’s reasonable to ask why the
Times
would choose someone with no expertise, no education, and no background in climate science to interview a man apparently dedicated to undermining public confidence in the majority view about the risks of global warming.

As a lifeguard, the last time Freeman Dyson went down to the bottom of the cliff to check on the rock pile was, well, never. He too has no background in climate science, having done no research whatever—ever—on atmospheric physics or on climate modelling. Even in theoretical physics, his area of expertise, his greatest contributions date to the late 1940s and early 1950s. So again, in a free society Dyson has every right to stand at the top of the cliff and shout, “Jump!” But it’s reasonable to wonder why the
New York Times Magazine
would give him the soapbox, especially when most of the time the magazine pays relatively little attention to this, the most urgent environmental issue humankind has ever faced.

Here’s another fairly current example: the
Globe and Mail,
Canada’s answer to the
New York Times
and arguably the most influential newspaper north of the 49th parallel, carried an opinion piece on April 16, 2009, by Bjørn Lomborg, the famously self-described
Skeptical Environmentalist
(per the title of his best-selling 2001 book). Under the headline “Forget the Scary Eco-Crunch: This Earth is Enough,” the article sets out to dismiss the concern that humans are currently consuming global resources at a pace that cannot be sustained.

Lomborg begins by criticizing the concept of an ecological footprint, in which scientists try to estimate actual human impact on the environment rather than counting only the land we cover with roads and houses. As Lomborg says, scientists working on behalf of the World Wildlife Foundation have calculated that when you add up all the land affected by human consumption habits—the land where we live, the land used to grow our food, the land that is destroyed by mining or polluted by industries that produce our consumables—“each American uses 9.4 hectares of the globe, each European 4.7 hectares, and those in low-income countries one hectare. Adding it all up, we collectively use 17.5 billion hectares. Unfortunately, there are only 13.4 billion hectares available. So, according to the W WF, we’re already living beyond Earth’s means, using around 30 percent too much.”

Complaining that these calculations oversimplify the situation and don’t factor in potential future changes, Lomborg goes on to say, “ . . . it is clear that areas we use for roads cannot be used for growing food, and that using areas to build our houses takes away from forests. This part of the ecological footprint is a convenient measure of our literal footprint on Earth. Here, we live far inside the available area, using some 60 percent of the world’s available space, and this proportion is likely to drop because the rate at which the Earth’s population is increasing is now slowing, while technological progress continues. So no ecological collapse.”

This logic is impenetrable. Lomborg implies, first of all, that we can disregard the ecological aspect of our footprint because it’s tricky to tally with absolute certainty. Then he says our literal footprint is actually going to get smaller because the population is rising, but at a slightly reduced rate. (Lomborg alone understands how more humans will take up less space.) Then, the skeptical environmentalist reassures us with this: “Due to technology, the individual demand on the planet has already dropped 35 percent over the past half-decade, and the collective requirement will reach its upper limit before 2020 without any overdraft.”