Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (20 page)

The
Guardian
newspaper had reported on October 14, 2007, in “Revealed: the Man Behind the Court Attack on Gore Film” that Monckton’s old friend was Robert Durward, the gravel-pit magnate who had started the U.K. Scientific Alliance and who has been the chief benefactor to the New Party, a libertarian splinter party for which Monckton wrote the original manifesto and Dimmock was an early, though unsuccessful, candidate. When Monckton looks at
An Inconvenient Truth
and says, it’s all politics, that is apparently because, for him, it’s all politics.

Monckton’s other purpose on the Beck show (other than to argue that DDT is actually a wonder chemical that should be sprayed liberally around the developing world) was to try to rustle up funding for an American court challenge to the showing of
An Inconvenient Truth.
Unsatisfied with the facts of the actual judgment, Monckton also left Beck with the impression that the court had commanded teachers to show Durkin’s
Swindle
in schools along with the Gore documentary:

GLENN: Okay. So you told me last night—because I said to you, I have no problem with Al Gore’s movie being shown in school, as long as the
Great Global Swindle
or something like that is also shown side by side. Show both sides. Teach both sides. You said that the same thing that happened over in Great Britain can be done here, but it requires about $2 million to get it done.

MONCKTON: This is absolutely right. So if any of your listeners out there have got a spare $2 million and you would be willing to take Al Gore on in court, then get in touch with Glenn Beck and he’ll get in touch with me . . .

No takers had emerged at the time of writing. But really, why would you invest in a losing court case when your team has already wrung all the public relations benefits imaginable out of the last round of defeat? On this issue, against someone of Al Gore’s reputation and character, it’s clearly better to declare victory— and stay in your cave.

[
twelve
]
MANIPULATED MEDIA
An industry overwhelmed in the age of information

I
have considered, if only briefly, the state of climate science. As Naomi Oreskes showed in her
Science
survey of peer-reviewed literature, no serious scientific debate exists over the fact and origins of global warming. Despite Benny Peiser’s best efforts, no one has been able to refute that finding. On the contrary, the science academies in every major nation in the world have all stepped forward, issuing statements affirming that climate change is a potential global crisis and that humans are both the principal cause and the only hope for a solution. The IPCC, while acknowledging that in science there must always be room for error, has said that there is a greater than 90 percent chance that our spaceship is going to crash if we don’t change course. The signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—nearly two hundred countries and organizations from around the world, ranging from Albania and Argentina to the United States and Zimbabwe—have agreed that in the absence of an option to climb aboard a different spaceship, we should be fixing the one we have—or at least we should stop wrecking it quite so quickly. That should meet anybody’s definition of consensus, while accommodating the inevitable pockets of disagreement that are accepted within the definition. We have a problem (global warming), a diagnosis (the human generation of greenhouse gases), and a suite of proposed solutions (ranging from obvious money-savers such as energy conservation to innovative challenges such as the development of sustainable energy alternatives).

It seems so obvious. Or perhaps not. If you ask Americans whether the climate is changing, just over 70 percent of them will say yes. (Pew Center research from May 2008 put the exact number at 71 percent, while an ecoAmerica poll from October 2008 set the total at 73 percent.) But if you ask how many believe humans are responsible, the number drops below 50 percent.

From a political perspective, that is not enough. No one is going to get elected by promising to solve a problem that half the people don’t even acknowledge. And solving climate change is not going to be easy. It will demand major changes in the way we consume energy, shape our cities, and source our food. It will demand an unprecedented international act of social and political will. Such changes cannot be wrought with minority support, even with a newly elected U.S. president Barack Obama heralding a climate of change.

Looking more deeply at the nature of public understanding, you can also see some stunning partisan divisions in how people comprehend climate science. It is an article of faith among some political independents in the United States that there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, but on the issue of climate change that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to the Pew poll cited above, 84 percent of Democrats say the Earth is warming, compared to just 49 percent of Republicans. And in 2008 the Republican numbers were going down: they had dropped from a total of 62 percent only a year earlier. Asked whether humans are responsible for that warming, 58 percent of Democrats said yes; just 27 percent of Republicans agreed.

But here’s where the numbers get really surprising. At least, these are the numbers that most surprised me. If you look among highly educated partisans, the division gets deeper. Among Democrats with a college education, Pew found that 75 percent believe humans are responsible for global warming. Among Republicans: 19 percent.

The only way to explain that split is through the way these groups consume media and the nature and types of media they consume. It’s generally safe to assume that people with more education will be better informed. On this issue, however, Democrats seem to be better informed about the science, while Republicans are better informed about the controversy.

You can blame this on a whole host of factors: the complexity of the issue, the attention span of the modern media consumer, the consolidation of major media, the splintering of media markets through the Internet, and the think tank campaign to confuse. But at the end of the day a huge amount of blame has to be laid at the feet of what in the Internet age is known as “mainstream media.” Whether through inadvertence, understaffing, or, in certain outlets, an actual intent to misinform, many major media outlets in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Europe have failed to inform their readers and listeners about what is surely the most important and dangerous environmental issue in the history of humankind.

PERHAPS WE SHOULD look first at how we consume information. There was a great feature in the
New Yorker
in December 2007, in which author Caleb Crain chronicled the decline of reading and the implications of returning to an oral culture— one where we depend less on what we read than on what we hear. In the article, titled “Twilight of the Books,” Crain documented the decline in book sales and library retrievals and the relative collapse in the reading of newspapers, including online editions. People have grown accustomed, instead, to getting their news from television and radio, two sources that struggle with complexity and that resist careful criticism.

The complexity issue is a real problem for global warming, in part because there are no easy analogies to explain the science: you have to sit down and work through the details. Past scientific issues have not created as much of a challenge. With the ozone hole, for example, people understood the issue metaphorically, if not scientifically: there is a protective coating around the Earth called the ozone layer, a kind of a roof. And because of human activity, we were tearing a hole in that roof. It was so clear a concept that people have even tried to use it to explain climate change. When the David Suzuki Foundation commissioned a national study in 2006 on Canadian understanding and attitudes toward climate change, more people blamed global warming on the ozone hole than on any other factor. Clearly the media—print or broadcast—have not succeeded in transmitting even the most rudimentary explanation of the actual cause of climate change.

When it comes to judging and criticizing sources of information, TV and radio also present a problem for listeners. Crain puts it this way: “It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the
New York Times,
for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.” Thus, while reading offers the opportunity for sober second thought, TV and radio give you only enough time to pick out bits of information that reconfirm your existing biases. Crain also argues that it’s harder for radio and television to transmit information that contradicts what you already believe, saying, “It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show.”

Democrats forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh or conservative Republicans trapped in an Al Gore lecture on climate change are likely to agree with that statement. The nearly infinite number of media choices now available through the Internet and cable TV have contributed yet further to our ability to become extremely well-versed in arguments that reinforce our political, economic, social, and scientific assumptions. The well-read American business executive, working daily through the
Wall Street Journal
and biweekly through the
National Review
and keeping constantly tuned to Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck on Fox News, will be barraged with stories that suggest a scientific controversy about climate change. Every new article that muddies the waters, no matter how obscure, finds its way into the pages of these publications or onto the Fox airwaves. Each winter snowstorm or Florida frost is presented derisively as evidence that the globe is not warming quickly enough. This steady diet of doubt can’t help but influence people who are working diligently to stay well-informed.

But the failure of journalism is not merely a matter of partisan news outlets picking out a selection of stories that tend to reaffirm an established audience bias. Even that would be defensible if they maintained a reasonable standard of accuracy and made an effort to weed out obvious manipulation. But in the worst cases networks like Fox and newspapers like Canada’s
National Post
throw caution (and sometimes good practice) to the wind, broadcasting or publishing the works of Steven Mil-loy and Fred Singer without mentioning to viewers or readers that these people are taking money from the industries they are trying to defend.

Milloy may be the most obvious example. He has spent his entire career in public relations and lobbying, taking money from companies that include Exxon, Philip Morris, the Edison Electric Institute, the International Food Additives Council, and Monsanto in return for his work declaring environmental concerns to be “junk science.”
¹
Smoked out of his position as the executive director of the Philip Morris-created TASSC and revealed as one of the authors of the American Petroleum Institute’s plan to sow doubt and confusion about climate change, Milloy has continued to lobby against environmental regulations of all kinds. His Web site, JunkScience.com, is a running attack on environmental issues and the people who promote them.

Yet when Fox News brings Steven Milloy into the studio, they somehow never get around to mentioning that he is an industry lobbyist. They call him a “junk science expert”—which is true in its way, but is in no way helpful in letting viewers identify him for what he is: not an impartial journalist committed to a balanced or even accurate account, but a registered corporate lobbyist who has been paid to spin the issue to the advantage of his clients. It is an offense against the principle of transparency that Fox doesn’t prominently post his affiliations.

The
National Post
is inclined to fall into the same trap. The paper carries opinion pieces by Milloy and by S. Fred Singer, again with no mention of the pair’s corporate affiliations. Fred Singer is identified as the proprietor of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, an organization that sounds environmentally conscious. But readers might judge his input differently if the
Post
were more forthcoming about his corporate affiliations. The
National Post
can’t fall back on a defense of ignorance, either. In an age when a Google search will turn up exhaustive details on Singer’s background in milliseconds, readers should be able to expect that newspaper editors will check the bona fides of their contributors and share the details with their readers.

The
Calgary Herald,
another property in the Canwest Global Communications empire, is another offender. Calgary is Canada’s oil capital: it hosts the head offices of Canada’s major oil companies and is the economic (though not political) capital of Alberta, which with the tar sands boasts the world’s largest known supply of oil outside the country of Saudi Arabia. Oil has made Alberta the wealthiest province in Canada, which cannot help but influence the policies of the province’s leading newspaper. But that alone can’t explain why the
Herald
would employ Friends of Science financier and University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper to write a weekly column without sharing the news of Cooper’s financial machinations on behalf of the Friends of Science.

Any newspaper is entirely within its rights to load up its opinion page with outspoken partisans, and Cooper is a good candidate for such a position. He is politically well-connected, and he is well-informed. But it is equally the newspaper’s responsibility to inform its readers when its writers have a clear agenda and, as in this case, a significant pecuniary self-interest. Cooper makes outrageous accusations, saying that scientists are faking claims of climate change so they can fleece governments for additional research funding. This is one of the favorite claims of the denier community, and a clever one at that. They turn the accusation of self-interest—to which they themselves are vulnerable—on a community of international scholars who have chosen to pursue science rather than to enrich themselves in the service of industry. Yet while making this claim, Cooper is protected by the
Herald
from having to admit the degree to which he has benefitted himself, his “Friends,” or his family members. He gets to climb onto his
Herald
soapbox, dismissing climate change as some kind of a complex hoax, without having to acknowledge the efforts that he has made to hide from the public the oil-and-gas-industry funding for the so-called Friends of Science.