Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (7 page)

• Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.

The statement seems to make clear that the goal was not to promote an understanding of science, but to spread uncertainty. The goal was not to put the best case before a deserving public, but to ensure at all times that the public was treated to “balance”—and in this case, the API strategists meant that every time a top scientist offered the public new insights into the risks of climate change, the institute would be there with a contradictory view. Victory would be achieved when the public accepted this balance—this confusion—as “conventional wisdom.” It was also a priority that industry leaders learn not about science but about uncertainty, with a specific goal of attacking the Kyoto agreement, making its supporters appear “out of touch with reality.” There is, however, no contention here that Kyoto supporters really
were
out of touch, only that the API would like to cast them as such.

The plan went on to describe how the API might achieve these goals, beginning with a campaign to search out and recruit “new (scientific) faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientists who already are vocal.” The document goes on to expand on the list of specific tactics (with my emphasis added in italics):

• Develop a global climate science information kit for media including peer-reviewed papers that undercut the “conventional wisdom” on climate science. This kit also will include understandable communications, including simple fact sheets that present scientific uncertainties in language that the media and public can understand.
*

• Conduct briefings by media-trained scientists for science writers in the top 20 media markets, using the information kits. Distribute the information kits to daily newspapers nationwide with offer of scientists to brief reporters at each paper. Develop, disseminate radio news releases featuring scientists nationwide, and offer scientists to appear on radio talk shows across the country.

• Produce, distribute
a steady stream of climate science information
via facsimile and e-mail to science writers around the country.

• Produce, distribute via syndicate and directly to newspapers nationwide
a steady stream of op-ed columns and letters
to the editor authored by scientists.

• Convince one of the major news national TV journalists (e.g., John Stossel) to produce a report examining the scientific underpinnings of the Kyoto treaty.

• Organize, promote and conduct through grassroots organizations a series of campus/community workshops/ debates on climate science in 10 most important states during the period mid-August through October, 1998.

• Consider advertising the scientific uncertainties in select markets to support national, regional and local (e.g., workshops / debates), as appropriate.

Like the Western Fuels Association campaign in the early 1990s and the TASSC campaign that followed, this document once again set out a major work plan that involved burying science writers in “a steady stream of climate science information” concentrating not on quality but on doubt. It can hardly be a coincidence that even as the science itself was becoming ever
more
certain—and ever more alarming—the “conventional wisdom” in the late 1990s and into the early part of this century turned more and more to confusion and doubt.

If you look at the bottom of the “Situation Analysis” within this plan, you get a list of the authors. The list includes but is not limited to Candace Crandall, Science and Environmental Policy Project; Jeffrey Salmon, George C. Marshall Institute and later the Bush Administration’s associate under secretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy; Myron Ebell, Frontiers of Freedom; Randy Randol, Exxon; Sharon Kneiss, Chevron; Steven Milloy, TASSC; and Joseph Walker, American Petroleum Institute. The more you read in this area, and the farther you read into this book, the more you begin to recognize the names of people and organizations. You also find that many of the most prominent “scientists” and spokespeople are not currently working in science, and often never were working in climate science. Many others, like Steven Milloy, enjoy generous financial connections to self-interested industries, connections that they generally fail to report when they are casting themselves as impartial experts.

Returning to the question of Astroturf groups, you also realize that the term “grassroots” as we might normally recognize it means something completely different to the people who are writing these reports. When we think of a grassroots group, we might think of something like the Montgomery Improvement Association, the citizens’ group that emerged to support Rosa Parks when she stood up in 1955 for the rights of African Americans. But like any number of modern public relations firms that boast of having grassroots expertise, the API was talking about something much less spontaneous. The API’s grassroots groups were not going to sprout up independently. They were to be planted, tended, nurtured, and financed by the fossil fuel companies that would benefit as the actual weight of science gave way to a manufactured “conventional wisdom.”

There are four specific references to “grassroots” in the API document. First, the API proposed establishing a “global climate science data center,” staffed not by scientists but by “professionals on loan from various companies and associations with a major interest in the climate issue.” One of the important prerequisites for these “professionals” was that they have “expertise in grassroots organization.” This “science data center” could then start a “national direct outreach and education” project, one element of which would be a plan to “distribute educational materials directly to schools and through grassroots organizations of climate science partners (companies, organizations that participate in this effort).” And again, from the earlier list of tactics, the API would “organize, promote and conduct through grassroots organizations a series of campus/community workshops/ debates on climate science in 10 most important states during the period mid-August through October, 1998.” In each of these strategy planks, the proposed “grassroots” groups do not currently exist but can be organized by people with the appropriate expertise. The result is not being pitched as a spontaneous expression of democratic choice, but as a fixed goal that can be achieved by patching together something that looks like a public organization built from the ground up, rather than an industry-driven lobby.

The other thing you’ll notice if you sit down and read one of these documents is that the doubt about climate science begins to sound legitimate. You begin to forget that most of the “scientists” who act as spokespeople for the API or its partner organizations do
no
research in climatology or any other related field. You stop noticing that the goals of these “science” reports never include financing actual scientific research—or even an impartial review of the best of current science. The Global Climate Coalition asked its own in-house scientists for an impartial review in 1995, and then stuck the results in a drawer, far away from the curious eyes of the public.

No, promoting scientific research or advancing the public understanding of the true state of science appears not to be the priority. The API strategists, working on behalf of clients in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, are working instead to change the conventional wisdom, irrespective of the science. They are crafting a plan to create grassroots organizations that serve industry goals, regardless of whether the public might share those goals or might spontaneously have risen to fight for those priorities. These industry-funded planners set out to ridicule the Kyoto agreement and to frustrate government efforts to constrain greenhouse gas emissions. They made a plan to overwhelm the media with a steady stream of information that served industry’s purposes and injected “balance” into coverage, whether or not that balance reflected the true state of science.

In March of 2009 Gallup updated its annual poll asking whether Americans thought the risks of climate change were being reported reasonably or whether they were being exaggerated. A total of 41 percent of respondents said they thought the seriousness of the global warming threat is, even at the beginning of 2009, still being exaggerated. That means that two years after the release of a report in which a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists declared with a more than 90 percent certainty level that climate change is real, pressing, and apt to change forever the face of the Earth, four in ten Americans still don’t believe it. For them, uncertainty is embedded as conventional wisdom. For the writers of the API strategy— though not for the defenders of accuracy in media—that must be considered a victory.

*
For the record, and per the discussion in Chapter 2 about Naomi Oreskes’s survey of the reputable scientific literature of the day, neither the API nor any other organization that wants to deny the science has yet come up with any “peer-reviewed papers that undercut the ‘conventional wisdom’ on climate science.”

[
five
]
INTERNATIONALIZING UNCERTAINTY
Taking the doctrine of doubt on the road

T
here are few “skeptical scientists” with as little actual expertise and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist per se, Dr. Ball quit his position as an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, apparently ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science. Yet ten years later, Ball-the-climate-expert seemed to be everywhere— on the radio, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, even testifying before a committee in the Canadian parliament. Online videos of his radio and lecture performances showed him to be an affable and entertaining speaker with a warm, funny, and folksy style. He would say things like this, quoted from an interview with Charles Montgomery for an August 12, 2006, story, “Meet Mr. Cool,” in the
Globe and Mail:
“Environment Canada [the Canadian national weather service] can’t even predict the weather! How can you tell me that they have any idea what it’s going to be like 100 years from now if they can’t tell me what the weather is going to be like in four months, or even next week?” Ball always elicited a knowing chuckle with this kind of commentary, which he delivered in hundreds of speeches across western Canada. No chamber of commerce, beef producers’ association, or Probus Club of active retirees was too small to justify Ball’s time. And the fact that Ball widely proclaimed himself to be “the first Canadian Ph.D. in climatology” seemed to give him carte blanche to confuse weather and climate—to dismiss out of hand the entire output of the best climate scientists working in the field today—and have his lunchtime crowds take him completely seriously.

Ball was the favorite front man for a Canadian Astroturf group called the Friends of Science—as Montgomery described them in the
Globe
article, “a coalition of oil-patch geologists, Tory [Canadian Conservative Party] insiders, anonymous donors and oil-industry PR professionals” from the Canadian oil capital of Calgary, Alberta. Here, taken from “Kyoto no no,” one of Tim Ball’s podcasts at fcpp.org, is his own entirely unwitting critique of the presumptuousness involved in calling your organization the “Friends of Science”: “One of the things that angers me are these groups like Friends of Science. Now think of the arrogance of the title of that. Basically, what they are saying is that if you’re not in our group, you’re not a friend of science, or Friend of the Earth I should say. Sorry, the Friends of the Earth.” Oops. According to Ball, it’s okay to be an exclusive friend to science—even if your principal goal is to argue with the world’s leading scientific experts—but it takes maddening arrogance to call yourself a friend of the Earth.

The Friends of Science motto is “Providing Insight into Climate Change,” and on the Web site, friendsofscience.org, they announce their purpose this way: “Concerned about the abuse of science displayed in the politically inspired Kyoto protocol, we offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of Kyoto and present alternative causes of climate change.”

Founded in 2002, Friends of Science attracted relatively little mainstream media attention and no serious independent scrutiny in its first couple of years. It made a series of YouTube videos such as “Climate Catastrophe Cancelled” and sponsored talks by Tim Ball and others. It solicited funds for the stated purpose of affecting Canadian elections.
¹
But it wasn’t until August 2006, when the freelance writer Charles Montgomery started nosing around on behalf of the
Globe and Mail,
that anyone really came to understand what the “Friends” were up to and who was paying their bills.

As Montgomery reported in “Meet Mr. Cool,” you could argue that the Friends began as a legitimate grassroots organization:

“We started out without a nickel, mostly retired geologists, geophysicists and retired businessmen, all old fogeys,” says Albert Jacobs, a geologist and retired oil-explorations manager, proudly remembering the first meeting of the Friends of Science Society in the curling lounge of Calgary’s Glencoe Club back in 2002.

“We all had experience dealing with Kyoto, and we decided that a lot of it was based on science that was biased, incomplete and politicized.”

Mr. Jacobs says he suspects that the Kyoto Accord was devised as a tool by United Nations bureaucrats to push the world towards a world socialist government under the UN. “You know,” he says, “to this day, there is no scientific proof that human-caused CO2 is the main cause of global warming.

Given that Albert Jacobs was happy to rely on the likes of Tim Ball for scientific analysis—and giving him the benefit of the doubt—you could assume that he was sincere in his misguided position about the causes of global warming. But his ensuing fund-raising tactics demonstrated that he understood the implications of his actions. In the same
Globe
article Montgomery reported that the Friends were having difficulty garnering enough cash in the form of small donations to have the kind of impact that they wanted.