The climate change smokescreen

August 2, 2008
SMH

Global warming scepticism is being manipulated by tactics reminiscient of an earlier campaign of denial, writes David McKnight.

When the tobacco industry was feeling the heat from scientists who showed smoking caused cancer, it took decisive action, engaging in a decades-long public relations campaign to undermine the medical research and discredit the scientists.

The aim was not to prove tobacco harmless but to cast doubt on the science. In the space provided by doubt, billions of dollars in sales could continue. Delay and doubt were crucial products of its PR campaign.

In May, the multibillion-dollar oil giant Exxon Mobil acknowledged it had been doing something similar. It said it would cease funding nine groups that had fuelled a global campaign to deny climate change.

Exxon's decision came after a shareholder revolt by members of the Rockefeller family and big superannuation funds to get the company to take climate change more seriously. Exxon (once Standard Oil) was founded by John D. Rockefeller.

Brad Miller, chairman of the US House of Representatives oversight committee on science and technology, last year said Exxon's support for sceptics "appears to be an effort to distort public discussion". The funding of an array of think tanks and institutes which house climate sceptics and deniers also worried Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society. It found that in 2005, Exxon distributed nearly $3 million to 39 groups which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change". Its protests helped force Exxon's recent retreat.

The chief scientist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Dr Jim Salinger, knows all about misrepresentation. Two months ago, an Exxon-funded group, the Heartland Institute, said his work undermined the theory that burning carbon was a cause of global warming.

The Heartland Institute - essentially a free-market lobby group - emphasises "the climate is always changing". It is a theme common to many climate change deniers who talk about a so-called Little Ice Age (1300-1900) and Medieval Warm Period (800-1200). Salinger's research studied variation in climate, so it was enrolled in the denial campaign.

Climate variations were normal, Salinger said, but this did not weaken conclusions about the dangers of burning oil and coal. "Global warming is real," he said, and demanded reference to his work be removed. The institute refused. The Heartland Institute received almost $800,000 from Exxon, according to Greenpeace research based on Exxon's corporate donation disclosures.

Another regular of the PR campaign is the Oregon Petition, which urges US rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and claims there is "no convincing scientific evidence" for global warming. It has been cited by climate sceptics such as the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt among others. It is said to be signed by 31,000 graduates most of whom appear to have nothing to do with climate science.

The petition originated in 1998 with Frederick Seitz, a 1960s president of the US National Academy of Sciences (and a 1970s tobacco consultant) and was accompanied by a purported review of the science co-published by the George C Marshall Institute. This institute received at least $715,000 from Exxon Mobil over the past 10 years.

Claims about the world cooling, not warming, are common in the world of deniers. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, referred to this possibility recently. In his book Heat, George Monbiot gives the example of the TV presenter and botanist, David Bellamy, who is also a climate sceptic. He told the New Scientist in 2005 that most glaciers in the world were growing, not shrinking. He said his evidence came from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland, a reputable body. When Monbiot checked the service, they said Bellamy's claim was "complete bullshit". The world's glaciers are retreating.

When pressed, Bellamy pointed to a website, iceagenow.com, which claims we are heading for a new ice age. Last week, it published an article that stated that last month, the American Physical Society had "reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming". This is stunning. Global warming is all about physics and the society is the premier body of US physicists. A check with its website showed the opposite. Prominent was a press release reaffirming that the evidence for global warming was "incontrovertible". Once again, a sceptic website was simply lying.

In Australia, the main body trying to undermine the science of global warming is the Lavoisier Group. It maintains a website with links to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (more than $2 million from Exxon), the Science and Environmental Policy Project ($20,000) and the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide (at least $100,000). The Competitive Enterprise Institute returns the compliment to Lavoisier in its publication, which praised the group for its work in defeating the Kyoto protocol. Lavoisier, it said, "provides the principal intellectual and organisational opposition in Australia to Kyoto". Its sources of funding are not public.

The Lavoisier group is certainly influential in the Federal Opposition. During the Howard years, a senior figure in the group told Guy Pearse, author of High & Dry, a study of climate policy in Australia, there was "an understanding in cabinet that all the science is crap".

The Lavoisier board includes former mining executives Ray Evans and Ian Webber, the latter a former chief executive of Mitsubishi, and Harold Clough, whose companies include a provider of services to the oil and gas industries. Its president is the former Labor finance minister Peter Walsh.

There are at least three other reasons the oil companies' PR campaign has had success for climate change deniers. First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed as political orthodoxy rather than objective knowledge, a curiously postmodern argument.

The tide slowly turned on tobacco denial and the science finally was accepted. Some people still choose to smoke and some pay a price for it.

But climate is different. There are no "smoke-free areas" on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign.

David McKnight is an associate professor at the University of NSW. He researches media, including public relations, and is the author of Beyond Right And Left: New Politics And The Culture Wars.

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