DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science

"Supressed" Climate Report Cribbed From Patrick Michaels?

Mitchell Anderson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:21:06 PDT

The folks at Fox News were fuming this week that the EPA apparently suppressed an internal “scientific report” that questioned the rational for listing CO2 as a pollutant under the Clear Air Act.

The report, however, is neither secret nor scientific.

It's not secret because it has been posted on the websites of the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and several other think tanks with a record of using any excuse to deny climate change science. The full file is available here.

The person listed as the author of the report, Alan Carlin, is not a scientist, but an economist who works for National Center for Environmental Economics. But Carlin also had some help.

Several years ago, Ken Gregory of the Astroturf group Friends of Science compiled an eye-glazing compendium of pseudo science questioning climate change. Real Climate points out that Carlin has imported sections of this verbatim, crediting Gregory 20 times in the report.

Carlin also referenced Christopher Monckton and S. Fred Singer, a politician and a lapsed scientist, both of them darlings of the denial industry.

But what about un-referenced sources? Plugging Carlin’s report into Plagiarism Checker.com revealed a whole series of unreferenced sections lifted verbatim from one of the deans of the denial industry, Patrick Michaels, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Have a look: Page 79 of Carlin's PDF states:

“For instance, despite the overall rise in U.S. and global average temperatures for the past 30 years, U.S. crop yields have increased (Figure 3-1), the population’s sensitivity to extreme heat has decreased (Figure 3-2), and our general air quality has improved (Figure 3-3). Further, there has been no long-term increase in weather-related property damage once changes in inflation, population size, and population wealth are accounted for (an essential step in any temporal comparison). All of these trends are in the opposite sense from those described in the EPA’s Endangerment TSD.”

Small world. It seems that a November 19th op-ed piece on Michael’s website entitled “Why the EPA should find against Endangerment” has exactly the same wording and exactly the same graphs. In fact, the entire section 3 of Carlin’s report seems to be a very thin re-write of the anti-EPA piece from last November.

Plagiarism is a serious academic offence, particularly if it involves obviously biased sources. It is therefore ironic that Carlin's unsolicited 85 page report, on a subject well outside his area of expertise, is devoted to criticizing the scientific community for their shoddy work.

This week an indignant Senator James Inhofe demanded an inquiry into this strange report. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. It might be interesting to find out who else Carlin cribbed and who paid for the report.

Recently revealed tax documents show that Michaels’ consulting firm was paid $242,900 by the Cato Institute since April 2006, during which year Cato Ihad accepted $612,000 from 26 corporate supporters including ExxonMobil, General Motors and the American Petroleum Institute.

Since neither Carlin nor Gregory are climate scientists, what do active climate researchers think of the “suppressed” report? Dr. Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies provides an amusing evisceration here, pointing out the numerous non-peer reviewed and discredited sources that have loomed into public view yet again.

The blog for Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world also dismissed this report out of hand, calling it “rehash of old, scientifically dubious arguments.”

Hardly a bombshell, but you would never know that watching the hyperbolic media coverage. Have a look at this remarkable puff piece from Fox News that interviews the aggrieved Carlin himself.

Perhaps the next time Carlin is in the presence of the media, someone should ask him why his name is on a report that instead seems to be largely written by well-known members of the denial industry.

I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions, but it does seem odd that this dubious story based on dubious sources appears in high media rotation just as the Waxman-Markey bill moves to the Senate.

The XX in Exxon = "Fingers Crossed"

Ross Gelbspan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:03:32 PDT

The world's largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial.Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000, and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

Republicans Cribbing from Big Coal?

Mitchell Anderson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:37:37 PDT

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It’s a small world after all. Turns out that a PowerPoint being trotted out by House Republicans to undermine the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill was apparently created by none other than dirty fuel giant Peabody Energy.

Grist broke this hilarious story by burrowing into the PowerPoint file properties, revealing the “author” was Peabody CEO Greg Boyce and their communications services manager Chris Taylor was listed as the file “manager.”

Oops.

As if Republican clean energy opponents needed another hit to their already battered credibility, it seems the fossil fuel industry is now even writing their talking points for them.

The PowerPoint and related teleconference event was apparently intended to ““highlight how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax will make it more expensive for rural Americans to fertilize the crops, put fuel in the tractor and food on the table.”

Such scare tactics are now in high rotation on the Hill as the battle heats up for the energy future of America. Separate bills in the House and Senate are being assailed by vested interests in the powerful carbon lobby, as evidenced by this latest incredible fiasco.

Fossil fuel-friendly members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee have so-far blocked a meaningful renewable energy standard, instead insisting on massive increases in offshore drilling and loan guarantees for a gas pipeline in Alaska.

"This bill's renewable standard is so pitiful that it wouldn't require any new renewable energy development beyond business as usual," warned Marchant Wentworth, a clean-energy advocate at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In fact, the draft Senate bill is now so bad it could actually be worse than no law at all.

According to Wentworth, “if any states adopted the loopholes and exemptions in this bill, it could reduce the amount of renewable energy development we expect under existing state policies”

The political fear mongering focuses on the fiction that a low carbon future will be bad for consumers and the economy. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.

A recent study by the Consumer Federation of America – hardly a strong advocate of higher prices - found that a national renewable energy standard (RES) of 25% would save U.S. consumers $200 billion a year in differed energy costs by 2030.

Another report concluded such a clean energy requirement, which has proved an enormous boon to the California economy, would add 850,000 jobs in fifteen years to the beleaguered US manufacturing sector.

Another investigation showed the renewable sector in the last decade grew 250% faster than the rest of the economy - even before the massive investment of public dollars towards clean energy.

"Study after study tells us that a robust renewable electricity standard requiring utilities to get a quarter of their electricity from sources like the wind and sun would create jobs and save ratepayers money," said Wentworth.

Instead the whopper being circulated on Capitol Hill - apparently cribbed from Big Coal - is that strong requirements for renewable energy would be bad for business. Of course that depends on whose business you are talking about...

Peabody is the largest private sector coal company in the world with reserves in 2006 of 10.2 billion tons of unextracted coal. It is little wonder why they might oppose shifting to a clean energy future.

While this fight is far from over, the Senate bill has already been watered down to an RES of only 15% by 2021. Some lawmakers are vowing to do even more damage as the bill moves out of Committee.

Makes you wonder who they are really working for…

The Climate Change Hangover

Jeremy Jacquot — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:34:02 PDT

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Let’s assume that the Obama administration and Congress get their act together this year and make good on their pledge of enacting meaningful climate legislation by establishing the nation’s first cap-and-trade system.

Let’s further assume, for the sake of argument, that the administration, working with its international partners, succeeds in drafting a robust successor to the Kyoto Protocol at the climate talks in Copenhagen later this year.

If we accept that the U.S. climate bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), will accomplish its goal of bringing down emission levels 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050—which is nothing to sneeze at when you consider that a substantial fraction of policymakers (including some Democrats) vehemently oppose the measure—then the question becomes: Will it be enough to prevent the worst of climate change?

Having spent the better part of the last two decades predicting the severity of unconstrained climate change, many researchers are now shifting their focus to the aftermath of emission mitigation. The limited consensus so far has been sobering: Even if we were to significantly ratchet down our current emission levels by midcentury, a full recovery to safe levels, let alone a partial one, could take many decades—if not centuries.

The scenarios become especially grim if we overshoot certain “dangerous” thresholds of atmospheric GHG levels—around 1.7°C above pre-industrial levels, according to James Hansen, or the more moderate 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the European Union.

Under certain worst-case scenarios, some researchers have predicted that we would need to keep emissions at near-zero, or even negative, levels to stabilize near-surface temperature—hardly realistic goals. Until now, however, few studies have attempted to examine the underlying reasons for the sluggish recovery rates.

In a new study detailed in the journal Environmental Research Letters, Jason A. Lowe of the Met Office Hadley Center at the University of Reading and his colleagues did just that, using two global climate models—the HadCM3LC model, a complex general circulation model (GCM) developed by the Hadley Center, and the MAGICC model, a simple model—to scrutinize the accuracy of previous predictions and assess their relevance in a more policy-centric context.

They used four different scenarios which followed identical emission estimates up until 2000, after which they followed SRES A2 emissions until at least 2010. For the first three scenarios, CO2 emissions were set to zero for the next 100 years at years 2012, 2050, and 2100. The fourth scenario, which was meant to better approximate real-life conditions, also included forcing from other GHGs and pollutants, such as sulfate aerosol particles.

Using only the CO2 component of the SRES A2 emissions scenario to force the complex GCM until the end of the 21st century, they found that atmospheric levels would likely exceed 1000 ppm in 2100. Setting emissions to zero in 2012 and 2050 resulted in atmospheric levels exceeding 404 ppm and 556 ppm, respectively. In all cases, the model simulated extremely low rates of decline in atmospheric CO2 levels.

The predicted temperature rise was considerable: over 2°C by 2050 and, assuming emissions are zeroed beginning that year, around 0.2°C per century thereafter, suggesting that temperatures could remain dangerously high for a long time. Furthermore, the 2050 and 2100 scenarios, by drastically altering precipitation levels and global temperatures, resulted in the terrestrial biosphere becoming a net source of carbon—emitting up to 50 GtC (gigatons of carbon) and 76 GtC, respectively, over the ensuing century. (The oceans, however, could potentially compensate by increasing their uptake.)

In the fourth scenario, with multiple GHG emissions peaking in 2015 before adjusting to an annual long-term reduction rate of 3 percent, the authors found that there was a 55 percent chance that temperatures would overshoot the 2°C. Worse, there was a 30 percent chance that temperatures would remain above this dangerous threshold for at least a century, and a 10 percent chance that they would exceed it for up to 3 centuries. And here’s the kicker:

“This particular scenario has a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions approaching 50% of the 1990 values by 2050, which we note is similar to the G8 statement in 2008 to consider ‘the goal of achieving at least 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050’.”

In other words, even adopting the emission targets set by the global community (which could be further watered down) may not be enough to prevent temperatures from staying dangerously high.

Putting aside the usual list of caveats, this study should worry anyone who believes that passing a climate bill, even an ambitious one, would solve all of our problems. The basic message is that climate change is here to stay and, though governments need to do everything in their power to forestall the worst, we will have to live with its effects for many decades to come. As such, Lowe and his colleagues argue, there should be more of a focus among the research community on studying the resiliency of what they call “Earth system components,” such as the Greenland ice sheet or the thermohaline circulation.

John Holdren, who, as director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, oversaw the publication of the new 196-page report issued by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and Steven Chu, the head of the Department of Energy, are well aware of the risks of complacency and presumably will do their utmost to ensure that the administration keeps its eyes on the climate ball.

Art appraiser puts principle ahead of profit

Richard Littlemore — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:46:33 PDT

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Bostonian rebuffs denier darling Richard Lindzen

A Boston art dealer sacrificed an easy buck recently in a principled protest against the writings of the climate change denier-darling Dr. Richard Lindzen, according to an outraged story by the junk scientist and cigarette salesman, Steve Milloy.

Prof. Lindzen (inset) is a senior scientist at MIT, a man who has had an impressive scientific career, but who for the past decade has made himself famous and much-loved in the climate change denial community by quibbling about narrow aspects of climate change science.

Apparently, the professor suffered a recent house fire, resulting in damage to a valuable old rug. When Lindzen tried to get the damage appraised (Milloy reports), a respected Boston art appraiser rejected the opportunity with this comment:

I am sorry to inform you that after some consideration, I’ve decided not to perform the appraisal service that you’ve requested. Your writing on the subject of global warming is offensive to me personally, and I feel that I would have difficulty being an impartial appraiser of value given my view on the subject.

You have to admire someone who honors his principles ahead of the opportunity to make easy money. And it's hardly a surprise that Steve Milloy doesn't understand the dealer's objection or his honorable response.

I only wish he had named the upright entrepreneur: we don't know that many Boston art collectors, but if we find any, we'd love to send him the business.

Three Full-Page Whoppers from the Heartland Institute (Part Two)

Mitchell Anderson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:49:11 PDT

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The Heartland Institute has reared its hoary head again, this time fronting three full-page color ads in the Washington Post targeting lawmakers now debating the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) on Capitol Hill.

As I mentioned in my last post, it is not often the denial machine resorts to something as clumsy as buying media exposure. This indicates just how desperate their oily funders are to avoid meaningful regulation of filthy fuels.

That they have managed to dodge this bullet for so long, illustrates just how brilliant Big Oil has been at precluding pesky laws for their dangerous product.

I promised in my last post to pull apart some of the knee-slappers and nose-stretchers in these full-page propaganda pieces and I will try not to disappoint. There is plenty to work with...

The first ad hilariously complains that that the denial machine has been shut out of the media and political process.

I thought I should stretch before I allowed myself to laugh at the thought, for fear I might break a rib.

That oil-funded deniers maintain they have not excelled at inserting their vested interests into the politics or the media, fully a decade after the scientific community ceased to seriously debate this issue, is truly the height of false modesty.

So-called climate skeptics and their shadowy backers may well represent the largest, most sinister and successful PR campaign in public relations history. Truly gentlemen, you are good at your job – as heinous as that job might be.

Numerous academic studies have documented how the media routinely pairs baseless claims of climate deniers beside the overwhelming consensus of scientific community.

This is ostensibly in the interests of journalistic “balance”, though the result is a public that remains shockingly badly informed on the greatest long-term threat to the United States, the planet and the global economy.

Likewise the public remains remarkably ill-informed on the well-documented benefits of shifting to a low-carbon economy.

The odious PR practice of fielding phony experts was famously pioneered by the tobacco industry decades ago. No doubt many thousands of people perished of cancer due to the resultant delay in tobacco regulation.

That Big Oil is now claiming that this ruse hasn’t worked for them, and they are somehow victims, truly exceeds my capacity for disgust.

The second ad accuses the entire scientific community of unethical behavior, implying that the public should instead throw their trust behind the Heartland Institute.

Desmog Blog readers will recall a recent demonstration of the ethical prowess of this $5.2 million organization that continues to conceal their corporate funders.

The Heartland leadership boldly proclaimed last year that 500 scientists agreed that climate change was a bunch of hooey.

The problem was that many of those researchers had no idea their research and reputations were being dragged through the mud by an industry front group.

That is, until we contacted them…

Here is a small sampling of the outrage expressed by practicing climate researchers towards the Heartland Institute when they learned of this ruse:

"I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite."- Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

"I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there." - Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

"I don't believe any of my work can be used to support any of the statements listed in the article." - Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford

"Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!!" - Dr. Svante Bjorck, Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lund University

"I'm outraged that they've included me as an "author" of this report. I do not share the views expressed in the summary." - Dr. John Clague, Shrum Research Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University

You get the idea…

The Heartland list also included several dead people who were clearly no longer in a position to defend their reputations. Heartland neither retracted the offending article nor issued an apology, although many of the scientists threatened legal action.

It is therefore rich that the Heartland Institute is now hectoring the world’s scientists for their lack of ethics and their shoddy research.

Their last ad maintains that politicians and the media are ignoring the good work the Heartland Institute is doing.

They whine that: “politicians…and the media routinely ignore and silence the scientists, economists and other experts who say global warming isn’t a crisis.”

That’s strange – that’s not what the Heartland Institute is telling their funders.

In their latest annual report, their President Joseph Bast brags:

“Our primary audiences are the nation’s 8,300 state and national elected officials and approximately 8,400 local government officials… 85 percent of state legislators and 63 percent of municipal officials report reading at least one Heartland publication. Nearly half of state elected officials say a Heartland publication influenced their opinions or led to a change in public policy.”

As for their penetration in the media, their annual report also shows that Heartland shelled out $1.48 million in 2007 on public relations efforts, that “produces a steady stream of news alerts, opinion-editorials, and letters to the editor; organizes events for its key audiences; schedules speaking engagements for Heartland’s senior fellows; and engages in joint projects with allies and other civic and business groups.”

They also produce five of their own monthly periodicals aimed at sitting politicians. In their own words:

The Heartland Institute has discovered a way to get the attention of busy elected officials. We package research and commentary on public policy issues as news, in the form of monthly public policy newspapers. These 20-page tabloid-sized publications are colorful, easy to read, arrive in the mail frequently, and feature short articles. They are far more likely to be read than policy studies, books, or media kits.

This lobbying onslaught adds up to 2.5 million policy newspapers pubished annually, targeted specifically at elected officials throughout the nation. Their on-line efforts also reached 18 million page views in 2007.

According to the Christian Lobby group Culturewatch: “If the name of the game is influencing public policy and shaping the political debate, then The Heartland Institute has created a perfect vehicle for accomplishing these goals.”

Clearly this strategy has worked for their clients - whoever they are. Since 1999, Heartland’s budget has ballooned from $1.1 million to $5.2 million – an increase of 370% in nine years.

So it is strange that Heartland is now moaning in full-page ads in the Washington Post that they are being shut out of the media and the political process.

If the Heartland Institute is by their own admission now so ineffective, perhaps their clients should take their business elsewhere.

Or maybe they just aren't telling the truth...

The last knee-slapper in their quarter million dollar ad campaign is that moving to a low carbon economy will be a disaster for business, consumers and taxpayers.

Wow. What a load.

Perhaps they did not see the recent open letter from G20 Task Force on Low-Carbon Economic Prosperity that includes many of the world’s leading corporations. This blue ribbon panel concluded that: “one thing is crystal clear: to ensure our future prosperity, we need a high-growth and low-carbon economy.”

And then there’s the recent study by the Consumer Federation of America showing that strong renewable energy standards would save U.S. consumers $200 billion a year in differed energy costs by 2030.

Another recent report revealed the green energy sector was already growing 250% faster than the rest of the economy, even before the massive infusion of public money towards conservation and renewables.

Trade unions and environmental groups also released a report predicting stricter requirements for clean energy will produce 850,000 manufacturing jobs by 2025.

California has already reaped a massive economic windfall from its ambitious mandatory requirements for clean energy, with 10,209 new businesses and 125,390 jobs created in 2007 alone. Green venture capital investments in the Golden State totaled $6.6 billion from 2006 to 2008.

Another study from economists at Berkeley showed even stronger clean energy requirements would further boost economic growth in California, generating 500,000 jobs and $100 billion in cumulative payrolls over the next 40 years.

The tired media machine that is the climate denial lobby has clearly run out of steam, allies and credibility. These latest ads are enough to make the Heartland Institute and their clients a laughingstock.

Three Full-Page Whoppers from the Heartland Institute (Part One)

Mitchell Anderson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:32:33 PDT

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You can often judge progress by the reaction of those opposed to it. If that's true, we may finally be getting somewhere.

The notoriously unethical Heartland Institute is blowing a bundle of cash in an all-out effort to derail climate change legislation moving through Congress. The Heartland folks have never been overly encumbered by either ethics or accuracy and their latest effort is no exception.

Heartland is fronting three full-page ads in the Washington Post, transparently targeted at lawmakers now horse-trading over the draft American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES).

So what does that kind of action cost? According the Washington Post website, close to $250,000. But that is pocket change for Big Oil and Big Coal, who stand to lose big if US climate policy moves into the 21^st century.

The ads deadpan three hilariously audacious whoppers:

Climate deniers lack access to the media or politicians,
Climate scientists the world over are part of some grand conspiracy to deceive the public, and
You should instead trust a “non-profit” organization with a budget of $5.2 million that refuses to disclose its funders.

I’ll deal with the content of the full-page propaganda effort in a separate post but the first thing to note is the desperation of the tactics.

These are sophisticated players and such ham-handed lobbying techniques are typically a last resort in the public relations toolkit. This latest move illustrates just how isolated vested oil and coal interests have become in the climate change debate.

Lets start with their natural allies. The US Chamber of Commerce is already dealing with a revolt in their ranks over their long-standing opposition to meaningful climate legislation.

Trade unions have joined forces with long-time adversaries in the environmental movement to demand a 25% national renewable energy standard (RES) by 2025 - a move they have shown will generate 850,000 manufacturing jobs in fifteen years.

Another study by the Consumer Federation of America found an RES of 25% would also save U.S. consumers $200 billion a year in differed energy costs by 2030.

The reason that such a broad coalition of former foes is coalescing around the clean economy is simply that it is good business.

Even before the mountain of public money poured into building America as a global leader in the renewable energy sector, clean tech and green jobs were growing 250% faster than the rest of the economy.

A number of studies have shown that renewable energy technologies provide four to six times as many jobs as equivalent investments in fossil fuels.

Ambitious renewable energy standards in California have already led to a boom in green collar jobs. In 2007 alone, California saw the opening of 10,209 businesses with 125,390 jobs. Green venture capital investments in the Golden State totaled a whopping $6.6 billion from 2006 to 2008.

A recent economic study from Berkeley concluded that even more ambitious state investments in the renewable sector could help the beleaguered California government balance their books. Researchers predict that a statewide RES of 50% by 2050 would generate 500,000 jobs and $100 billion in cumulative payrolls over the next 40 years.

The same has already proved true for the entire nation. Even though renewables currently only supply 10% of US energy, the sector already employs half as many people as the conventional energy sources.

“The clean energy economy is poised for explosive growth,” said Lori Grange, deputy director of the Pew Center, which recently authored a green employment analysis.

“These jobs are driving economic growth and environmental sustainability at a time when America needs both. There is a potential competitive advantage for federal and state policy leaders who act now to spur jobs, businesses and investments in the clean energy sector.”

So if investing in green energy is such a boon for the economy, the ACES bill must be sailing through Congress right?

Hardly. Vested interests with very deep pockets still have considerable influence and the draft bill has already been significantly watered down.

While the President and the renewable energy industry are demanding a RES of 25% by 2020, the draft bill has since been dialed down to a mere 15% by 2021 during its murky journey through Beltway backrooms.

This is less than many state requirements, creating the real danger of a meaningless national energy standard. Leaders in the emerging green economy are understandably disgusted.

“The current legislation does not create jobs and, more importantly, does not effect the sea change that President Obama sought," said Don Furman, president of the American Wind Energy Association.

Ham-handed does not mean ineffective. The corporate pushback on the climate bill is very real and increasingly desperate. It is telling that Big Oil and their allies have enlisted the help of such unsavory actors as the Heartland Institute and rolled out such unethical tactics as questioning the rock-solid scientific consensus on climate change.

Watch this struggle closely - nothing less than the future of the US economy hangs in the balance. But I wouldn’t be betting on Big Oil winning the war just yet.

The gathering massive coalition demanding a green energy future means politicians are increasingly aware that siding with the past will endanger their future.

Slamming the Climate Skeptic Scam

Jim Hoggan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:36:08 PDT

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Updated: June 15, 2009

There is a line between public relations and propaganda - or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth - to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival.

And it is infuriating - as a public relations professional - to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.

That's what is happening today, and I think it's a disgrace. On one hand, you have the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – as well as the science academies of every developed nation in the world – confirming that:

climate change is real;
it is caused by human activity; and
it is threatening the planet in ways we can only begin to imagine.

On the other hand, you have an ongoing public debate - not about how to respond, but about whether we should bother, about whether climate change is even a scientific certainty. While those who stand in denial of climate change have failed in the last 15 years to produce a single, peer-reviewed scientific journal article that challenges the theory and evidence of human-induced climate change, mainstream media was, until very recently, covering the story (in more than half the cases, according to the academic researchers Boykoff and Boykoff) by quoting one scientist talking about the risks and one purported expert saying that climate change was not happening – or might actually be a good thing.

Few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as this attack on the science of climate change. It has been a triumph of disinformation – one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world. As a public relations practitioner, it is a marvel – and a deep humiliation – and I want to see it stop.

Here’s how it works: Public relations is not a process of telling people what to think; people are too smart for that, and North Americans are way too stubborn. Tell a bunch of North Americans what they are supposed to think and you’re likely to wind up the only person at the party enjoying your can of New Coke.

No, the trick to executing a good PR campaign is twofold: you figure out what people are thinking already; and then you nudge them gently from that position to one that is closer to where you want them to be. The first step is research: you find out what they know and understand; you identify the specific gaps in their knowledge. Then you fill those gaps with a purpose-built campaign. You educate. If people are afraid to take Tylenol (as they were after someone poisoned some pills), you explain the extensive safety precautions now typical in the pharmaceutical industry. If people think Martha Stewart is arrogant and uncaring, you create opportunities for her to show a more human side.

In the best cases – the cases that are most personally rewarding – your advice actually guides corporate behavior. That is, if a client wants to protect or revive their reputation, if they want to convince the public that they’re running a responsible company and doing the right thing, the most obvious public relations advice is that they should do the right thing.

It's the kind of advice that, historically, has been a hard sell in the tobacco industry, in the asbestos industry - and too often in the automotive industry. Those sectors have provided some of the most famous examples of PR disinformation: "smoking isn't necessarily bad for you;" "it's not certain that asbestos will give you cancer;" "your seatbelt might actually kill you if you're the one person in five trillion whose buckle jams just as your car flips into a watery ditch."

But few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as the attack on the scientific certainty of climate change. Few have been so coldly calculating and few have been so well documented. For example, Ross Gelbspan, in his books, The Heat is On and Boiling Point sets out the whole case, pointing fingers and naming names. PR Watch founder John Stauber has done similarly exemplary work, tracking the bogus campaigns and linking various pseudo scientists to their energy industry funders.

I have filled a whole book with details of the documented corporate action plans to deny climate change and confuse the public. Climate Cover-up will hit the shelves in the fall of 2009. In the meantime, one of the best proofs of climate disinformation came in a November 2002 memo from political consultant Frank Luntz to the U.S. Republican Party. Luntz followed the rules: he did the research; he identified the soft spots in public opinion; and he made a clever critical judgment about which way the public could be induced to move.

In a section entitled "Winning the Global Warming Debate," Luntz says this:

"The Scientific Debate Remains Open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

If you download the memo and read the whole thing, you will notice that Luntz never expressly denies the validity of the science. In fact, he says, "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but is not yet closed."

" ... not yet closed"? Among those who disagreed with that assessment when Luntz wrote this report were the 2,500 scientists in the IPCC, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004, Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, said, "We're in the middle of a large uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have." And to back up this sense of certainty, he reported that University of California, San Diego science historian Dr. Naomi Oreskes had published an analysis in Science in which she had combed through 928 peer-reviewed climate studies published between 1993 and 2003 and found not a single one that disagreed with the general scientific consensus.

Yet journalists continued to report updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both were equally valid.

Notwithstanding, Luntz wrote: "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." He recommended that his Republican Party clients do just that. He urged them to marshal their own "scientists" to contest the issue on every occasion. He urged them to plead for "sound science" a twist of language of the sort that George Orwell once said was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."

Luntz's goal – which was embraced with unnerving enthusiasm by the Bush Administration - was to manufacture uncertainty and to politicize science. Like all tragedy, it would be hilarious if you could play it for laughs.

Luntz himself actually backed off this position a couple of years later, saying that the evidence of climate change was overwhelming. So it’s difficult to tell who is being wilfully blind and who, like Luntz, was falling victim to gross negligence in the way they ignore the science - and in the potential catastrophic risks that they promote. Whichever way you cut it, their actions reflect badly on the whole public relations industry.

As you might assume from my earlier criticism, I'm not suggesting that Frank Luntz or even a dubious cabal of ethics-free PR people are solely to blame for the public confusion on climate change. They have received extensive, if clumsy assistance from the media, which in a facile attempt to provide "balance" is willing to give any opinion an “impartial” airing as long as it is firmly in contradiction with another.

This is not just a feature of the point/counterpoint talking heads that have emerged as the principal vehicle for television news. Newspaper reporters are just as guilty of canvassing "both sides" of every argument, often without providing any critical judgment as to the validity or relative weight of either side. On the issue of climate change, journalists have consistently reported the updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both are equally valid. This is not balanced journalism. It is a critical abdication of journalistic responsibility. Any reporter who cannot assess the relative merits of a global scientific consensus - especially in contradiction to an "expert" that the coal industry is paying to help "clear the air" - deserves to have his pencil taken away in solemn ceremony and broken into bits.

There is yet more blame to go around. You could criticize scientists for the dense, cautious and conditional language that they use in talking about the threats of climate change. But in science, credibility is a currency (this, in apparent contradiction to the state of affairs in journalism or PR). A scientist who strays, even momentarily, off the path of certainty or who wanders from hard science into policy is immediately dismissed as someone with an axe to grind.

You could also criticize environmentalists, whose tendency has been to stray too far in the other direction, extrapolating scientific assumptions to create scare stories so dispiriting that they create apathy rather than activism. These, in turn, have made easy targets for the energy industry's climate change deniers.

The important thing at this point, however, is not to assign blame. It is to educate yourself and to join this increasingly urgent political debate. This is not one of those relatively low-level PR boondoggles. We're not talking about single individuals dying because the auto industry held out against seat belt laws. We're not even talking about many 100s of thousands of people dying of lung cancer because the tobacco industry held out for "sound science" while actively increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in their product. We're talking about the future of the planet.

So please read on.

Read everything.

If you are actually practicing public relations, take a close look at your clients and at your own performance. There has to be a point where principle trumps short-term economic gain, a point where you admit to yourself that it’s not worth the money to put the planet at risk.

Whatever you do, you must keep a wary eye. By all means, read the sites that deny the reality of climate change. But then check on www.sourcewatch.org to see who paid for those opinions. Read the DeSmogBlog. Don't accept the word of people who pass themselves off as "skeptics." Be skeptical yourself. Ask yourself what motive the scientific community has to gang up and invent a phony climate crisis. Compare that to the motives that ExxonMobil or Peabody Coal might have to deny that burning fossil fuels indiscriminately could change irrevocably our existence on the planet.

And if you still leave the lights on when you're done, make sure they're shining in the shamed faces of the PR pros who are still trying to prevent sound, sensible policy change to affect this, perhaps the biggest threat humankind has ever faced.

One Solution to the Crisis: Kneecap and Trade

Ross Gelbspan — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:39:48 PDT

"As Australian companies prepare to trade emissions, climate criminals are cashing in on similar schemes overseas. Interpol has warned companies to beware of bogus 'carbon credits' that fail to lower emissions. One Interpol agent said the carbon market would be irresistible to criminal gangs. 'In future, if you are running a factory and you desperately need credits to offset your emissions, there will be someone who can make that happen,' he said. 'Absolutely, organized crime will be involved.' "

BC NDP Leader Accepts BC Carbon Tax (Bravo! Carole James)

Richard Littlemore — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:47:11 PDT

Carole James.jpg

After election defeat, a conscientious shift

In a surprising and impressive political about-face, BC New Democratic Party leader Carole James withdrew her party's opposition to the BC carbon tax today - committing to improving the tax, rather than trying to undermine it.

James lost a close provincial election only last month, at least in part because an influential group of environmentalists condemned her party's position on the carbon tax and campaigned against her.

Given the bitterness that surrounded that debate, you might have expected James and the NDP to dig in even further on the issue, continuing to campaign against the tax. Instead, the leader appears to have accepted the public judgment AND the tax, telling the Vancouver Sun that BC Liberal leader "Gordon Campbell's tax is in place. We now need to make sure it's fair and that it's effective." In announcing her new shadow cabinet, James also appointed the bright, likable and decidedly green Victoria-Hillside Member of the Legislative Assembly, Rob Fleming, as Environment Critic, a further signal that she is committed to reasserting the NDP's environmental reputation.

Many of us on the DeSmogBlog - and many others, as well - criticized James harshly for the carbon tax position before and during the campaign. Believing as we do that a carbon tax is an essential , effective and inexpensive instrument in the fight against climate change, James' opposition to the tax was, in political terms, a firing offense.

But however ill-advised her earlier position, she has redeemed herself in one, sure gesture. It would be inspiring, now, if Premier Gordon Campbell welcomed her change of heart with equal grace and set upon the path of assuring British Columbia's position as the greenest jurisdiction in North America where climate change is concerned.