Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  None of the coauthors of “Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” had any more standing than Robinson himself as a climate change researcher. They included Robinson’s 22-year-old son, Zachary (home-schooled by his dad), along with astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. Both Baliunas and Soon worked with Frederick Seitz at the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Seitz served as executive director.24 Funded by a number of right-wing foundations, including Scaife and Bradley, the George C. Marshall Institute does not conduct any original research. It is a conservative think tank that was initially founded during the years of the Reagan administration to advocate funding for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—the “Star Wars” weapons program.25 Today, the Marshall Institute is still a big fan of high-tech weapons. In 1999, its website gave prominent placement to an essay by Col. Simon P. Worden titled “Why We Need the Air-Borne Laser,” along with an essay titled “Missile Defense for Populations—What Does It Take? Why Are We Not Doing It?” Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Marshall Institute has adapted to the times by devoting much of its firepower to the war against environmentalism, and in particular against the “scaremongers” who raise warnings about global warming.

  “The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review,” complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.” NAS council member Ralph J. Cicerone, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, was particularly offended that Seitz described himself in the cover letter as a “past president” of the NAS. Although Seitz had indeed held that title in the 1960s, Cicerone hoped that scientists who received the petition mailing would not be misled into believing that he “still has a role in governing the organization.”26

  The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. “The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal,” it stated in a news release. “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.” In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that “even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises.”27

  Notwithstanding this rebuke, the Oregon Petition managed to garner 15,000 signatures within a month’s time. Fred Singer called the petition “the latest and largest effort by rank-and-file scientists to express their opposition to schemes that subvert science for the sake of a political agenda.”28

  Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel called it an “extraordinary response” and cited it as his basis for continuing to oppose a global warming treaty. “Nearly all of these 15,000 scientists have technical training suitable for evaluating climate research data,” Hagel said.29 Columns citing the Seitz petition and the Robinson paper as credible sources of opinion on the global warming issue have appeared in publications ranging from Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post to the Austin-American Statesman, Denver Post, and Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.

  In addition to the bulk mailing, OISM’s website enables people to add their names to the petition over the Internet, and by June 2000 it claimed to have recruited more than 19,000 scientists. The institute is so lax about screening names, however, that virtually anyone can sign, including for example Al Caruba, the pesticide-industry PR man and conservative ideologue whose “National Anxiety Center” we describe briefly in chapter nine. Caruba has editorialized on his own website against the science of global warming, calling it the “biggest hoax of the decade,” a “genocidal” campaign by environmentalists who believe that “humanity must be destroyed to ‘Save the Earth.’ . . . There is no global warming, but there is a global political agenda, comparable to the failed Soviet Union experiment with Communism, being orchestrated by the United Nations, supported by its many Green NGOs, to impose international treaties of every description that would turn the institution into a global government, superceding the sovereignty of every nation in the world.”

  When questioned in 1998, OISM’s Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, “and of those the greatest number are physicists.”30 The names of the signers are available on the OISM’s website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of “Dr. Red Wine,” and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Ginger’s field of scientific specialization was listed as “biology.”31

  Casting Call

  In April 1998, at about the same time that the OISM’s petition first circulated, the New York Times reported on yet another propaganda scheme developed by the American Petroleum Institute. Joe Walker, a public relations representative of the API, had written an eight-page internal memorandum outlining the plan, which unfortunately for the plotters was leaked by a whistle-blower. Walker’s memorandum called for recruiting scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate.”Apparently, new faces were needed because the industry’s long-standing scientific front men—Michaels, Balling, Idso, and Singer—had used up their credibility with journalists.32

  Walker’s plan called for spending $5 million over two years to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences.” To measure success, a media tracking service would be hired to tally the percentage of news articles that raise questions about climate science and the number of radio talk show appearances by scientists questioning the prevailing view. The budget included $600,000 to develop a cadre of 20 “respected climate scientists” and to “identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach.” (Unanswered, of course, was the question of how anyone who has been recruited and trained by the petroleum industry can be honestly described as “independent.”) Once trained, these scientific spokesmodels would be sent around to meet with science writers, newspaper editors, columnists, and television network correspondents, “thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom.’ ”33

  “One of the creepiest revelations is that oil companies and their allies intend to recruit bona fide scientists to help muddy the waters about global warming,” commented the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, seemingly unaware that this “third party” strategy had been part of the industry campaign from day one.34

  Hot Talk, Slow Walk

  During the 1990s, Clinton-bashing was a common theme in industry’s appeals to conservatives, using the argument that the global warming issue was a liberal attempt to replace private property with “socialism,” “bureaucracy,” and “big government.” Particularly strong criticisms were leveled at then-Vice President Al Gore, who has spoken with occasional eloquence about the greenhouse effect and wrote about it in his book Earth in the Balance. Ironically, industry’s attacks on Clinton and Gore helped conceal the Clinton administration’s own complicity in the effort to prevent any effective
regulations on greenhouse emissions.

  On the eve of Earth Day in April 1993, Clinton announced his intention to sign a treaty on global warming, only to spend the rest of his two terms in office waffling and backpedaling. His “Climate Change Action Plan” of October 1993 turned out to be a “voluntary effort,” depending entirely on the goodwill of industry for implementation. By early 1996, he was forced to admit that the plan was off track and would not even come close to meeting its goal for greenhouse gas reductions by the year 2000.

  In June 1997, Clinton addressed the United Nations Earth Summit and pledged a sustained U.S. commitment to stop global warming. Painting a near-apocalyptic picture of encroaching seas and killer heat, he acknowledged that America’s record over the past five years was “not sufficient. . . . We must do better and we will.” Four months later, however, he announced that realistic targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be put off for 20 years, prompting Australian environmental writer Sharon Beder to comment that “champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil, Ford, General Motors, and the coal, steel and aluminum corporations of the US, Australia and Europe. . . . The new limits are so weak, compared with even the most pessimistic predictions of what the US would offer in the current negotiations, that two years of hard work by 150 countries towards reaching an agreement in December are now irrelevant.”35

  During negotiations in Kyoto, the United States lobbied heavily and successfully to weaken the treaty’s actual provisions for limiting greenhouse gases. The resulting treaty proposed a reduction of only 7 percent in global greenhouse emissions by the year 2012, far below the 20 percent cut proposed by the IPCC and European nations or the 30 percent reduction demanded by low-lying island nations that fear massive flooding as melting polar ice leads to rising sea levels. The United States also successfully won a provision that will allow countries to exceed their emission targets by buying right-to-pollute credits from nations that achieve better-than-targeted reductions.

  Greenpeace called the resulting Kyoto treaty “a tragedy and a farce.” It was condemned as “too extreme” by U.S. industry, declared dead on arrival by Senate Republicans, and praised by some environmental groups; and it provided all the political wiggle room that the Clinton administration needed to have its cake and eat it too. Clinton embraced the agreement but simultaneously said he would not submit it to the Senate until impoverished Third World nations agreed to their own cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions.

  There is a method to this madness that is well understood in Washington lobbying circles, although it is rarely discussed in public. By talking tough about the environment while sitting on the Kyoto treaty, Clinton and Gore were able to preserve their “green credentials” for political purposes while blaming the treaty’s demise on anti-environmental Republicans and an apathetic public. For Democrats, it was a “win-win situation.” They could stay on the campaign-funding gravy train by doing what their corporate donors wanted, while giving lip service to solving the problem. The December 12, 1997 New York Times reported that Clinton was “in the risk-free position of being able to make a strong pro-environmental political pitch while not having to face a damaging vote in the Senate. . . . One senior White House official . . . said it was possible that the treaty would not be ready for submission . . . during the remainder of Mr. Clinton’s term in office.” And indeed, this prediction proved correct. Industry’s “lobbyists for lethargy” had succeeded.

  Stormy Weather

  While Nero fiddles, the burning of Rome is proceeding and even appears to be occurring faster than some climatologists expected. The twelve warmest years in recorded history have all occurred since 1983. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Association concurred that 1997 was the hottest year ever, only to be surpassed by 1998, which was in turn surpassed by 1999. In January 2000, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences—Fred Seitz’s former stomping grounds—issued a major report concluding that global warming is an “undoubtedly real” problem and is in fact occurring 30 percent faster than the rate estimated just five years earlier by the IPCC.36

  A series of extreme weather events also seemed to corroborate the IPCC’s predictions. In 1998, a January ice storm caused widespread power outages in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. In February, Florida was hit by the deadliest tornado outbreak in its history. April through June was the driest period in 104 years of record in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, and May through June was the warmest period on record. Heat and dry weather caused devastating fires in central and eastern Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Central America, and Florida. Massive floods hit Argentina, Peru, Bangladesh, India, and China, where the flooding of the Yangtze River killed more than 3,000 people and caused $30 billion in losses. Droughts plagued Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia. On October 4, 1998, Oklahoma was hit by 20 tornadoes, setting a national record for the most twisters ever during a single day. Three hurricanes and four tropical storms caused billions of dollars of damage to the United States. In late September, Hurricane Georges devastated the northern Caribbean, causing $4 billion in damages. A month later, Central America was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, Central America’s worst natural disaster in 218 years, which killed more than 11,000 people and displaced another 2.4 million. In the Pacific, October’s Supertyphoon Zeb inundated the northern Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan. Only eight days later, Supertyphoon Babs struck the Philippines, submerging parts of Manila.37

  In 1999, farmers in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States suffered through a record drought. A prolonged heat wave killed 271 people in the Midwest and Northeast. Hurricane Floyd battered North Carolina, inflicting more than a billion dollars in damages, while Boston marked a record 304 consecutive days without snow. In India, a supercyclone killed some 10,000 people. Torrential rains and mudslides killed 15,000 in Venezuela. Hurricane-force windstorms destroyed trees, buildings, and monuments in France, leaving more than $4 billion in damages. The South Pacific islands of Tebua Tarawa and Abunuea in the nation of Vanuato disappeared beneath the ocean, the first victims of the global rise in sea levels. The wave of catastrophes continued in 2000, with a prolonged drought in Kenya while wet, warm weather spawned billions of crop-threatening locusts in Australia and drought-driven fires devastated Los Alamos. The melting and fissuring of Antarctica’s ice shelf, which first became dramatically evident in 1995, led in May 2000 to the calving of three enormous icebergs with a combined surface area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.

  It is impossible, of course, to prove that any of these individual events was caused by global warming, but cumulatively the evidence is becoming harder to deny. As the evidence continues to mount, even some members of the oil industry have begun to defect. In 1999, the oil companies BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell, along with Dow Chemicals, left the Global Climate Coalition and stated publicly that they now consider global warming a real, immediate problem. The following year saw similar moves from Ford, DaimlerChrysler, the Southern Company, Texaco, and General Motors.38 The DuPont corporation claims it will voluntarily cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 35 percent of their 1990 level by the year 2010.

  “You can’t stop climate change given what we’re doing right now,” said Michael MacCracken in February 2000. MacCracken is director of the National Assessment Coordination Office of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, which was launched by President Bush in 1989. It is already too late to stop global warming, he said, due to the accumulated carbon-dioxide emissions that have already entered the atmosphere. The best that can be hoped for is to minimize the problem and adapt to the changes. In the United States, necessary measures will include changing the way water supplies are managed in the western United States, beefing up public health programs, building higher bridges, and rethinking massive environmental restorati
on projects.39

  For years, the PR apparatus of big coal and big oil persuaded many key decision-makers that global warming was a phantom—that it was not even happening. As the scientific data proving otherwise has accumulated, the contrarian line of argument has also shifted. Industry voices have begun to admit that the industrial greenhouse effect is real, and some are attempting to argue, like Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, that it is actually a good thing—that it will enhance plant growth or that it will be of no consequence because the anticipated temperature changes will be relatively slight. Other voices are stepping forward with industry’s standard lament, claiming that even if global warming is a bad thing, fixing the problem is impossible because it will cost trillions of dollars, ruin the economy, and eliminate jobs.

  The Western Fuels Association (WFA), which provides coal to electrical utility companies, has been a major sponsor of efforts to respin the global warming debate. In the early 1990s, WFA backed the ICE campaign, which attempted to claim that the planet was actually cooling. Its more recent creations include the Greening Earth Society, which promotes that idea that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is “good for earth” because it will encourage greater plant growth. The Greening Earth Society has produced a video, titled “The Greening of the Planet Earth Continues,” publishes a newsletter called the World Climate Report, and works closely with a group called the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Each of these groups has its own separate website.40

  Another web venture is a “grassroots mobilization effort” created for WFA by Bonner & Associates, a Washington, D.C., lobby firm that specializes in “grassroots public relations”—a PR subspecialty that uses telemarketing and computer databases to create the appearance of grassroots public support for a client’s cause. The “Global Warming Cost” website41 focuses on generating e-mail to elected officials. Between September 1997 and July 1998, WFA claims the site generated 20,000 e-mail messages to Congress opposing the Kyoto treaty. The way it works is simple. Visitors to the home page of the website are invited to click on an icon indicating whether they represent “business,” “seniors,” “farmers,” “families,” or “workers.” This takes them to another Web page that requests their address and asks a handful of questions about the amount they spend on home heating, transportation, and other fuel costs. Based on this information, the website automatically generates a “customized” e-mail, directed to each senator and member of Congress in the visitor’s voting area, asking them to “reject any effort to stiffen the United Nations Global Climate Change Treaty.” It’s all computerized, and the website makes no effort to verify that the resulting letter is accurate or even plausible.