Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (12 page)

Even as CEI was losing its Exxon funding, however, a new team leader was emerging in the climate debate: the Heartland Institute. On the surface, Heartland is not quite as credible as the CEI. For example, the aforementioned Heartland “Smokers’ Lounge” gives the organization away as one that will make common cause with industrial forces (big tobacco) that have been publicly discredited. The institute used to acknowledge the funders for this sort of work (Philip Morris prominent among them), but found that “critics who couldn’t or wouldn’t engage in fair debate over our ideas found the donor list a convenient place to find the names of unpopular companies or foundations, which they used in ad hominem attacks against us.”
³

For the record, I’d argue that it would be fair to say that smoking is a dangerous habit that drives up social and health costs—a point accepted by U.S. courts. I would further argue that if someone is taking money from Philip Morris to make a contrary argument, the public has a right to know about the payment before making a finding as to Heartland’s credibility.

Early evidence that Heartland’s fund-raisers had struck oil came in 2007 with a major newspaper advertising campaign urging a debate between Al Gore and the prominent U.K. climate change denier Christopher Walter—or, as he prefers to be known, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Lord Monckton, who styles himself as a former science advisor to then-U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (he appears to have been a junior researcher in the Prime Minister’s Office) has no training whatever in science, but has turned his degree in classics and diploma in journalism to full-time denial, pumping out JunkScience.com products like the DVD
Apocalypse? No!
and writing purportedly scientific reports for organizations such as the Science and Public Policy Institute.
⁴

Heartland followed up its 2008 ad campaign with the first “International Conference on Climate Change.” Once again, Heartland was soliciting compliant scientists, offering an all-expenses-paid trip to New York and a US$1,000 honorarium to any scientist willing to help “generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science, and that expensive campaigns to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not necessary or cost-effective.” And lest there be any confusion as to the intended audience for this discussion, an invitational letter from Heartland senior fellow James M. Taylor noted that elected officials were invited to apply for “scholarships” covering all costs. In March 2009 Heartland launched the second such conference, with a speakers list featuring politicians, science “experts” like Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels, and non-academic “experts” like Christopher Walter.
⁵

I would not want to leave the impression from any of the foregoing that I believe think tanks are all bad. There are many admirable institutions that conduct excellent research and advance the discussion of public policy in a way that clearly serves the public interest. But reputable think tanks whose goals are in fact to serve the public good should be willing to post their funding sources prominently and should be doubly prepared to stand accountable when they take firm positions that are outside the mainstream, outside their field of expertise, or, especially, at odds with independent research bodies. I can’t think of a situation in which a think tank could credibly attack a national academy of science—as CEI, Heartland, and dozens of others have done on this issue.

The example of Heartland, with its support of “smokers’ rights,” raises one of the important issues on the climate change file. As Heartland CEO Joseph Bast likes to argue, a smoker—when separated from his children, his friends, and his workmates—is endangering only his own life. There is, I suppose, an argument to be made that it is his right to do so. But the people who are blocking or delaying action on climate change are putting the whole human population at risk. If they are doing so out of some sincere, if wrong-headed, belief that climate change really isn’t a problem, then their actions might be forgivable. But if they are doing it because their eagerness to post short-term profits overwhelms their judgment or their interest in the public good, then they should be subject to the full dose of public wrath. Either way, they have put themselves forward as experts—as lifeguards—so their responsibility to be well-informed is that much greater and their negligence of or disregard for the science is even more offensive.

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eight
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DENIAL BY THE POUND
Many wrongs don’t make a right, but they sound better

Tens of thousands of scientists now say the media and environmental
advocacy groups have it all wrong, that global warming is not a
crisis. They point to a cooling trend in global temperatures since 2000,
past warming and cooling cycles that were not man-made, and new
evidence that carbon dioxide is not a very powerful greenhouse gas.

On March 8 to 10, 2009, the 2009 International Conference
on Climate Change will provide a platform for scientists and policy
analysts from around the world who question the theory that global
warming is a crisis.

For more information about this exciting conference or to
register online, please visit
www.heartland.org
or
www.globalwarmingheartland.org . . .

FROM A HEARTLAND ADVERTISEMENT IN THE
NATIONAL REV IEW

T
ens of thousands of scientists say global warming is not a crisis? Really? Well, the Heartland Institute wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true in its way. At the bottom of the same ad, Heartland offers a source for this claim: “More than 34,000 scientists have signed a petition saying global warming probably is natural and not a crisis. See the complete list at
www.oism.org/pproject.
”

Type that link into your computer and you’ll wind up at the home of the grandiose-sounding Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine—in reality, a farm shed situated a couple of miles outside of Cave Junction, Oregon (population 17,000). In addition to its founder chemist Arthur Robinson, the Oregon Institute lists six faculty members, two of whom are dead and two others of whom are Robinson’s twenty-something sons. The Oregon Institute lists no ongoing research and carries no students. Rather, it publishes books on surviving nuclear war and distributes Arthur Robinson’s homeschooler package—a creationist-friendly curriculum based on such material as the 1911
Encyclopedia Britannica.

Robinson’s views on climate change are clear, and clearly out of step: “I think it’s important to speak the truth,” he told Jeff Goodell in an interview that Goodell conducted for his book
Big Coal.
Robinson continued, “When you start cutting back on coal and oil, what you’re really talking about is depriving millions of people in places like Africa access to cheap energy to improve their lives. One of these days, people will start to see global warming for what it is—a thinly disguised scam by corporations, the United Nations, and big environmental groups to reduce the world’s population. Speaking as a scientist, I can tell you that most people who tout global warming are liars, and the sooner we recognize that, the better.”

This is all too typical of the language that deniers use in condemning the world’s greatest scientists. Robinson, who is not personally a climate scientist, is not suggesting that the climate change experts on the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC are merely mistaken. He says that most of them are “liars.” Yet he makes no effort to explain their motives or to say which corporations might benefit from reducing global population. He is also careful enough not to attach a specific name to this libel. Instead, for the last ten years he has dedicated a huge amount of his time to the so-called Oregon Petition. The petition was launched in 1999 under the signature of Dr. Frederick Seitz, the scientist whom a Philip Morris executive dismissed ten years earlier as “quite elderly and not sufficiently rational as to offer advice.” Robinson’s early role in the petition had been to prepare what Seitz would later refer to as a “twelve-page review of information on the subject of ‘global warming.’” Titled “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” the review was coauthored by Robinson’s son Noah and Willie Soon, a Harvard-Smithsonian physicist whose work has been funded by the API and the Exxon-friendly George C. Marshall Institute. Neither peer-reviewed nor published in any scientific journal, the article was laid out and printed in exactly the style used for the prestigious journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It was then distributed with a letter from Seitz, who is prominently identified as a former National Academy president. Not surprisingly, many recipients took this for an official National Academy of Sciences communication, triggering an uproar that resulted in the National Academy issuing a statement on April 20, 2008, clarifying that it was in no way connected to the petition, that the article had never appeared in a National Academy of Sciences journal—or in any journal—and that the National Academy’s position on global warming was opposite to what was being suggested in the petition literature.

This criticism notwithstanding, the petition attracted a huge number of signatures—though the actual number and the veracity of the names have never been established. When early critics pointed out that the petition was littered with names like Perry Mason, Michael J. Fox, and (former Spice Girl) Geri Hal-liwell, Robinson and company insisted that some of the names were legitimate (Perry Mason refers to a Ph.D. chemist, not to the fictional TV lawyer) and that others had been submitted by mischievous environmentalists. But by failing to include any contact information—or even signatory links to academic institutions— the Oregon Institute made it impossible to verify the petition.
¹

That didn’t stop people from trying. In its August 2006 issue the magazine
Scientific American
told readers about its own efforts to confirm or debunk the petition:

Scientific American
took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers—a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.

None of the “200 climate researchers” had ever published any refereed research that supported their supposed skepticism, but apparently they still felt strongly enough to sign the petition.

Scientific American
conducted this review at a time when the petition listed seventeen thousand signatures. Like other would-be scrutinizers, they found the “scientists” were almost all people with undergraduate degrees and no expertise in climatology, no record of research, and no more ready information than the “review” penned by Robinson, Robinson, and Soon. Yet the petition’s organizers were sufficiently pleased with their product that they continued to tout it and to add names. Even though they didn’t have the weight of evidence, and even though their signatories were not heavyweights in scientific terms, it appeared that the gross weight of all those purported “scientists” again helped demonstrate a scientific controversy that to the casual observer seemed both legitimate and lively. Robinson and company have continued to solicit signatures ever since, launching a major drive in 2007 that helped push the total from under twenty thousand to over thirty thousand names. Now, when people brandish the reports of the IPCC as evidence that the work of more than 2,500 top experts worldwide supports a conclusion that we must be concerned about the human contribution to climate change, the Heartland Institute and all of their supporters hold up the Oregon Petition and say, so what? “Tens of thousands of scientists now say the media and environmental advocacy groups have it all wrong, that global warming is not a crisis.”

This science-by-petition argument has a rich tradition, one that continues to birth new petitions at regular intervals. Dr. S. Fred Singer launched the first obvious effort through his think tank/Web site, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (sepp.org), in 1992. The “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming” was released four months before the “UN Conference on Environment and Development,” the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. With forty-seven signatories, mostly weather forecasters and physicists, it was just the first hint of how the strategy would unfold in the years to come.

In the same year four thousand scientists, including seventy-two Nobel Prize winners, signed the “Heidelberg Appeal,” which Singer said also took issue with the science of global warming, but which, in fact, didn’t mention climate change or any other environmental issue. It merely called for scientific policy based on “scientific criteria and not on irrational preconceptions.”

The “Leipzig Declaration,” also promoted by Singer and sponsored by the Science and Environmental Policy Project, arose out of a conference in Leipzig, Germany, in 1995 and included a mix of eighty scientists and twenty-five T V weather forecasters. It was rereleased in 1997 and again in 2005. When Øjvind Hesselager of the Danish Broadcasting Company tried to verify the signatories in 1997, he was working with a list of eighty-two, thirty-three of whom were listed as European. In reporting his findings he gave these results:

• He was unable to locate four of the signatories at all;

• He found twelve who denied having signed or, in some cases, ever having heard of the “Leipzig Declaration”;

• He found many who were not qualified in fields even remotely related to climate research. They included medical doctors, nuclear scientists, and entomologists; and