Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (18 page)

It seems that there are no safe compromises to be made in dealing with climate change. Denying it was wrong. Delaying action is dangerous. People who say otherwise should, at some point in the very near future, have to stand accountable for their recklessness.

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SLAPP SCIENCE
Using courts and cash to
silence critics of climate confusion

A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (
SL APP
) is a
lawsuit intended to intimidate and silence critics by burdening them
with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or
opposition. Winning the lawsuit is not necessarily the intent of the
person filing the
SL APP
. The plaintiff’s goals are accomplished if the
defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or
simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A
SLAPP
may also
intimidate others from participating in the debate.

WIKIPEDIA, APRIL
30, 2009

I
t’s a tricky business, accusing someone of filing a lawsuit merely to silence their critics. By saying so, you must necessarily suggest motive on the part of the plaintiff, which can be difficult or impossible to prove. So for the record, I have no direct evidence that the suits I am about to explore were SL APPs. In the first case, plaintiff Dr. S. Fred Singer prevailed, winning an apology from his target, Justin Lancaster. In the second case the plaintiff, Tim Ball, bailed without comment as soon as the target put up a fight. And in the third case, plaintiff Stuart Dimmock lost, but by cleverly spinning the result—and by recruiting the assistance of ideologically primed journalists—his supporters were able to turn defeat into a bizarre kind of victory.

The first suit keyed off the reputation of Roger Revelle, a giant of science whom you may remember from Chapter 2 as one of the early voices raising alarm about the potential danger of global warming. Revelle is also an icon of climate science, in part because Al Gore speaks of him so fondly. Revelle taught Gore at Harvard during the 1960s, explaining even then the complications that might evolve if humans continued to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without regard for the consequences. It’s clear from the recent activities of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former vice president that Revelle had the capacity to engage and inspire. Gore never forgot the lesson and has been one of the most influential advocates in the world for action on global warming.

But Revelle had also caught the attention of people who were less enthusiastic about acknowledging the threat of unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. One of those people was Dr. Siegfried Frederick Singer, who as early as 1990 was arguing for inaction. In fact, in an article written for the journal
Environmental
Science & Technology
in 1990, Singer concluded that for economic reasons, we should be wary of overreacting to climate change: “Drastic, precipitous, and especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity without being effective . . . It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. ‘Look before you leap’ may still be good advice.”

That may have sounded like cautious wisdom in 1990. It most certainly sounded like the words of a man who was in no hurry to disrupt the status quo. But Singer wasn’t content to have those words printed only under his own name. It appears that he wanted to be able to attribute those thoughts to someone else—say, for example, someone who was widely trusted in the world as a credible commentator on climate change. Say, Roger Revelle. So Singer convinced Revelle to sign on as a coauthor for a “new paper” to be published in
Cosmos,
the peer-reviewed journal of the prestigious Cosmos Club. A third coauthor was the late Chauncey Starr, founder of the Electric Power Research Institute and a founding “science advisor” on Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project.

In 1991, at the time this project was unfolding, Revelle was in his eighty-second and, it would turn out, last year. He had already suffered a serious heart attack and was in failing health—unable, according to his students and staff, to pay attention for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Singer brought Revelle galley proofs of the paper and stayed with him for three hours, purportedly reviewing the finer points of the science. Then he published an article that concluded with: “Drastic, precipitous—and, especially, unilateral—steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective . . . It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. ‘Look before you leap’ may still be good advice.” This, of course, seems more than coincidentally similar to Singer’s own conclusion—a similarity that prevails through most of the article.

Justin Lancaster, who was working with Revelle as a graduate student at the time, was offended by what he saw as Singer’s blatant manipulation—his outright bullying—of Revelle. In an account of the incident posted on the Environment Science & Technology Web site, Lancaster wrote, “Revelle was hoodwinked, in my view. Perhaps more severe terms are deserved. My personal conversation with Roger shortly after the publication of the
Cosmos
article gave me the very strong sense that he was intensely embarrassed that his name was associated. He seemed noticeably relieved when we agreed together that perhaps the readership of the Cosmos Club journal would be small and limited. Little did either of us anticipate at that moment what was really going on and what would follow.” What followed the article’s publication was an early application of the echo chamber. As the world’s great powers were gathering in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit in 1992, Singer and company began spouting everywhere the news that the great Roger Revelle—grandfather of the greenhouse effect—had capitulated. Lancaster lost his temper and said publicly that Singer had duped Revelle. Ill-advisedly, Lancaster also suggested that Singer’s actions were unethical.

The ensuing lawsuit hit hard. Lancaster says now that he suddenly found himself sitting in the offices of some of the most expensive lawyers to be found anywhere in the northeastern United States, staring into the black hole that had once been his future. Here he was, a recently graduated Ph.D. with no job and, thanks to this controversy, no offers. Lancaster’s own lawyers looked at the evidence and said that Lancaster had a very good case to make before the courts. The similarities between the original Singer article and the one purportedly coauthored with Revelle go well beyond the conclusions quoted here: a compelling case could be made that Singer was the author on both occasions.

But the lawyers also told Lancaster that using the word “unethical” is always dangerous and usually expensive. They said that even if Lancaster decided to pursue the case and won on the main point, the challenge to Singer’s ethics would be difficult to defend. And even in victory Lancaster would still be left with a legal bill so huge that he and his young family might never recover.

So Lancaster rolled over, retracted his charge, and walked away. And a decade later Singer was still crowing. He penned a chapter (“The Revelle-Gore Story: Attempted Political Suppression of Science”) in 2002 in a Hoover Institution book titled
Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking,
and he has continued to quote Revelle’s capitulation and to charge that Lancaster had only complained because he was doing Al Gore’s bidding.

Unable to find work as an academic because of the embarrassment of the whole affair, Justin Lancaster moved off into the private sector, becoming successful enough that he now has the resources to stand up for principle. He has “retracted his retraction” and now says unequivocally that Singer suckered Revelle—taking advantage of a kind and intelligent but aging intellectual. Although Lancaster’s own version of the events has been on the Internet for almost three years, he has heard no more from Dr. S. Fred Singer.

Even so, Lancaster’s earlier capitulation had made the whole scientific community nervous. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to defend yourself in a libel trial, and even if you win, you never recover all of your investment or any of your time. Facing an industry-backed player like Singer, many other scientists have likely chosen the prudent course and stayed out of the debate.

As an aside—on the question of whether Singer is, in fact, industry backed—it’s worth mentioning Singer’s connection to the junk science crowd. To his credit, there is no doubt that Singer was once widely considered to be a distinguished physicist. In the early 1960s he was a leader in developing Earth-observation satellites. He was a special advisor to U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and a founder and the first director of the U.S. National Weather Bureau’s Satellite Service Center. For more than twenty years, however, he has been closely associated with the think tanks and lobby groups that are fully engaged in supporting the kinds of industries that might attract negative public attention. For example, Singer has argued that the use of DDT is a good thing and should be restored. When 6,500 American physicists condemned Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as impractical, Singer joined a very exclusive club of scientific cheerleaders. And, as reported in the Chapter 8 discussion about petitions disputing the science of climate change, Singer has long been a leader in the campaign of confusion. His Web site, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, is a catchall for “scientific” information favorable to the industries with which he associates.

But Singer doesn’t like criticism, especially if you report that he has served as a paid defender of the tobacco industry. When the DeSmogBlog suggested such a connection in a post on June 16, 2006, Singer responded on June 18, 2006, with a threat to sue and a demand that we post a retraction, saying, “Dr. Singer and SEPP (Science & Environmental Policy Project) have no connection whatsoever with the tobacco industry, now or in the past.” But the record suggests otherwise. It appears from a series of memos filed on the Web site tobaccodocuments.org that Singer was engaged, at least once, to write a “research” paper challenging the health effects of secondhand smoke. For example, there is an internal memo from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution commending Dr. Singer as “the man [who] would handle the EPA/ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] . . . work.” Commenting on Singer, the March 1994 memo’s author says, “Very impressive resume—I think the project is worth the [US]$20 K we discussed.” In a December 2004 letter to Walter Woodson, vice president and director of public affairs at the Tobacco Institute, de Tocqueville executive director Cesar Conda thanks the Tobacco Institute for the US$20,000.

The site also contains a copy of a draft report, “The EPA and the Science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke,” on which Singer is listed as the lead author. And there is an August 1994 memo from Tobacco Institute president Samuel D. Chilcote Jr. celebrating the press conference at which the institute and the de Tocqueville Institution jointly released the report, with Singer and Jeffreys in attendance. The paper itself was a bit of a stretch as a scientific analysis. Presented as a “peer-reviewed document,” it turned out that most of the nineteen reviewers, like Singer, had little or no expertise in the science of smoke. Ten of the reviewers were economists. Two were fellows at another libertarian public policy institute (the Hoover Institution), and one was a mineralogist. Singer’s fairly political conclusion in this “scientific” paper was as follows: “I can’t prove that ETS [environmental or secondhand tobacco smoke] is not a risk of lung cancer, but the EPA can’t prove that it is.” He seems to be both promoting and taking comfort from uncertainty.

On the strength of this evidence, I declined to apologize, and, though Singer’s lawyer sent two more threatening letters, they never followed through on a suit.

This was not the first occasion that Singer had been reported to have taken money from industry only to deny it after the fact. For example, on February 12, 2001, Singer wrote to the
Washington Post
in a letter to the editor that the
Post
headlined “My Salad Days,” denouncing suggestions that he had accepted money to lobby on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. “As for full disclosure,” he said, “my résumé clearly states that I consulted for several oil companies on the subject of oil pricing, some 20 years ago, after publishing a monograph on the subject. My connection to oil during the past decade is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil.” Yet Ross Gelbspan has reported on HeatIsOnline.org that ExxonMobil’s own Web site listed Singer as a recipient of US$10,000 in direct funding in 1998 and as a participant in an event that year to which ExxonMobil contributed US$65,000. Asked since about those payments, Singer has taken the amnesia defense: he says he gets so many checks that he can’t remember who they’re all from.

ON APRIL 19, 2006, the self-appointed Canadian climate change expert Dr. Timothy Ball published an opinion column in the
Calgary Herald,
the newspaper of record in Canada’s oil capital (often referred to as “Houston North”). The column, headlined “Aussies’ Suzuki Heavier on Rhetoric than on Science,” was a churlish attack on the Australian academic Tim Flannery, who was crossing Canada on a promotional tour for his best-selling climate change book,
The Weather Makers.
Ball derided Flannery as someone with “no professional credentials in the field” who “blunders regularly.” He alleged that Australian scientists had “debunked” Flannery’s book, and he stated flatly that “there is no more reason to believe Flannery today than there was” to believe Lowell Ponte, a scientific outlier who warned of global cooling in the 1870s.

All this was fairly typical invective from Ball, who had garnered a national reputation as a letter and opinion-page writer and an exuberant speaker on the climate change denial circuit. Also typical was this biographical note, added at the bottom of his column: “Tim Ball is a Victoria-based environmental consultant. He was the first climatology Ph.D. in Canada and worked as a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years.”