Global.Warming.org
How many times have you heard climate
activists claim skeptics are just latter-day “tobacco
scientists?” Google “tobacco scientists” and “global warming,” and
you’ll get about 1,110,000 results. With so much (ahem) smoke, surely there must be some fire, right?
Al Gore helped popularize this endlessly repeated allegation. In
An Inconvenient Truth
(p. 263), he contends that just as tobacco companies cynically funded
corrupt scientists to cast doubt on the Surgeon General’s report linking
cigarette smoking to cancer, so fossil fuel companies fund “skeptics”
to create the appearance of scientific controversy where none exists.
Here’s the pertinent passage:
The misconception that there
is serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is
actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively
small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including
Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies. These
companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with
their current business plans that rely on the massive unrestrained
dumping of global warming pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere every
hour of every day.
One of the internal memos prepared by this group
to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign
was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan.
Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as
theory, rather than fact.”
This technique has been used before. The
tobacco industry, 40 years ago, reacted to the historic Surgeon
General’s report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other lung
diseases by organizing a similar disinformation campaign.
One of their memos,
prepared in the 1960s, was recently uncovered during one of the
lawsuits against the tobacco companies in behalf of the millions of
people who have been killed by their product. It is interesting to read
it 40 years later in the context of the global warming campaign:
“Doubt is our
product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of
fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the
means of establishing controversy.” Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company
memo, 1960s
There’s just one problem with this tale of corruption and intrigue —
much of it is false and all of it is misleading. Let’s examine the flaws
in this urban legend, going from minor to major.
First, Gore’s alleged source, Ross Gelbspan, is not a Pulitzer Prize winner. Gelbspan’s 1997 book,
The Heat Is On, supposedly
exposes how fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians collude
to ”confuse the public about global warming.” The jacket of the book
describes Gelbspan as a “Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.” But former
JunkScience.Com blogger
Steve Milloy searched the
list of Pulitzer journalists,
and found that Gelbspan was not among them. Gelbspan later claimed only
to have conceived, directed, and edited a series of articles that won a
Pulitzer in 1984.
Second, Gelbspan was not the source of Gore’s story. Gore discussed the leaked documents in his 1992 book,
Earth in the Balance (p. 360), which was published five years before Gelbspan’s book. So how did Gore find out about it? Blogger
Russell Cook notes that the documents were first “reported in a 1991
New York Times article which claimed they came from an unnamed source at the Sierra Club.”
Why did Gore credit Gelbspan with breaking the story? Who
knows! Maybe because information sourced to “Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter” sounds credible even if the reporter neither won a Pulitzer
nor broke the story.
Third, Gore gives the false impression that ExxonMobil and other oil
companies were part of the “group” behind the “disinformation
campaign” supposedly revealed in the memo that Gelbspan supposedly
“discovered.”
The memo was one of several
documents drafted
by an ad hoc group calling itself Information Council for the
Environment. ICE was a project of Southern Company (an electric utility)
and Western Fuels Association (a non-profit supply cooperative of
consumer-owned electric utilities). No oil companies were involved.
Fourth, the documents are not an adopted plan to ”reposition” global
warming but a proposal to “test market” the effectiveness of such
messaging.
The actual objectives of the project were to:
1) Demonstrate that a
consumer-based media awareness program can positively change the
opinions of a selected population regarding the validity of global
warming.
2) Begin to develop a message and strategy for shaping public opinion on a national scale.
3) Lay the solid groundwork for a unified national electric industry voice on global warming.
The plan was never developed, much less implemented. As the 1991
New York Times article reported, different members of the electric utility industry took different positions on climate change:
The utility industry is
divided on the question of global warming. Two California utilities,
Southern California Edison, the nation’s second-largest utility after
the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and the Los Angeles Water and
Power Department, the largest municipal company, volunteered in May to
cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 20 percent in the next 20 years.
Most of the savings, they said, would come from efficiency improvements
in lighting, motors and cooling that would pay for themselves.
The Arizona Public Service Company,
which serves Flagstaff, declined an invitation to participate in ICE.
Mark De Michele, president and chief executive, did not reply to
repeated phone calls seeking comment. But he told The Arizona Daily Sun
in May, “The subject matter is far too complex and could be far more
severe than the ads make of it for the subject to be dealt with in a
slick ad campaign.”
The Edison Electric Institute, a utility
trade group based in Washington that also helped organize the ICE
campaign, takes the position that because of the possibility that
climate change is a real threat, steps should be taken to cut
carbon-dioxide output if those steps are justifiable for other reasons —
for example, saving money through higher efficiency or reducing the
output of sulfur dioxide from power plants. That chemical causes acid
rain.
Some of the advertising messages test-marketed in Flagstaff, Ariz., Bowling Green, Ky., and Fargo, N.D., were goofy. From the
Times article:
In Bowling Green, an ad
showed a cartoon horse in earmuffs and scarf and said, “If the Earth is
getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder?” Another, with a cartoon
man bundled up and holding a snow shovel, appeared in Minnesota and
substituted “Minneapolis” for “Kentucky.”
Did any skeptical scientists endorse those messages? No. As the
Times
reported, Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and Sherwood Idso, the ICE
science advisory panel, ”said in telephone interviews that the salient
element in two of the ads, that some areas might be getting cooler, did
not contradict the theory of global warming.” The article also
reported that Balling and Michaels “have both asked to have their names
removed from future mailings.”
Indeed, as Gelbspan acknowledged in his book, “Michaels has insisted
that he dissociated himself from the ICE campaign when he learned of
what he called its ‘blatant dishonesty.’” When Balling and Michaels
pulled out, the ICE project collapsed. So much for the grand
fossil-fueled conspiracy.
Fifth, there is no shame in repositioning as
theory that which is
not fact.
* The “repositioning” memo is dated May 15, 1991 — four and a half years before the
IPCC famously concluded,
in November 1995, that the ”balance of evidence suggests that there is a
discernible human influence on global climate.” Note too that the
IPCC’s iconic formulation is not an assertion of what is demonstrably
true, only an assessment of what the “balance of evidence” “suggests.”
From 1979 to 1991, two of the three main data sources — satellites
and radiosondes (weather balloons) — showed no warming or even a slight
cooling trend in the bulk atmosphere (troposphere). It was the land
record that was the odd man out. Given that radiosondes were calibrated
to measure global temperature and the satellites were specifically
designed for that purpose, while the surface network was designed to
measure agricultural weather, which should objective scientists trust
least?
In 1998, the
Remote System Sensing (RSS) team led
by Frank Wentz discovered an orbital decay-induced spurious cooling in
the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) satellite record. The UAH
scientists corrected their record, the balloon record was also revised,
so all three records showed a warming trend. Only at that point did
global
(as distinct from urban or local) warming become a “fact” — a trend
confirmed by multiple independent observations. But then, irony of
ironies, global warming plateaued in the RSS record, and
“the pause” has persisted for 17 and a half years.
Even today, calling
anthropogenic global warming a ”fact” – meaning
conclusively demonstrated – would still be an exaggeration.
A study published last year by
Benjamin Santer and colleagues in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
alluding to the IPCC’s iconic attribution statement, proudly proclaimed
“clear evidence for a discernible human influence on the thermal
structure of the atmosphere.” Since 1979, the middle atmosphere has
warmed (albeit
less than predicted)
while the stratosphere has cooled. This observed pattern matches the
model-predicted vertical structure (“fingerprint”) of anthropogenic
climate change.
Why is that evidence of
anthropogenic warming? If the Sun
were responsible for global warming, the stratosphere should also get
warmer. But if warming is due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in
the troposphere, then the stratosphere should cool because more
upwelling heat is trapped in the layer beneath it.
Santer et al., however, chose their words carefully — perhaps
artfully. A “discernible human influence” can include the cooling
effects of manufactured substances, chiefly hydroflourocarbons, that
destroy ozone in the troposphere. Ozone is itself a greenhouse (heat
absorbing) gas. So some significant part of stratospheric cooling could
be due to ozone depletion rather than to greenhouse gas emissions
trapping more heat in the troposphere. A
study cited by the Santer team, led by one of its co-authors, acknowledges that possibility:
In the mid and upper
stratosphere the simulated natural and combined anthropogenic responses
are detectable and consistent with observations, but the influences of
greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances could not be separately
detected in our analysis.
Sixth, when read in context, “reposition as theory, rather than fact” refers not to anthropogenic warming per se but to the
prediction
“that higher levels of carbon dioxide will bring a catastrophic global
warming.” For example, an ICE document quotes then University of
Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels: “I am one of many scientists
who believe the vision of catastrophic global warming is distorted.”
The key climate science question for policymakers and citizens is not whether anthropogenic global warming is
real but whether, in
Al Gore’s words, climate
change is “a planetary emergency — a crisis that threatens the survival
of civilization and the habitability of the Earth.” The climate alarm
narrative was not a “fact” in 1991 and certainly is not today.
Mounting evidence indicates that
the climate is substantially less sensitive (reactive) to greenhouse
gas emissions than “consensus” science had assumed. The oft-asserted
link between warming and extreme weather
continues to elude researchers.
More importantly, the climate trilogy of terror – ocean circulation
collapse, rapid ice sheet disintegration, and runaway climate change
(the methane “bomb”) – has far less scientific plausibility today
than it did in 1991.
**
Gore and other climate campaigners have been trying for decades to
reposition fear as fact. Their j’accuse directed at skeptics is
Orwellian.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
* In
colloquial English, a “theory” is any supposition or hypothesis, which
may or may not jibe with “facts” or observations. In strict scientific
parlance, however, a “theory” is the highest form of cognition. As one commentator explains:
A theory is really one of
the pinnacles of science – what nearly everyone strives to make out of
their hypotheses. A hypothesis is elevated to a theory when it has
withstood all attempts to falsify it. Experiment after experiment has
shown it sufficient to explain all observations that it encompasses. In
other words, a “theory” has never been shown to be false, despite –
usually – hundreds if not thousands of separate attempts to break it. It
explains the observations with one or more mechanisms and, because it
provides that mechanism, it is considered to be above the level of a
Law.
** For references to the peer-reviewed literature, see pp. 23-26 of the free-market organizations’
comment letter on the social cost of carbon.
No comments:
Post a Comment