HOT - Living through the next Fifty Years
by Mark Hertsgaard
Second section:
"Looking at stress, at genetics, at lifestyle issues let Reynolds
claim it was funding real research," explained Stanton Glantz, a
professor of medicine at the University of California, San
Francisco, and a coeditor of The Cigarette Papers (1998), which
exposed the inner workings of the Brown & Williamson tobacco
company. "But then it could cloud the issue by saying, `Well,
what about this other possible causal factor [for lung
disease]?'It's like coming up with fifty-seven other reasons for
Hurricane Katrina rather than global warming."
For his part, Seitz told me he was comfortable taking tobacco
industry money, "as long as it was green. I'm not quite clear
about this moralistic issue. We had absolutely free rein to
decide how the money was spent."
I asked whether his research gave the tobacco industry political
cover.
"I'll leave that to the philosophers and priests" he replied.
In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global
warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn't warrant
imposing limits on greenhouse gas emissions. He made his case
vocally, trashing the integrity of IPCC scientists on the op-ed
page of the Wall Street Journal; publicly circulating a letter to
the Clinton administration, accusing it of misrepresenting the
science; authoring papers that said global warming was a fanciful
threat devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists
pushing a political agenda.
But Seitz was only the highest-ranking scientist among a group of
advocates who, beginning in 1991, disputed every suggestion that
climate change was a real and present danger. As a former
president of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1961 to
1970), he gave such objections instant credibility. But it was
the Global Climate Coalition, an organization created and funded
by the coal, petroleum, utility, and auto industries, that did
the most to promote these views to government, business, and
media leaders and thereby to the public at large. Although Ross
Gelbspan and other journalists published occasional exposes of
the coalition's funding sources and political agenda, the
deniers' assertions were generally taken at face value in
congressional hearings, news stories, and other public forums and
ended up having considerable effect.
"The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn't to win the
debate," Gelbspan later explained. "The goal was simply to keep
the debate going. When the public hears the media report that
some scientists believe warming is real but others don't, its
reaction is, `Come back and tell us when you're really sure. So
no political action is taken."
It was all in keeping with the PR strategy "Doubt is our
product." "They've done a very good job of getting their
perspective to receive much more attention than it deserves on
the basis of its scientific credibility," James Hansen said of
the deniers. The NASA scientist accused them of "acting like
lawyers, not scientists, because no matter what new evidence
comes in, their conclusion is already decided." As the scientific
case for climate change solidified in the 1990s, said Hansen, the
deniers' counterarguments shifted accordingly. At first, they
denied the earth was warming at all. When that became untenable,
they said that any warming would be small and have few ill
effects. Next, they said that even if there was warming, human
activity wasn't the cause. By the end of the Bush years, they had
been reduced to what was their core objection all along: that
cutting greenhouse gas emissions would "wreck the economy," as
Bush put it.
"Not trivial" is how Seitz reckoned the influence he and his
fellow deniers had. Their arguments were frequently cited in
Washington policy debates, especially in the lead-up to the 95 to
o Senate vote prior to Kyoto. The deniers' effect on news media
coverage was also profound, said Bill McKibben, who in 1989
published the first major popular book on global warming, The End
of Nature. Introducing the tenth anniversary edition of his book
in 1999, McKibben noted that virtually every week over the past
decade studies had appeared in scientific publications painting
an ever more alarming picture of the global warming threat. Most
news coverage, on the other hand, "seems to be coming from some
other planet."
"In the U.S. you have lots of news stories that, in the name of
balance, give equal credence to the skeptics," Fiona Harvey, the
environment reporter for the Financial Times, Britain's leading
business newspaper, told me in 2005. "We don't do that here, not
because we're not balanced but because we think it's unbalanced
to give equal validity to a fringe few with no science behind
them."
As of April 2010, much of the U.S. media has still not learned
this basic lesson of news judgment. U.S. media coverage of global
warming had begun to improve in early 2006, when, in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and emboldened by the release of
Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, many news organizations
finally made it clear that an overwhelming majority of scientists
believed man-made global warming is real, already under way, and
very dangerous. But the improvement turned out to be short-lived.
By late 2009, key parts of the media in the United States and
internationally had reverted to their long-standing posture of
scientific illiteracy and de facto complicity with the deniers'
disinformation campaign.
As the Copenhagen climate summit began in December 2009, almost
every major news organization in the world gave front-page
coverage to the deniers' unfounded accusations of widespread
fraud on the part of leading climate scientists. Quoting people
out of context and cherry-picking data, the deniers accused
scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East
Anglia in Britain of falsifying results and then lying about it,
and of conspiring to suppress dissenting views. The only news
organization that took the time to investigate rather than merely
echo these charges was the Associated Press. A team of AP
reporters read and analyzed each of the 1,073 stolen e-mails, a
total of about 1 million words of text. The AP found that some of
the East Anglia scientists had said nasty things about
deniers-hardly a surprise, considering all the nasty things
deniers had said about them. Some East Anglia scientists also
discussed concealing data, though in the end they did not do so.
Bottom line: the AP found zero evidence of fraud, a conclusion
later shared by two official investigations by British government
bodies. In the words of the AP's headline, "Science Not Faked,
but Not Pretty."
But by the time that AP story was published, the rest of the
media had embraced the deniers' framing of the controversy as
"Climate-gate," thus implicitly endorsing the notion that evil
deeds were afoot and amplifying the underlying suggestion that
climate science was bunk. A few weeks later, news outlets again
advanced the deniers' agenda when they repeatedly devoted ominous
headlines to a handful of inaccuracies discovered in the IPCC's
Fourth Assessment Report, including the mistaken assertion that
the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. That there might
be a handful of errors within a three-thousand-page-long report
is not surprising, but most stories portrayed it as deeply
suspicious. Worse, they failed to explain that these
inaccuracies, which the
..........
To b e continued
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