Local authors take on climate change deniers

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      Big Oil has attacked a global scientific consensus on climate change; now some local authors are exposing its tactics.

      For many years, University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver has watched with horror as the deniers of climate change have managed to confuse the public about global warming. Weaver, a lead author with the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the Georgia Straight in a recent phone interview that he has “lived the misinformation” and “lived the propaganda” that are being fomented by think tanks and advocacy groups financed by oil and coal companies.

      Weaver said that on many occasions, he has seen people pretend that they’re experts on climate science when they’re not. “In the climate-science community, we think we’ve been screaming inside a closed room and nobody is listening,” Weaver declared.

      So after veteran Vancouver public-relations executive James Hoggan and writer Richard Littlemore finished a new book called Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Greystone Books, $20), Weaver said it felt like somebody had pulled an angry gorilla off his back. “You feel this big sense of relief,” he said. “Finally, the truth is coming out.”

      Climate Cover-Up is one of two new books written by local authors—the other being Donald Gutstein’s Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy (Key Porter Books, $22.95)—that show how the fossil-fuel industry has sunk millions of dollars into campaigns designed to derail public concerns about human-induced climate change. Both books demonstrate how the world’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, has funded numerous think tanks, including the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which later issued reports criticizing the IPCC’s scientific consensus on global warming.

      In December, a major United Nations climate conference will begin in Copenhagen to try to reach a new international treaty on global emissions that will be approved by the United States, China, and India. Climate Cover-Up and Not a Conspiracy Theory offer compelling insights for anyone interested in learning why there is so much confusion about this issue in the media. The Hoggan and Littlemore book focuses exclusively on global warming, touching on such things as the coal industry’s efforts to sideswipe mitigation measures. It also focuses on how clever use of language is helping to undermine action on climate change.

      In the other book, Gutstein, a retired SFU communications professor, doesn’t merely look at how industrial forces have used propaganda to stall action around climate change. He includes case studies showing how business groups have also influenced the debate about medicare, continental integration, DDT, and other areas through slick public-relations techniques that often zero in on key decision makers and sympathetic national media commentators.

      The two books both describe how industry-created front groups—such as the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, Friends of Science, and the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions—have tried to convince politicians, the media, and the public that there is a vigorous scientific debate about climate change. Weaver said that these campaigns can yield tremendous returns for industry if they stall emission reductions. Right now, he suggested, “ideology” seems to be driving the debate.

      “You get far more bang for the buck if you can get the Vancouver Sun editorial staff to believe that this global warming is nothing more than a socialist conspiracy to transfer wealth to the developing world,” he said.

      However, according to Weaver, there is little scientific debate, notwithstanding what you might read in Canadian newspapers. In his 2008 book, Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World (Viking Canada), he highlights how the IPCC—a collection of 2,000 international climate scientists—has achieved a broad scientific consensus that human beings are changing the climate by burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

      These gases, including carbon dioxide, form a blanket around the earth, trapping heat. Warmer temperatures have prolonged B.C.’s mountain-pine-beetle infestation and contributed to forest fires around the world, the melting of glaciers, the shrinking summer ice in the Arctic Ocean, and expanded deserts. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has even suggested that the loss of Pacific salmon could be linked to warming ocean temperatures.

      In 2007, the IPCC stated in its Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the middle of the 20th century “is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [human-generated] greenhouse gas concentrations”. Canada emitted 22.6 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1990 and 2002. “This is almost the same as the 23.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted by India, even though its population is thirty-four times greater than ours,” Weaver writes in his book.

      Weaver told the Straight that science is about gathering available information and then developing an explanation for it. “It explains all known observations with a theory,” he said. “Propaganda is the opposite—you find the observations that support the theory.”

      To cite one recent example of the latter, Weaver said he was recently given a copy of lesson plans on global warming that were distributed to B.C. schools by the Fraser Institute. He described these lessons as “shocking” and “shameful”.

      “It’s not science that’s being given out,” Weaver charged. “It’s propaganda.”

      Hoggan, the author of Climate Cover-Up, told the Straight by phone that average people need to gain a greater understanding of the issue to avoid being misled by the media, which echo the claims of industry-financed groups. He described these campaigns as “manipulation of the highest order” and “Darth Vader public relations”, suggesting that consulting firms can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars by coming up with simple phrases like “junk science” or “clean coal” to downplay the issue.

      James Hoggan says Climate Cover-Up
      exposes “Darth Vader public relations”.

      “This is a very, very serious problem, and the way it’s being reported on is completely misleading and, I think, irresponsible,” Hoggan said, singling out the National Post and its owner, Canwest Global Communications Corp., for special criticism.

      Hoggan, who chairs the David Suzuki Foundation, said climate change could have a dramatic effect on people’s lives around the world. “We’re talking about people starving,” he said. “We’re talking about mass migrations away from uninhabitable parts of the globe in parts of Africa and Asia, in places like Bangladesh.”

      On the day that Hoggan spoke to the Straight, Globe and Mail columnist Rex Murphy wrote yet another column denying the seriousness of climate change. Hoggan claimed that all of Murphy’s points that day were originally conceived by industry-funded front groups. “Those are paid arguments,” Hoggan said. “He just happens to pick them up as an ideologue. I think that [if] you repeat disinformation enough, people actually start to believe it.”

      He added that journalists should ask “very basic questions” of anyone who suggests that climate change is not a problem. “The first question we have to ask is whether or not they’re actually climate scientists,” Hoggan said. “Then I would ask whether or not they’re practising climate science. Are they actually doing climate science? Then the third question we have to ask is, ”˜Are they taking money from industry?’”

      On October 18 at the Hollywood Theatre on Vancouver’s West Side, the Fraser Institute hosted a screening of Not Evil Just Wrong, which is an attack on former U.S. vice president Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It was a classic example of the type of communication on global warming that Hoggan, Littlemore, and Gutstein warn about in their books.

      Created by Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer and his wife, Ann McElhinney, the film zeroes in on Gore’s opposition to new fossil-fuel-fired power plants that don’t capture and store their carbon emissions. Not Evil Just Wrong suggests that this approach will harm the U.S. economy and impose hardship on working families. It slickly intersperses images of Gore and an outlandish Christian televangelist, as if to convey that Gore’s forecasts about global warming are as kooky as anything you might find on Sunday-morning television. It also takes a run at James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who declared in 1988 that he was 99 percent confident that global warming was under way.

      Almost everyone quoted in the film is not a practising climate scientist. Some of the sources—including Fred Singer, Roger Innis, Ross McKitrick, and Steve McIntyre—are covered extensively in Not a Conspiracy Theory. One practising climate scientist in Not Evil Just Wrong who is a critic of the climate-change consensus—Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—was described as a “lone voice in the wilderness” by the Los Angeles Times in 2001.

      McAleer gave extensive screen time to Patrick Moore—a B.C. industry consultant who claims to be a cofounder of Greenpeace—to criticize environmentalists and offer his views on global warming. “I don’t believe there is a climate catastrophe,” Moore says at one point in the film. On other occasions, he suggests that environmentalists really don’t like people, which is why they’re more concerned about protecting wildlife.

      In a discussion with the audience after the screening, Moore said it’s “simply wrong” to think that climate change has become “almost the only important issue” in the world. “They have tried to make the word skeptic into a dirty word when, in fact, it is every thinking person and every scientist who needs to be a skeptic,” Moore declared to sustained applause from the audience.

      McAleer, who is not a climate scientist, later told the crowd at the Hollywood Theatre that international treaties on climate change are “the longest and least read suicide notes in history” because they will wreck people’s quality of life. “No one reads these treaties,” he claimed. “But they’re going to radically change our lives—radically—you know, because it’s a tax on everything you do and everything you are. It’s a tax on every light switch. It’s a tax on every room in your house from the attic to the garage. It’s a tax on your car. It’s a tax on your insulation. It’s a tax on your heat. It’s a tax on your thermostat.”

      Then he said it was “no coincidence” that environmentalism rose to prominence as communism declined, because environmentalists and communists both “take money from the middle class, bring it into the government, and then rely on government to distribute it to tax-free job projects run by their own supporters”.

      Dean Pelkey, communications director of the Fraser Institute, later told the Straight by phone that the producers paid for their own travel arrangements and the institute incurred costs for hosting screenings in different Canadian cities. “We did not receive any funding for publicizing Not Evil Just Wrong from any oil company or any coal company,” Pelkey said, noting that the institute is in “general agreement” with the film’s message.

      In Not a Conspiracy Theory, Gutstein points out that the Fraser Institute has been challenging the scientific consensus on climate change since the 1990s. He notes that former staffer Laura Jones, now with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, edited a Fraser Institute book in 1997 called Global Warming: The Science and the Politics, which included chapters by several U.S. global-warming deniers.

      Mother Jones once reported that ExxonMobil provided $8.6 million between 2000 and 2003 to a bunch of think tanks and other groups that have raised public doubt about global warming. Gutstein notes in his book that this included $960,000 to the American Enterprise Institute, $1.4 million to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, $340,000 to the Heritage Foundation, $310,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute, and $140,000 to the Hoover Institution. Pelkey said that ExxonMobil contributed $63,000 to the Fraser Institute in 2003, and another $63,000 in 2004.

      In his book, Gutstein traces the first media mention of a “made-in-Canada solution to climate change” to a 2002 speech by then-outgoing Imperial Oil president Robert Peterson. Peterson, an opponent of the Kyoto Protocol, told shareholders at the annual general meeting that there were “too many theories chasing not enough facts to support the theory of global climate change”.

      From that point forward, Gutstein reports, Conservative politicians and commentators began calling for a “North American solution” or a “made-in-Canada solution” to climate change. This coincided with National Public Relations launching the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions with the goal of planting the made-in-Canada solution.

      The propaganda campaign included television advertisements and a Canadian Taxpayers Federation–financed study on the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on Canadian paycheques. It was prepared by Ross McKitrick, an economist and Fraser Institute fellow who shows up in Not Evil Just Wrong. Gutstein noted that a key operative in the NPR campaign, Guy Giorno, later became Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff.

      In a phone interview with the Straight, Gutstein said the Fraser Institute’s budget doubled over a recent five-year period, rising from $6.9 million in 2004 to $13.9 million in 2008. Gutstein said the media “are enormously at fault” for not pressing the Fraser Institute harder to reveal who funds its research.

      “I think the Fraser Institute is kind of funding-driven,” he said. “They’re still inviting these guys like Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton [two British climate-change deniers] out here. Why are they doing that? Because they’ve got the money to do it. The oil patch wants them to keep doing it.”

      Pelkey, however, insisted that the institute’s board of trustees and the contributors have no impact whatsoever on what issues come under scrutiny. “The research that we do is determined by the directors of the various research departments,” he said.

      For his part, Hoggan said he thinks think tanks and industry front groups should be stripped of their right to hide their sources of funding. “Canadians are concerned about climate change in general, although they are confused about it,” he said. “But we also don’t want to see ourselves embarrassed internationally by our government—and our government failing to live up to its international obligations on the most important environmental issue we’ve ever faced.”

      So what does Weaver, one of the world’s top climate scientists, think Canada should do at the Copenhagen climate talks, which begin on December 7? “I could sum it up very quickly,” he replied. “Canada should just shut up because it has lost all credibility in the last few years on this portfolio. Nobody respects Canada’s opinion on this anymore.”

      Weaver said that if he’d been asked six months ago, he would have said that the Copenhagen negotiations are “crucial” for the future of the planet. However, he explained that China’s recent public recognition of the problem—and President Hu Jintao’s promise last month to curb the increase in carbon-dioxide emissions—have given him hope for the future, even if the climate treaty gets hijacked by backroom deals. “I actually think China is going to show leadership on this, and the rest of the western world will follow,” Weaver predicted.

      Comments

      40 Comments

      Nestor

      Oct 22, 2009 at 10:22am

      This is an unresearched ridiculous article, propaganda.

      DroneLove

      Oct 22, 2009 at 12:10pm

      You fail to notice the other communications strategy constantly at play which is to paint anyone who questions the IPCC (whose majority members are not climate scientists either) or Al Gore or the anthropogenic global warming "consensus" as an agent of Big Oil via ad hominem attacks.

      The real question not "is the climate changing?" -- it is, and always has been. The debate is really about "whats causing the change?" and "should we rush to drastic social engineering and world government in the name of reducing CO2?"

      Another pro AGW strategy is to focus on the *effects* of warming while downplaying the *causes.* Science has an incomplete understanding of the influence of natural cycles, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields on global climate.

      In the past, CO2 increased *after* temperatures increased, because life thrives in warmth, leading to more decay of organic matter. CO2 increases plant respiration. It's a fact CO2 is fertilizer. It's a boon -- the gift of life.

      Today, human CO2 emissions (which account for 4% of total CO2 emissions) keeps increasing, while temperature rise has halted. Has any climate model predicted this?

      It's too bad the pro-AGW machine has exploited so many humans' natural instinct to protect their mother earth to get them to buy into eugenics and forced social engineering.

      What about supporters of pro-AGW NGOs? No shortage of oil companies and globalist foundations backed by the likes of Rothschilds and Rockefellers there.

      Ivan Pulaski

      Oct 22, 2009 at 12:25pm

      Wow, so let me get this straight, ALL science that contradicts your "theory" is the product of scientists on the take from big oil? Holy shit, nice work Einstein!

      It might surprise you that there are many folks that think humans have a lesser effect compared to the other variables on changing the climate. Nobody is denying that climate changes, that is what it does and has done for several billion years. It will change regardless of our wants and desires, mother nature drives the bus folks we are just passengers. Maybe you should STFU and enjoy the ride.

      What happened to the Straight ? Nice journalism. Really, you got to be kidding.

      TheParadigmShift

      Oct 22, 2009 at 2:13pm

      Google:

      "Al Gore sued by over 30,000 Scientists for Global Warming fraud"

      The whole global warm... I mean "climate change" scam is the "direct external threat" that is needed to get the public on board for GLOBAL GOVERNMENT.

      Te majority of scientists REJECT the human caused global warming theory because it's so easy to disprove.

      FIRST OFF, THE EARTH IS IN IT'S THIRD DECADE OF GLOBAL COOLING WHILE SHATTERING HUNDREDS OF COLD WEATHER RECORDS JUST IN THE LAST 2 YEARS ALONE! SECOND LOOK AT THE TEMPERATURE GRAPHS FOR THE LAST 1000 YEARS AND YOU'LL SEE THAT WE ARE IN BELOW AVERAGE TEMPERATURE. THIRD, Co2 MAKES UP LESS THAN 2% OF ALL GREENHOUSE GASES, THE LARGEST BEING WATER VAPOUR FROM THE EVAPORATING OCEANS.

      Google:
      "Global Warming or Global Governance" for the facts.

      Amish Rake Fighter

      Oct 22, 2009 at 2:18pm

      The High Court in England has banned "The Inconvenient Truth" from being shown at schools without a lengthy warning because of all the errors in the movie.

      Al Gore stands to make a lot of money from trading carbon credits, he owns a piece of the exchange

      Lifeforce

      Oct 22, 2009 at 2:31pm

      It's not just big oil - it is big animal factories too!
      Livestock Emissions: Still Grossly Underestimated?

      Washington, D.C.-The environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs), according to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change" in the latest issue of World Watch magazine.

      A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock's Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. But recent analysis by Goodland and Anhang finds that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.

      See:
      The pdf of the article is available at
      http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf

      Peter Hamilton
      Lifeforce Founding Director
      www.lifeforcefoundation.org

      RodSmelser

      Oct 22, 2009 at 3:21pm

      Andrew Weaver and James Hoggan.

      Is this the same Andrew Weaver who recorded a "robo-call" on behalf of Victoria-Beacon Hill B.C. Liberal candidate Dallas Henault for the May 12th B.C. Election?

      http://thetyee.ca/Views/2009/05/13/WhatNow/

      See comments section of this article:
      G West
      15-05-2009
      Nope - haven't seen a peep
      The call came, to my house in Victoria, at 11:24am on May 11 - the caller ID indicated it was made from the Dallas Henault Office at 250 590 2098.

      The message, from a man who identified himself as UVic climate 'scientist' Andrew Weaver, urged me and my family to go out and vote to support the BC Liberals because of their 'carbon tax' legislation.

      They offered assistance and rides to the polls

      I always wondered what a distinguished Canada Research Chair and proud member of Premier Gordon M. Campbell's "Climate Action Team" does in their leisure time and now I know. They offer people rides to the polls in exchange for voting Liberal, ... er, ... I mean, ... voting for the environment.

      Is this the same James Hoggan who has donated generously to the BC Liberal Party, and then directed the David Suzuki Foundation's tirades at Carole James and Jack Layton?

      http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/BC-Politics/2009/04/15/SuzukiChairLibera...

      Just thought I'd ask. You see, if the topic is propaganda coming from oil companies, I think it's safe to say that these two authors have an extraordinarily high degree of expertise in the subject of propaganda.

      Rod Smelser

      seth

      Oct 22, 2009 at 3:22pm

      Chutzpah
      Just to remind you Charley but you accidentally (on purpose) forgot to mention that both Hoggan and Weaver had a major part in reelecting Big Oil/Coal's most favorite Canwest/Gordo one of the most notorious environmentally destructive carbon spewing politicians left in the western world. That's put them with their complaints about the Fraser Institute shilling for Big Oil companies up to the top of the list for the annual hypocrites award and gives them a zero credibility score.

      The two tell us they visited on this destruction on BC because of Gordo' cynical do nothing carbon tax - really just a campaign donation kickback scheme for Humongous Bank. Now that Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a series of articles in the New York Times has thoroughly trashed even real carbon taxes in favour of the NDP's Cap n'trade I've been waiting in vain to hear their Mia Culpa's. Weaver gets the double Chutzpah award for his ridiculing global warming deniers for their lack of climatology creds but puts on his unearned engineers and economist hats to extoll the virtues of Pirate Power and the carbon tax.

      Both are still big fans of Gordos corrupt run of the river schemes which send $45000 billion dollars of taxpayer money to buy one lousy gigawatt of intermittent run of river and wind power worth maybe $7 billion on the current springtime spot market, doubling our power rates and wiping out a lot of our industry. This doubles the worlds record for the most expensive large "green" power scheme yet hatched. The power will be worthless in a little as ten years with new nuclear fusion and nuclear waste burning Gen IV reactors coming on line but we will still be required to pay under Gordo's sleazy must take contracts.. Ontario was recently quoted $2 billion a gigawatt for baseload nuclear on a onetime reactor build – 5% of Canwest/Gordo's pirate power contracts. With mass produced nuclear that cost would drop to $1 billion - the cost our competitors in Alberta will likely be paying for their nuclear builds. Ontario also received a long term nuclear management proposal to provide nuclear power which if scaled up to Gordo's $45 billion in Pirate deals would give us nearly ten times the energy at almost zero environmental cost. 50000 hectares of forest and river valleys now being torn up would have lived.

      What Hoggan failed to report on in his book is the massive support Big Oil/Coal sends to "Green" organizations who love to trash nuclear using the same disinformation tactics Big Oil uses with their Global warming denial schemes. We wouldn't be having to worry about global warming now if the world had followed the French and Ontario's lead and built power grids around nuclear while the rest of the world built on deadly radiation, mercury and soot spewing coal plants killing hundreds of millions of us. That we didn't was testimony to the to very effective Big Oil anti nuclear campaign mounted to prevent exactly what France and Ontario did after Big Oil's engineered 1970's Oil Shock.

      Two of the worlds foremost environmental figures in books Steward "Whole Earth Catalog" Brand's - Whole Earth Discipline or James "Gaia" Lovelock' s The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning document Big Oil's anti nuclear campaign.

      No better example of a no nuke shill is Amory Lovin's a wannabee scientist who has never earned a science degree, who gets an enormous amount of support from Big Oil/Coal to spew his anti nuclear claptrap. To see Amory get shredded read the comments following his recent article in Grist magazine.

      http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-13-stewart-brands-nuclear-enthusias...

      The comments by nuclear engineers are a must read for anybody who wants to know the facts about nuclear power including how new Gen IV reactors eliminate nuclear waste and uranium supply problems.
      seth

      undeniable and the fallacy kings

      Oct 22, 2009 at 3:53pm

      Mr. Hoggan...so now that we are excluding everyone but "scientists" from the debate, does that mean you (PR spin doc.) and Al Gore are going to shut up?

      Ad Hominen, Ad Verecundiam, Ad Populum etc. etc. etc.

      Judy Cross

      Oct 22, 2009 at 4:46pm

      AGW has just been exposed for yet another time as being a total fraud.

      "At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors."
      http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4103

      So, how long will we put up with this swindle and attempt at world government.