Ilmastonmuutos | Uusi Suomi Puheenvuoro
Missä se näkyy, Christy et al. pumppaa hevonpaskaansa nonstoppina nettiin. Avaruussäätieätäjä Wattsin sivusto pumppaa samaa paskaa kertoimella 200 eikä kukaan ole estämässä.
Täältä voi käydä tsekkaamassa miten Exxon et al. kykeni vaikuttamaan instituutioiden sisältä denial, doubt and delay kampanjallaan denialistitiäteen edistämiseen. Täältä voi käydä tsekkaamassa sitä porukkaa jolla oli sanottavaa siihen mitä kongressin komiteat viljelivät laajemmalla skaalalla. Bush pöljemmän tultua asetetuksi [US Supreme Court päätöksellä] oval officen pöydän taakse älypää irrotti ensitöikseen Yhdysvallat Kioton sopimuksen puitteista. Sen jälkeen EPA:n virkamiehillä ei ollut lupa edes ajatella ääneen ilmaston lämpenemisestä.
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ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Campaign
In the late 1980s, when the public first began to hear about global warming, scientists had already conducted more than a century of research on the impact of carbon dioxide on earth’s climate.
As the science matured in the late 1980s, debate, a key component of the scientific process, surfaced among reputable scientists about the scope of the problem and the extent to which human activity was responsible.
Much like the status of scientific knowledge about the health effects of smoking in the early 1950s, emerging studies suggested cause for concern but many scientists justifiably argued that more research needed to be done.
Exxon (and later ExxonMobil), concerned about potential repercussions for its business, argued from the start that no global warming trend existed and that a link between human activity and climate change could not be established. Just as the tobacco companies initially responded with a coalition to address the health effects of smoking, Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute (an organization twice chaired by former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond) joined with other energy, automotive, and industrial companies in 1989 to form the Global Climate Coalition. The coalition responded aggressively to the emerging scientific studies about global warming by opposing governmental action designed to address the problem.
Drawing on a handful of scientific spokespeople during the early and mid-1990s, the Global Climate Coalition emphasized the remaining uncertainties in climate science. Exxon and other members of the coalition challenged the need for action on global warming by denying its existence as well as characterizing global warming as a natural phenomenon. As Exxon and its proxies mobilized forces to cast doubt on global warming, however, a scientific consensus was emerging that put their arguments on exceptionally shaky scientific ground.
MANUFACTURING UNCERTAINTY
By 1997, scientific understanding that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases were causing global warming led to the Kyoto Protocol, in which the majority of the world’s industrialized nations committed to begin reducing their global warming emissions on a specified timetable.
In response to both the strength of the scientific evidence on global warming and the governmental action pledged to address it, leading oil companies such as British Petroleum, Shell, and Texaco changed their stance on climate science and abandoned the Global Climate Coalition. ExxonMobil chose a different path.
In 1998, ExxonMobil helped create a small task force calling itself the “Global Climate Science Team” (GCST). Members included Randy Randol, ExxonMobil’s senior environmental lobbyist at the time, and Joe Walker, the public relations representative of the American Petroleum Institute.
One member of the GCST task force, Steven Milloy, headed a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by second-hand smoke.
A 1998 GCST task force memo outlined an explicit strategy to invest millions of dollars to manufacture uncertainty on the issue of global warming —a strategy that directly emulated Big Tobacco’s disinformation campaign. Despite mounting scientific evidence of the changing climate, the goal the team outlined was simple and familiar. As the memo put it, “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) uncertainties in climate science” and when public “recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’”
Regardless of the mounting scientific evidence, the 1998 GCST memo contended that “if we can show that science does not support the Kyoto treaty…this puts the United States in a stronger moral position and frees its negotiators from the need to make concessions as a defense against perceived selfish economic concerns.”
ExxonMobil and its partners no doubt understood that, with the scientific evidence against them, they would not be able to influence reputable scientists. The 1998 memo proposed that ExxonMobil and its public relations partners “develop and implement a national media relations program to inform the media about uncertainties in climate science.” In the years that followed, ExxonMobil executed the strategy as planned underwriting a wide array of front organizations to publish in-house articles by select scientists and other like-minded individuals to
raise objections about legitimate climate science research that has withstood rigorous peer review and has been replicated in multiple independent peer-reviewed studies—in other words, to attack research findings that were well established in the scientific community. The network ExxonMobil created masqueraded as a credible scientific alternative, but it publicized discredited studies and cherry-picked information to present misleading conclusions.
INFORMATION LAUNDERING
A close review reveals the company’s effort at what some have called “information laundering”:
projecting the company’s desired message through ostensibly independent nonprofit organizations. First, ExxonMobil underwrites well-established groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute that actively oppose mandatory action on global warming as well as many other environmental standards.But the funding doesn’t stop there. ExxonMobil also supports a number of lesser-known organizations that help to market and distribute global warming disinformation.
A few of these are household names. For instance, most people are probably not familiar with the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or the International Policy Network, to name just a few. Yet these organizations—and many others like them—have received sizable donations from ExxonMobil for their climate change activities.
Between 1998 and 2005 (the most recent year for which company figures are publicly available), ExxonMobil has funneled approximately $16 million to carefully chosen organizations that promote disinformation on global warming. As the New York Times has reported, ExxonMobil is often the single largest corporate donor to many of these nonprofit organizations, frequently accounting for more than 10 percent of their annual budgets.
A close look at the work of these organizations exposes ExxonMobil’s strategy. Virtually all of them publish and publicize the work of a nearly identical group of spokespeople, including scientists who misrepresent peer-reviewed climate findings and confuse the public’s understanding of global warming. Most of these organizations also include these same individuals as board members or scientific advisers.
Why would ExxonMobil opt to fund so many groups with overlapping spokespeople and programs? By generously funding a web of organizations with redundant personnel, advisors, or spokespeople, ExxonMobil can quietly and effectively provide the appearance of a broad platform for a tight-knit group of vocal climate science contrarians. The seeming diversity of the organizations creates an “echo chamber” that amplifies and sustains scientific disinformation even though many of the assertions have been repeatedly debunked by the scientific community.
Take, for example, ExxonMobil’s funding of a Washington, DC-based organization called Frontiers of Freedom. Begun in 1996 by former Senator Malcolm Wallop, Frontiers of Freedom was founded to promote property rights and critique environmental regulations like the Endangered Species Act. One of the group’s staff members, an economist named Myron Ebell, later served as a member of the Global Climate Science Team, the small task force that laid out ExxonMobil’s 1998 message strategy on global warming. Following the outline of the task force’s plan in 1998, ExxonMobil began funding Frontiers of Freedom —a group that Vice President Dick Cheney recently called “an active, intelligent, and needed presence in the national debate.
Since 1998, ExxonMobil has spent $857,000 to underwrite the Frontiers of Freedom’s climate change efforts.
In 2002, for example, ExxonMobil made a grant to Frontiers of Freedom of $232,000 (nearly a third of the organization’s annual budget) to help launch a new branch of the organization called the Center for Science and Public Policy, which would focus primarily on climate change.
A recent visit to the organization’s website finds little information about the background or work of the Center for Science and Public Policy. The website offers no mention of its staff or board members other than its current executive director Robert Ferguson, for whom it offers no biographical information. As of September 2006, however, the website did prominently feature a 38-page non-peer-reviewed report by Ferguson on climate science, heavily laden with maps, graphs, and charts, entitled “Issues in the Current State of Climate Science: A Guide for Policy Makers and Opinion Leaders.” The document offers a hodgepodge of distortions and distractions posing as a serious scientific review. Ferguson questions the clear data showing that the majority of the globe’s glaciers are in retreat by feebly arguing that not all glaciers have been inventoried, despite the monitoring of thousands of glaciers worldwide. And, in an attempt to dispute solid scientific evidence that climate change is causing extinctions of animal species, Ferguson offers the non sequitur that several new butterfly and frog species were recently discovered in New Guinea.
Perhaps most notable are Ferguson’s references, citing a familiar collection of climate science contrarians such as Willie Soon. In fact, although his title is not listed on the organization’s website, Soon is the Center for Science and Public Policy’s “chief science researcher,” according to a biographical note accompanying a 2005 Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored by Ferguson and Soon. Ferguson’s report was not subject to peer review, but it is nonetheless presented under the auspices of the authoritative-sounding Center for Science and Public Policy.
Another organization used to launder information is the George C. Marshall Institute. During the 1990s, the Marshall Institute had been known primarily for its work advocating a “Star Wars” missile defense program. However, it soon became an important home for industry-financed “climate contrarians,” thanks in part to ExxonMobil’s financial backing. Since 1998, ExxonMobil has paid $630,000 primarily to underwrite the Marshall Institute’s climate change effort.
William O’Keefe, CEO of the Marshall Institute, formerly worked as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute, served on the board of directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is chairman emeritus of the Global Climate Coalition.
Since ExxonMobil began to support its efforts, the Marshall Institute has served as a clearinghouse for global warming contrarians, conducting round-table events and producing frequent publications. Most recently, the Marshall Institute has been touting its new book, Shattered Consensus:
The True State of Global Warming, edited by longtime climate contrarian Patrick Michaels (a meteorologist). Michaels has, over the past several years, been affiliated with at least ten organizations funded by ExxonMobil. Contributors to the book include others with similar affiliations with Exxon-funded groups: Sallie Baliunas, Robert Balling, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, and Willie Soon.
The pattern of information laundering is repeated at virtually all the private, nonprofit climate change programs ExxonMobil funds. The website of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which received $119,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005, offers recent articles by the same set of scientists. A visit to the climate section of the website of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which received $241,500 from ExxonMobil in 2005, turns up yet another non-peer-reviewed paper by Patrick Michaels. The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which received $215,000 from ExxonMobil over the past two funding cycles of 2004 and 2005, boasts a similar lineup of articles and a scientific advisory panel that includes Sallie Baliunas, Robert Balling, Roger Bate, Sherwood Idso, Patrick Michaels, and Frederick Seitz—all affiliated with other ExxonMobil-funded organizations.
A more prominent organization funded by ExxonMobil is the Washington, DC-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Founded in 1984 to fight government regulation on business, CEI started to attract significant ExxonMobil funding when Myron Ebell moved there from Frontiers of Freedom in 1999. Since then, CEI has not only produced a steady flow of vituperative articles and commentaries attacking global warming science often using the same set of global warming contrarians. CEI has also sued the federal government to stop the dissemination of a National Assessment Synthesis Team report extensively documenting the region-by-region impacts of climate change in the United States. For its efforts, CEI has received more than $2 million in funding from ExxonMobil from 1998 through 2005.
The irony of all these efforts is that ExxonMobil, a company that claims it is dedicated to supporting organizations favoring “free market solutions to public policy problems,” is actively propping up discredited studies and misleading information that would otherwise never thrive in the scientific marketplace of ideas. The tactic is seen clearly in ExxonMobil’s backing of a website called Tech Central Station, which portrays itself as a media outlet but is, in fact, part of a corporate PR machine that helps corporations like ExxonMobil to get their message out.
Tech Central Station (which received $95,000 in funding from ExxonMobil in 2003) is a web based hybrid of quasi-journalism and lobbying that helps ExxonMobil complete the circle of its disinformation campaign. The website is nominally “hosted” by James K. Glassman, a former journalist. But despite Glassman’s public face, Tech Central Station was published (until it was sold in September 2006) by a public relations firm called the DCI Group, which is a registered ExxonMobil lobbying firm A Tech Central Station disclaimer states that the online journal is proud of its corporate sponsors (including ExxonMobil) but that “the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily of any corporation or other organization.” In practice, the opposite is true. Although Tech Central Station’s content is dressed up as independent news articles, the DCI Group established the outfit to allow corporate clients and their surrogates to communicate directly to the public. Predictably, Tech Central Station contributors on the global warming issue are the familiar spokespeople from ExxonMobil-Although Tech Central Station’s content is dressed up as independent news articles, the DCI Group established the outfit to allow corporate clients and their surrogates to communicate directly to the public funded organizations, including Sallie Baliunas, Robert Balling, David Legates, Patrick Michaels, Willie Soon, George Taylor, and others.
It is also no surprise that the DCI Group’s own literature boasts that it specializes in what it calls “corporate grassroots campaigns” and “third party support” for corporate clients, both code words for the establishment and use of front organizations to disseminate a company’s message. The group’s managing partners, Tom Synhorst, Doug Goodyear, and Tim Hyde, each honed their skills in this area over the course of nearly a decade working for the tobacco firm R.J. Reynolds. Synhorst was a “field coordinator” for R.J. Reynolds, heading up work for the company on issues such as state, local, and workplace smoking bans. Goodyear worked for a PR firm called Walt Klein and Associates that helped set up a fake grassroots operations on behalf of R.J. Reynolds. And Hyde served as senior director of public issues at R.J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997, overseeing all of the company’s PR campaigns.
Confounding the matter further is ExxonMobil’s funding of established research institutions that seek to better understand science, policies, and technologies to address global warming. For example, ExxonMobil’s corporate citizen report for 2005 states:
Our climate research is designed to improve scientific understanding, assessing policy options, and achieve technological breakthroughs that reduce GHG [green house gas or global warming] emissions in both industrial and developing countries. Major projects have been supported at institutions including the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon, Charles River Associates, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, International Energy Agency Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford, The University of Texas, and Yale.
In its most significant effort of this kind, ExxonMobil has pledged $100 million over ten years to help underwrite Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. According to the program’s literature, the effort seeks to develop new energy technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower global warming emissions.”
The funding of academic research activity has provided the corporation legitimacy, while it actively funds ideological and advocacy organizations to conduct a disinformation campaign.
PROMOTING SCIENTIFIC SPOKESPEOPLE
Inextricably intertwined with ExxonMobil’s information laundering strategy of underwriting multiple organizations with overlapping staff is the corporation’s promotion of a small handful of scientific spokespeople. Scientists are trusted messengers among the American public. Scientists can and do play an important and legitimate role in educating the public and policymakers about issues that have a scientific component, including global warming. Early on, Exxon (and later ExxonMobil) sought to support groups that worked with the handful of scientists, such as Frederick Singer (a physicist), John Christy (an atmospheric scientist), and Patrick Michaels, who had persistently voiced doubt about human-caused global warming and its consequences, despite mounting evidence.
However, to pull off the disinformation campaign outlined in the 1998 GCST task force memo, ExxonMobil and its public relations partners recognized they would need to cultivate new scientific spokespeople to create a sense among the public that there was still serious debate among scientists. Toward that end, the memo suggested that the team “identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach. These will be individuals who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate. Rather, this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientists who already are vocal.
By the late 1990s, the scientific evidence on global warming was so strong that it became difficult to find scientists who disputed the reality of human-caused climate change. But ExxonMobil and its public relations partners persevered. The case of scientists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas is illustrative.
Soon and Baliunas are astrophysicists affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who study solar variation (i.e., changes in the amount of energy emitted by the Sun). Solar variation is one of the many factors influencing Earth’s climate, although according to the IPCC it is one of the minor influences over the last century. In the mid-1990s, ExxonMobil-funded groups had already begun to spotlight the work of Soon and Baliunas to raise doubts about the human causes of global warming. To accomplish this, Baliunas was initially commissioned to write several articles for the Marshall Institute positing that solar activity might be responsible for global warming. With the Baliunas articles, the Marshall Institute skillfully amplified an issue of minor scientific importance and implied that it was a major driver of recent warming trends.
In 2003, Baliunas and Soon were catapulted into a higher profile debate when they published a controversial review article about global warming in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Writing in the journal Climate Research, the two contrarians reviewed the work of a number of previous scientists and alleged that the twentieth century was not the warmest century of the past 1,000 years and that the climate had not changed significantly over that period. The Soon-Baliunas paper was trumpeted widely by organizations and individuals funded by ExxonMobil. It was also seized upon by like-minded politicians, most notably James Inhofe (R-OK), chair (until January 2007) of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who has repeatedly asserted that global warming is a hoax. Inhofe cited the Soon-Baliunas review as proof that natural variability, not human activity, was the “overwhelming factor” influencing climate change.
Less widely publicized was the fact that three of the editors of Climate Research—including incoming editor-in-chief Hans von Storch—resigned in protest over the Soon-Baliunas paper. Storch stated that he suspected that “some of the skeptics had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common” and described the manuscript as “flawed.” In addition, thirteen of the scientists cited in the paper published a rebuttal explaining that Soon and Baliunas had seriously misinterpreted their research.
The National Research Council recently examined the large body of published research on this topic and concluded that, “It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher in the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900.” The brouhaha in the scientific community had little public impact.
The echo chamber had already been set in motion reverberating among the mainstream media, while the correction became merely a footnote buried in the science sections of a few media outlets.
This controversy did not stop Soon and Baliunas from becoming central “new voices” in ExxonMobil’s effort to manufacture uncertainty about global warming. Both scientists quickly established relationships with a network of organizations underwritten by the corporation.
Over the past several years, for example, Baliunas has been formally affiliated with no fewer than nine organizations receiving funding from ExxonMobil. Among her other affiliations, she is now a board member and senior scientist at the Marshall Institute, a scientific advisor to the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, an advisory board member of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and a contributing scientist to the online forum Tech Central Station, all of which are underwritten by ExxonMobil Another notable case is that of Frederick Seitz, who has ties to both Big Tobacco and ExxonMobil. Seitz is the emeritus chair of the Marshall Institute. He is also a prominent solid state physicist who was president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) from 1962 to 1969.
In an example of the tobacco industry’s efforts to buy legitimacy, the cigarette company R.J. Reynolds hired Seitz in 1979. His role was to oversee a tobacco industry–sponsored medical research program in the 1970s and 1980s. “They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,” Seitz, who is now 95, admitted recently in an article in Vanity Fair, but he said he felt no compunction about dispensing the tobacco company’s money.
While working for R.J. Reynolds, Seitz oversaw the funding of tens of millions of dollars worth of research. Most of this research was legitimate. For instance, his team looked at the way stress, genetics, and lifestyle issues can contribute to disease. But the program Seitz oversaw served an important dual purpose for R.J. Reynolds. It allowed the company to tout the fact that it was funding health research (even if it specifically proscribed research on the health effects of smoking) and it helped generate a steady collection of ideas and hypotheses that provided “red herrings” the company could use to disingenuously suggest that factors other than tobacco might be causing smokers’ cancers and heart disease.
Aside from giving the tobacco companies’ disinformation campaign an aura of scientific credibility, Seitz is also notable because he has returned from retirement to play a prominent role as a global warming contrarian involved in organizations funded by ExxonMobil. Consider, for instance, one of Seitz’s most controversial efforts.
In 1998, he wrote and circulated a letter asking scientists to sign a petition from a virtually unheard-of group called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine calling upon the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. Seitz signed the letter identifying himself as a former NAS president. He also enclosed with his letter a report co-authored by a team including Soon and Baliunas asserting that carbon dioxide emissions pose no warming threat. The report was not peer reviewed. But it was formatted to look like an article from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a leading scientific journal.
The petition’s organizers publicly claimed that the effort had attracted the signatures of some 17,000 scientists. But it was soon discovered that the list contained few credentialed climate scientists. For example, the list was riddled with the
names of numerous fictional characters. Likewise, after investigating a random sample of the small number of signers who claimed to have a Ph.D. in a climate-related field, Scientific American estimated that approximately one percent of the
petition signatories might actually have a Ph.D. in a field related to climate science.
In a highly unusual response, NAS issued a statement disavowing Seitz’s petition and disassociating the academy from the PNAS-formatted paper. None of these facts, however, have stopped organizations, including those funded by ExxonMobil, from touting the petition as evidence of widespread disagreement over the issue of global warming. For instance, in the spring of 2006, the discredited petition surfaced again when it was cited in a letter to California legislators by a group calling itself “Doctors for Disaster Preparedness,” a project of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
SHIFTING THE FOCUS OF THE DEBATE
One prominent component of ExxonMobil’s disinformation campaign on global warming is the almost unanimous call for “sound science” by the organizations it funds..Like the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forests” program, which masks a plan to augment logging, the rallying call for “sound science” by ExxonMobil-funded organizations is a clever and manipulative cover. It shifts the focus of the debate away from ExxonMobil’s irresponsible behavior regarding global warming toward a positive concept of “sound science.” By keeping the discussion focused on refining scientific understanding, ExxonMobil helps delay action to reduce heat-trapping emissions from its company and products indefinitely. For example, like the company itself, ExxonMobil-funded organizations routinely contend, despite all the solid evidence to the contrary, that scientists don’t know enough about global warming to justify substantial reductions in heat-trapping emissions.
As ExxonMobil explains prominently on the company’s website:
While assessments such as those of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgment rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human actions.
Will be continuing…
