Newsweek exposé: Global Warming Is A Hoax*

*So say the folks funded by fossil-fuel lobby groups.

I've said it often enough, so it was great to read Dave Sag of Carbon Planet saying it:

Newsweek is running a fascinating history of coordinated climate change denial in a story The Truth About Denial.

It’s been the dirty secret of the dinosaur industries who see their immediate bottom line about to be hit by actions to mitigate against climate change that they know global warming is real, they know we humans have caused it, and they have been doing everything in their path to coverup those facts. But no amount of bullshit pseudo-documentaries, hack-science and well funded rhetoric can keep the basic, inconvenient truths contained. For those of us who care about the planet, our time is surely now. — DS, Carbon Planet

It's even more gratifying that the respected Newsweek is exposing the confected "hoax" of the fossil-fuel funded global warming denialist industry. The article by Sharon Begley is accurate, well researched and well written. It lays bare the mechanics behind a decades-long orchestrated, concerted attack on the public's understanding of the crystal-clear message coming out of the climate sciences.

The outcome is that we are still fiddling around the edges of mitigation while ExxonMobil — the largest patron of the denialist industry — continues making record profits. By now we should have rolled up our sleeves, got stuck into the problem, and be well down the road of serious progress. You see, climate change is racing to head us off at Tipping Point pass.

All the blame for the opportunity-cost lies at the feet of ExxonMobil, the think-tanks and lobby-groups they funded, and the media shills and blatantly scientifically illiterate opinion journalists who faithfully relayed the big lies of big coal and oil.


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IPCC's clarion call

Coming to an IPCC Report near you. :::[SMH: Window closing on planet's chances]

"Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt."

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due out tomorrow, and that is some of the wording just agreed upon between scientists and governments after last-minute objections from the US, China and Saudi Arabia over wording and graphics sparked an all night dispute.

I've been listening to the BBC coverage of the release. AGW's happening. And it's alarming. There is no other word. There is good observational data, now, to prove that the climate-models are accurately forecasting. Game over for sceptics, and game over non-renewable energy sources. Or it's game over for life as we know it. That's what they are telling us.

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Back to reeducation camp for global warming ex-skeptic

In September 22, 2006, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine published his Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore. Reason Foundation had been in receipt of $250,000 of ExxonMobil's money since 2000 - to promote a contrarian media view to the scientific consensus on global warming.

Earlier in the week, Bob Ward, the British Royal Society's senior manager for policy communication, had sent a letter to the oil giant ExxonMobil accusing it of funding groups that misinform the public about the reality of man-made global warming, asking it to cease and desist.

It's safe to say that Ward may count the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine and Reason Online as one of the 39 groups that he believes misleads the public on the issue of climate change. If that's the case, then at least some of the information that Ward says "misrepresents" climate change science may be past articles written by me. So the question is: Why did I do it? Did ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond hand me brown paper bags filled with stacks of unmarked bills in the back of taxis while whispering, "Ron, we're counting on your widely read and highly influential articles to help stave off the Green onslaught against our soaring profits"? Or was I a simple-minded dupe, passing along misinformation supplied to me during expensive lunches at the Palm by corrupt scientists who had been paid off by the oil giant? Or perhaps I am just generally skeptical of end-of-the-world scenarios and believe, as Carl Sagan famously did, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?

It's extraordinary that he didn't look at the extraordinary body of evidence that had been accumulating since before the first IPCC conference in 1988. Extraordinary he chose to base his skepticism on the discrepancy between ground temperatures, and atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites and by balloons. That's it.

Ronald Bailey's conversion was sudden. The day the scientific peer-review process established that satellites and weather balloons had not be measuring temperatures correctly, and that in fact the atmosphere is indeed experiencing upward trends in warming rates, as predicted by earlier climate models, he publicly recanted.

In August 2005, Science magazine published three papers that went a long way toward resolving the issue. One paper found that Christy and Spencer had failed to take proper account of satellite drift, which produced a spurious cooling trend to their dataset. Another found that the operation of weather balloons also tended to add spurious cooling to their data. When the corrections were made the satellite and weather balloon datasets were in better agreement with the surface thermometer datasets that showed higher warming trends. On the day that the studies were released I wrote a column for Reason in which I declared that my skepticism of man-made global warming was at an end. The column was titled, "We're All Global Warmers Now." The first line read: "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."

The Committee for Reeducation note that the conversion is not total, and recommends further rigorous attention in this matter.

In the column, I quote Christy saying, "The new warming trend is still well below ideas of dramatic or catastrophic warming."

[...]

I reviewed former vice-president Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth for Reason. I agreed that Gore has "won the climate debate" and that "on balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science" though I argued he exaggerates just how bad future global warming is likely to be.

We further note that he has tried to deny that he is nought but a 'corporate shill', employing the same scant logic that makes the Reason Magazine masthead a major misnomer, and which fuels the media 'debate' on the scientific consensus.

ExxonMobil has been a supporter of the Reason Foundation. Folks at the foundation confirmed when I called yesterday that the company has donated a little over $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contributions were $10,000 in 2003 and $20,000 this past January. The last contribution poses a possible conundrum for hard-line corporate conspiracy theorists because it arrived about five months after I declared, "We're All Global Warmers Now." I would suggest that ExxonMobil supports the Reason Foundation because my colleagues robustly defend the free enterprise system.

Er, ExxonMobil has given Reason Foundation $230,000 since 2000 to deny global warming, and then five months after the public conversion of Bailey, Reason's science correspondent for nearly eight years, they get another $20,000 in the post. And he uses this to deny he is a shill? There's a lesson for you in speed if you were the ship-jumping rat type.

Good Members of the Committee for The Global Warming Apocalypse Reeducation Unit of the One World Government, come on? You can bet your bottom carbon trading offset investments that, if Reason was so far off the money on the science and so slow on the evidence, their invoicing of ExxonMobil wouldn't be any quicker.

Our constitution allows us to accept conversions-in-full only. My recommendation to the Committee is for further reeducation - Ronald Bailey is to be subject to 500 hours of watching An Inconvenient Truth, and a further 25 hours of Al Gore's live PowerPoint presentations.

He'll have plenty of time to look at ALL that science that he got so wrong for so long. And to think about how much carbon dioxide was actually emitted into the atmosphere on his watch, and during his long career working for ExxonMobil funded think tanks. For penance he will write an insiders tell-all about big fossil-fuel's long and hard campaigning to sow public confusion about the global warming scientific consensus. Upon doing so, the Committee should determine his conversion as complete, and reset Ronald Bailey's status to good chap, and action all consequent privileges under the Single Government of the Global Carbon Economy.

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Cheney's money talks of an inconvenient truth

Dick Cheney is a scary guy to boldly express dissent to — no matter who your are.

If you are swarthy and have a beard, you run the risk of being rendered by the bloke's private army. Even if you are a CIA agent, you're not safe . A newly discovered hazard of the job — like you need more problems in that role — is that you risk being outed on his instruction for something you didn't do.

Like Valerie Plame was.

So if you were his investment funds manager you would pretty much tell him what he wants to hear, right?

Not, it seems, if your name is Jeremy Grantham, who is basically Cheney's money - talking - and the topic is global warming. :::[AOL News]

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham -- Cheney's own investment manager. "What were we thinking?' Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data," Grantham's philippic^* adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.

"Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change," he writes, "and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain."

Yet "there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures," he writes. "The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company)."

That's Exxon Mobil.

As for Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, who appears everywhere to question global warming, Grantham mocks him as "the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field."

And for those nonscientists who are still undecided about the issue, Grantham reminds them of an old logical principle known as Pascal's Paradox. It may be better known as the "what if we're wrong?" argument. If we act to stop global warming and we're wrong, well, we could waste some money. If we don't act, and we're wrong ... you get the picture.

As for the alleged economic costs of going "green," Grantham says that industrialized countries with better fuel efficiency have, on average, enjoyed faster economic growth over the past 50 years than the U.S.

Grantham says that other industrialized countries have far better energy productivity than the U.S. The GDP produced per unit of energy in Italy is 50% higher. Fifty percent. Japan: 60%.

And China "already has auto fuel efficiency standards well ahead of the U.S.!" he adds. You've probably heard about China's slow economic growth.

Grantham adds that past U.S. steps in this area, like sulfur dioxide caps adopted by the late President Gerald Ford, have done far more and cost far less than predicted. "Ingenuity sprung out of the woodwork when it was correctly motivated," he writes.

There is also a political and economic cost to our oil dependency, Grantham notes. Yet America could have eliminated its oil dependency on the Middle East years ago with just a "reasonable set of increased efficiencies." All it would take is 10% fewer vehicles, each driving 10% fewer miles and getting 50% more miles per gallon. Under that "sensible but still only moderately aggressive policy," he writes, "not one single barrel would have been needed from the Middle East." Not one.

I repeat: This is not some rainbow coalition. This is not even Al Gore. Grantham is the chairman of Boston-based fund management company Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo. He is British-born but has lived here since the early 1960s.

I love this bit: "What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined." Apoplexy anyone?

==

^*Global Warming Word Watch: Phi·lip·pic

n.

1. Any of the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon in the fourth century b.c.

2. Any of the orations of Cicero against Antony in 44 b.c.

3. philippic A verbal denunciation characterized by harsh, often insulting language; a tirade.

==

Other unflattering things I've said about Cheney

==

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ExxonMobil's $16 millon FUD campaign

FUD is an old sales technique widely used in the telecommunications and other sales oriented industries. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt and it is what a salesperson plants in the minds of their prospects in relation to his or her competitor, while trying not to appear to denigrate the competition. That's regarded by good salespeople, and good clients, as tacky.

To prevent the public from understanding the full implications of fossil-fuel greenhouse emissions, ExxonMobil outsources their FUD campaign to a network of think-tanks and opinionmakers. The objective is to discredit the science of global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientist has a tally of how much they have spent over the last few years: :::[Forbes]

ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in a coordinated effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted Wednesday.

The report by the science-based nonprofit advocacy group mirrors similar claims by Britain's leading scientific academy. Last September, The Royal Society wrote the oil company asking it to halt support for groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change."

ExxonMobil (nyse: XOM - news - people ) did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the scientific advocacy group's report.

What do you say?

ExxonMobil lists on its Web site nearly $133 million in 2005 contributions globally, including $6.8 million for "public information and policy research" distributed to more than 140 think-tanks, universities, foundations, associations and other groups. Some of those have publicly disputed the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

But in September, the company said in response to the Royal Society that it funded groups which research "significant policy issues and promote informed discussion on issues of direct relevance to the company." It said the groups do not speak for the company.

Which is why these think-tank linked journalists and the like feel free to denigrate the 'competition', that being the scientific reality, aka the truth. It is also why I avoid their petrol stations, which include Caltex and Mobil franchises in Australia.

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