The video
http://blip.tv/slowtv/how-vested-interests-defeated-climate-science-robert-manne-6298484
Some 20 years ago, climate scientists arrived at the conclusion that
the vast acceleration in the emission of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution was causing the
temperature of the Earth to rise. Almost all agreed that we were facing a
genuine crisis. Some came to believe that we were facing a catastrophe
deeper than any other in the history of the human species. James Hansen
of NASA, perhaps the pre-eminent climate scientist in the world, argues
in Storms of My Grandchildren that if over the coming decades and
centuries we continue to exploit all the fossil fuels that have lain
under the surface of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years – all
the coal, oil, natural gas and tar sands that have been or are yet to be
discovered – then inevitably all the polar ice on Earth will melt,
raising the level of the oceans by 75 metres and turning the planet into
an alien, barren and unrecognisable place. He contends we have already
passed certain “tipping points”.
So far nations and the international ‘community’ have failed
conspicuously to rise to the challenge posed by these dangers. Since the
Rio Earth Conference of 1992, which initiated the search for an
international agreement, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 40% or
more. At Kyoto in 1997, a first, modest agreement was reached. It did
nothing to prevent the pace of emissions increasing. Since the failure
of the Copenhagen conference in 2009 to find a replacement for Kyoto,
there has been no prospect of any new international agreement. Nothing
was expected from the conference held at Rio in June on the 20th
anniversary of the initial international gathering. Nothing was
achieved. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker has captured perfectly the
world’s response so far to the warning issued by climate scientists 20
years ago: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically
advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that
is what we are now in the process of doing.”
As greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, as evidence of
global warming has continued to grow, as the unwillingness of the world
to act to curb emissions has become increasingly clear, a determination
not to notice the looming catastrophe has taken hold of large parts of
the population. At one level, this determination is psychological – the
incapacity of a society of consumers to accept the need to sacrifice
even a part of material prosperity to ensure the wellbeing of the Earth.
At another level, the determination is political – the willingness of
large numbers of people to listen to those who are telling them that the
group of experts upon whom they customarily rely, the relevant cadre of
trained and published scientists, have comprehensively got things
wrong.
For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to
answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is
threatening the future of the Earth. Thousands of climate scientists in a
variety of discrete disciplines have been exploring the issue for
decades. They have reached a consensual conclusion whose existence is
easily demonstrated. Every authoritative national scientific body in the
world supports the idea of human-caused global warming. So does one of
the most remarkable collaborative achievements in the history of science
– the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
in which the research findings of the world’s leading climate
scientists, as outlined in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals,
are periodically presented to and then accepted by the governments of
the world.
If a citizen was not convinced by this alone, three studies have been
conducted that reveal an overwhelming core consensus. In 2004, Naomi
Oreskes published in Science the result of her examination of the
abstracts of every article in the world’s leading scientific journals
published between 1993 and 2003 that was concerned with global climate
change. There were 928 articles. Not one challenged the core consensus.
In 2009, two scientists from the University of Chicago published in Eos
the result of a survey they conducted among a group they called “Earth
scientists”. They discovered that among those who called themselves
climate scientists and who had published recently in the field, 97.4%
agreed with the proposition that “human activity is a significant
contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”. And, in 2010,
the eminent climate scientist Stephen Schneider revealed in an article
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that 195 (97.5%)
of the 200 most published climate scientists were convinced by the
evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
Consensus does not imply unanimity. Nor does it suggest that climate
scientists are in agreement about the most difficult questions
concerning either the past or the future – their calculations of
temperature over the past centuries and millennia or their precise
predictions about the pace and the nature of the changes that will be
visited upon the Earth and its inhabitants as a consequence of the
ever-accelerating injection of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere. It should go without saying that the existence of a
consensus on the core issue of human-caused global warming does not
provide any answers to the diabolically difficult public policy
questions that arise for nations and the international community. What
is clear, however, is that a rational citizen has little alternative but
to accept the consensual core position of climate scientists.
Discussion of this point should long ago have ended. That it has not is
the most persuasive possible example of the feebleness of reason, the
futility of argument and the failure of politics.
There are three possible words to describe the political movement
that has sought to convince citizens to reject the core conclusion of
climate scientists: scepticism, contrarianism and denialism.
‘Scepticism’ suggests an open mind. The minds of those who dispute the
consensual core of climate science are closed. ‘Contrarianism’ is a term
commonly used, even by some of those who are best informed, like the
climate scientist Michael Mann. ‘Contrarian’ might be the right term for
the small minority among climate scientists who have not accepted the
consensual conclusion of their fellow scientists. The contrarian is a
loner, perhaps cranky, but also genuinely independent of mind. Most of
those who dispute the consensual conclusions of the climate scientists
are not mavericks or heretics but orthodox members of a tightly knit
group whose natural disposition is not to think for themselves. To
dispute the conclusion drawn by climate scientists involves for them
neither the open mind of the sceptic nor the cranky independence of the
contrarian but the determination – psychological or political or both –
to deny what those who know what they are talking about have to say.
They are denialists.
Political denialism is not a general political movement of the world
or even of the West. Recently, in Poles Apart: The International
Reporting of Climate Scepticism, James Painter outlined the results of a
study of the profile of climate change denial in the press of six
countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, India
and China – in two three-month blocks of time – early 2007, and late
2009 to early 2010. Painter selected a quality newspaper on the Left and
on the Right in five of the six countries studied. (China, of course,
has no right-wing press.) In the official Chinese press and in both the
right-leaning and left-leaning quality press in France, Brazil and India
there was almost no sign of climate change denial. It was, however, a
major element in the climate change journalism in both the US and the
UK. Significantly, the profile of climate change denial was much greater
both in the US and the UK in the later period. In addition, although
the coverage of climate change scepticism was reasonably evenly spread
between the right- and left-wing papers, the kind of coverage was very
different. In opinion pieces and editorials, overwhelmingly the voices
of climate change denial were uncontested in the right-leaning press and
contested or dismissed on the Left.
Painter’s survey and others like it show that, as a political
phenomenon, climate change denialism has grown greatly over the past two
or three years. It is predominantly a phenomenon of the Right. While
climate change denial as a psychological phenomenon occurs across the
West, as a high-profile political phenomenon it exists almost
exclusively in the English-speaking democracies. And although it has
spread to Canada, Australia and the UK, within the Anglosphere its place
of origin and heartland is the US.
*
The American climate change denialist movement was organised quite
rapidly in the late 1980s in response to two main developments. One was
James Hansen’s unambiguous and dramatic evidence of human-caused global
warming and what this meant for the future of the Earth, as delivered to
Congress in 1988. The second was the creation, in the same year and
under United Nations auspices, of the IPCC at the initiative of Bert
Bolin, the scientist who had been a prime mover in the identification
and solution of the cross-border problem of acid rain.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt is the most
important account of the movement’s political and intellectual origins.
They show that by the time the problem of global warming moved from a
concern of scientists to the centre stage of national and international
politics, a small group of sometimes highly accomplished right-wing
scientists existed inside a pro-Reagan scientific think tank, the George
C Marshall Institute. The most important were Frederick Seitz, S Fred
Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. By the late 1980s this
group had already been involved in a series of set-piece battles with
those they thought of as the anti-capitalist scientific Left – in
particular, the Union of Concerned Scientists – over a series of health,
strategic and environmental issues: tobacco; Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’
missile defence program and the ‘nuclear winter’ controversy; acid rain
and the thinning of the ozone layer. The Marshall Institute
intellectuals were Hayekian neoliberals who regarded arguments about the
need for government economic regulation to prevent harm to health and
environment as socialism by stealth. They were ideologically predisposed
to disregard any problem that mainstream scientists attributed to
market failure. They were also Cold Warriors who had once supported the
Vietnam War and the neoconservative hawkish policies of the early Reagan
administration. As the Cold War drew to its end in the late 1980s,
these intellectuals transferred their fears from Reds to Greens, that is
to say from communism to environmentalism. Their mindset morphed easily
from the Cold War to the culture war.
As is now well understood, the key insight of climate change denial
was the political potency of a technique pioneered in the struggle over
tobacco in which both Seitz and Singer had been deeply involved – the
manufacture of doubt. The principle was outlined in a now famous memo by
a public relations adviser to the tobacco industry in 1969: “Doubt is
our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of
fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” The logic here
was simple. To inhibit government regulation of tobacco or
chlorofluorocarbons or fossil fuels, the commercial interests involved
did not need to demonstrate that their product was safe. All they needed
to do was to create confusion and uncertainty in the public mind.
George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist, discovered documents of a
phoney grassroots movement, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition,
created in 1993 by the tobacco company Philip Morris. They showed that
the ASSC intended to counter claims about the dangers of passive smoking
by linking its propaganda with other instances of “junk science”, like
global warming. A decade later, in preparation for the 2002
Congressional elections, the tobacco strategy of manufacturing doubt was
explicitly linked to global warming in an infamous piece of political
advice offered to the Bush Republican Party by the spinmaster Frank
Luntz: “The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed. There is
still a window of opportunity to challenge the science … You need to
continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the
debate.” The tobacco strategy was likely to be particularly effective
when applied to global warming because the scope of the proposed actions
was so vast and the potential interference in the lifestyle of the
general public so real.
In all contemporary societies the authority and prestige of science
stands high. Of necessity, the struggle over global warming had
primarily to be fought on the battlefield of science. As virtually all
those with true expertise in the field of climate science were convinced
that human-caused global warming was happening and that its potential
for catastrophe was real, the climate change denialists had to construct
an alternative scientific community, or what Oreskes and Conway call a
“scientific Potemkin village”.
One method of building this village was to locate and then to heavily
promote an alternative cadre of scientific experts who could be
mobilised to create the necessary confusion and uncertainty. In the
early days of the denialist campaign, the fossil fuel industry worked
closely with a handful of climate change scientific mavericks – Richard
Lindzen, Robert Balling, Patrick Michaels, Sallie Baliunas and Willie
Soon. One or two were genuinely distinguished climate scientists, like
the fanatically anticommunist Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Others were second-raters in the field of climate science.
As journalist Ross Gelbspan revealed in his pioneering 1997 study of
climate change denial, The Heat Is On, Michaels and Balling received
hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal and oil corporations.
Greenpeace USA conducted detailed research into the funding that Soon,
of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had received since
2001 from fossil fuel corporations and conservative think tanks or
foundations for his denialist-friendly publications on solar influence
on climate change or on the resilience of the polar bear. The total came
to over $1 million. The high profile of this handful of scientists over
two decades has been critical to the success of the denialist movement.
As careful research has shown, they have testified to Congress as
frequently as the mainstream scientists. They have conjured the illusion
of a hotly contested and evenly divided scientific debate, or what one
scholar has called the “duelling scientists” false narrative.
This is not the only way the denialist Potemkin village has been
built. James Hoggan in Climate Cover-up shows just how industrious the
denialists have been in creating and promoting phoney scientist public
statements. In 1999, the Global Warming Petition Project, known as the
‘Oregon Petition’, was organised by an obscure chemist and
fundamentalist Christian, Arthur Robinson, and launched by Frederick
Seitz. Eventually it was signed by 30,000 “scientists”, the overwhelming
majority with an undergraduate degree unconnected to climate science.
In 1995, the Leipzig Declaration was launched, promoted by S Fred
Singer. Many of the supposed signatories had never heard of it. Many
others had no climate science expertise. In 2007, the Heartland
Institute, a right-wing think tank, published a list of ‘500 Scientists
Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares’. Many
scientists named on the list were furious, even “horrified”. Sometimes
the efforts to mislead were astonishingly crude. One article, co-written
by Robinson’s son, Noah, and Willie Soon, was printed in the exact
layout of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In answer
to the IPCC, the denialists created their own ersatz alternative, the
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
Yet there have been more serious attempts to sow confusion. One of
the most powerful arguments of mainstream scientists is the near-total
absence of peer-reviewed denialist publications. An obvious denier
response was to characterise the peer-review process as corrupt and
dominated by cronyism. Another was to create friendly peer-reviewed
journals, like Energy and Environment. Yet another was to infiltrate
first-rank journals. A New Zealander, Chris de Freitas, was appointed as
an editor of the prestigious journal, Climate Research. Odd articles
began appearing. Eventually one by Baliunas and Soon was published in
2003. It attempted to reinstate one of the by now standard myths of the
denialist movement, namely that temperatures were higher during the
“Medieval Warm Period” than in the past 20 years. The science was
shoddy. Four reviewers had independently argued against its publication.
The newly appointed editor-in-chief, Hans von Storch, was denied the
right by the German publisher to print an editorial repudiating the
article and resigned. Nonetheless the publication had done its work. It
entered denialist cyberspace. Philip Cooney, a White House employee and
former fossil fuel industry lobbyist, even recommended it to Vice
President Dick Cheney as the knockdown refutation of the paper of which
Mann was lead author, which was illustrated with the famous ‘hockey
stick’ graph that calculated the world’s temperatures over the past
thousand years.
As important as the building of the scientific Potemkin village has
been the effort to undermine the credibility of leading mainstream
climate scientists through protracted campaigns of character
assassination, which Mann has called the ‘Serengeti strategy’ – hunting
down supposedly vulnerable targets one by one. An early and infamous
instance was the campaign launched in 1995 by the Marshall Institute
Cold Warriors, Singer and Seitz, against Ben Santer, a distinguished
young climate scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Santer was a lead author for one of the chapters of the IPCC’s second
assessment report in 1995. Essentially, because he had summarised
studies that had been completed but not yet published and had edited his
chapter under instruction to align it with the style of the others – he
was asked to remove a concluding summary because in other chapters
summaries were found only in the introductions – he was accused by
Singer in the pages of Science and by Seitz in the Wall Street Journal
of removing material and of scientific fraud. Seitz wrote that in “more
than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community … I have
never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review
process”. Singer and Seitz were supported by the most important
denialist lobby of the 1990s, the Global Climate Coalition, which
published a report accusing Santer of “institutionalized scientific
cleansing”. Seitz and Singer had brought to climate science the
unmistakable mental and rhetorical habits of the Cold War, where
opponents were enemies and differences were deliberate deceptions.
Santer never really recovered from their attacks.
This was merely a beginning. As he explains in his poised and
well-tempered Science as a Contact Sport, Stephen Schneider was a target
throughout his career. In 1971, he had speculated about the possibility
of global cooling. Forty years later, the know-nothing denialist and
conservative columnist George Will, dismissed him as the
“environmentalist for all temperatures”. More damaging was the
persistence in cyberspace of a calumny based on the distortion of a
comment Schneider had made in 1989 in an interview for the magazine
Discover. He had spoken about the tension between his obligation as a
scientist towards nuanced truthfulness and his responsibility as a human
being to fight for the future wellbeing of the Earth. One passage of
the interview read: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is
between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
A journalist published the first sentence and omitted the second. For
20 years, on this basis, Schneider was defamed on denialist websites as a
self-confessed liar.
He got off lightly. The attacks on Hansen have been remorseless and
ruthless, especially once he became politically active. Michael Mann
chronicles the process in fine detail in The Hockey Stick and the
Climate Wars. After his ‘hockey stick’ graph morphed from an
illustration in a scientific paper to an icon of the climate change
campaign, Mann became the sworn enemy of the denialists, the subject of a
politically inspired Congressional investigation, never-ending vicious
lampooning, public heckling, constant email abuse and a plausible death
threat. What was interesting in all this was the steady rise in the
degree of the verbal violence. Santer was merely accused of deception
and fraud. After the ‘Climategate’ scandal broke in November 2009 – the
leaking of over a thousand emails between climate change scientists at
the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – Marc Morano,
the denialist operative and the political friend of our own former
Senator Nick Minchin, argued that the climate scientists “deserve to be
publicly flogged”. Even he was outdone by an ultra-right wing blogger,
the late Andrew Breitbart, who called for “capital punishment for Dr
James Hansen. Climategate is high treason.”
Naturally in a matter where so much was at stake for the fossil fuel
industry, if doubt was to be manufactured and inaction engineered,
serious money would be needed. The money was found both directly through
fossil fuel interests and indirectly through wealthy conservative
foundations whose involvement was as much a matter of libertarian
anti-regulatory ideology as it was of commercial considerations. During
the 1990s, probably the most important sources of denialist funds were
American coal and electricity corporations like the Western Fuels
Association, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association or the Global
Climate Coalition, an alliance of 50 or so corporations and trade
associations. In the late 1990s, this alliance fell apart, beginning
with the defection of BP. The largest source of funds for the denial
campaign was now probably ExxonMobil. By 2006, its support for climate
change denial had become so notorious that it was chastised in a letter
from the head of Great Britain’s Royal Society, which was leaked to the
press. Although in 2008 ExxonMobil announced that its funding of denial
had ended, evidence soon emerged that this was not entirely true.
Nonetheless, in recent years the most important sources of funds for
climate change denial have most likely not been fossil fuel corporations
but vastly wealthy and profoundly conservative foundations like Scaife
and John M Olin.
The earliest study of climate change denial – Gelbspan’s The Heat Is
On – offers a fairly simple and rather characteristic materialist
explanation of the funding: “A major battle is underway: In order to
survive economically, the biggest enterprise in human history – the
worldwide oil and coal industry – is at war with the ability of the
planet to sustain civilization.” Such an interpretation probably
underestimates the importance of ideology – the anti-regulatory,
anti-state market fundamentalism that shapes the funding agendas of the
conservative foundations.
In recent years, massive financial contributions to climate change
denialism and many other conservative causes have been made by the three
foundations managed by Charles and David Koch. In the case of the
Kochs, there is no need to choose between the material and ideological
explanations of the millions they have injected into the cause of
climate change denial. On the one hand, their vast fortune comes
originally and still predominantly from oil and gas. On the other, as
the sons of a right-wing oil man who did business in the Soviet Union,
whose anticommunism was grounded in his firsthand observation of the
terror under Stalin, and who became, following his return to the US, a
founding member of the John Birch Society, they have remained faithful
to their father’s heritage: deeply ideological anti-socialist,
anti-regulation, anti-statist, low-tax libertarians.
The corporations and the conservative foundations sought to conceal
their direct involvement by funding anti–global warming organisations,
such as the dozens of market fundamentalist think tanks that became a
vital dimension of the American political landscape during the Reagan
era and beyond, and are at the centre of the climate change denial
campaign. A study called ‘Defeating Kyoto’, by Aaron McCright and Riley
Dunlap, showed that in the build-up to the 1997 Kyoto conference, these
think tanks – Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland
Institute and, of course, the Marshall Institute – produced a large
amount of denialist material on their websites, described with unusual
wit as “consciousness lowering activity” and “the social construction of
non-problematicity”. Another study, ‘The Organization of Denial’, whose
lead author was Peter Jacques, looked at all the anti-environmental
books published in the US between 1972 and 2005. Of the 141 such books,
132 were connected to one of the right-wing think tanks. These books
were published at an ever-accelerating pace – six in the 1970s, 14 in
the 1980s, 72 in the 1990s, and 49 between 2000 and 2005. The
conservative think tanks also provided fellowships for many denialist
scientists and helped arrange their access to the media.
Even more powerful than the right-wing think tanks were critically
placed members of Congress who could assist in the prosecution of the
anti–global warming struggle. Three names stand out: Dana Rohrabacher
and Joe Barton, both members of the House of Representatives, and
Senator James Inhofe. Inhofe’s greatest claim to fame is his description
of climate change science as possibly the greatest hoax ever
perpetrated on the American people. After Climategate broke, in
imitation of an earlier senator, Joe McCarthy, Inhofe called for the
criminal prosecution of 17 climate scientists. Rohrabacher was chairman
of the committee on Energy and Environment following the resurgence of
the Republican Party in the 1994 Congressional elections. As George E
Brown, the ranking minority member of the committee, demonstrated in a
prophetic article, ‘Environmental Science Under Siege’, at the 1995
hearings of this committee it was Rohrabacher who was primarily
responsible for the partisan politicisation of climate science and for
the injection of the voices of denialist scientists into the centre of
American national debate.
A decade later the situation had further deteriorated. At a time when
Republican environmentalists were fast becoming a ‘vanishing tribe’,
the chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, Joe Barton,
summoned Michael Mann to appear before Congress in 2006 and then acted
as if he had summoned not a climate scientist but a criminal
conspirator. Barton demanded detailed records covering every aspect of
Mann’s scientific career – financial support, data archives, computer
codes, evidence of his attempts to replicate research. He then
commissioned an inquiry into Mann’s science by a politically friendly
statistician, Edward Wegman.
Climate science was by now one of the most fiercely contested fronts
in the increasingly bitter American culture wars. As in all such
battles, the role of the media would prove critical. In ‘Balance as
Bias’, a 2004 study that became famous because of its appearance in Al
Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, Maxwell and Jules Boykoff showed
that by adhering to the journalistic convention of balance, between 1988
and 2002 the American prestige press had unintentionally aided the
denialist cause. They had provided their readers with a misleading
impression of a more or less equal divide between the overwhelming
majority of climate scientists who were convinced that human-caused
climate change was occurring and the handful of mavericks who were not.
Maxwell Boykoff replicated the study later in the decade. He found that
by 2005 and 2006, the prestige press, as opposed to the tabloid press,
had replaced its earlier “balanced” coverage with accurate reports of
the state of the science (though he had missed the drift towards
denialism of the Wall Street Journal via its opinion pieces and
editorials). However, when he surveyed American television, he found
that denialist voices were common. With the ever-expanding influence of
the Rupert Murdoch–Roger Ailes innovation, the 24/7 conservative
populist propaganda cable channel, Fox News, they would become
increasingly so.
More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most effective
denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the
internet. A number of influential websites, like Watts Up With That?,
Climate Skeptic and Climate Depot, were established. One of this online
network’s early victims was Michael Mann. For this reason, he developed
an excellent understanding of how the denialist disinformation
distribution system operated. In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
he analyses in some detail the attempted debunking of the paleoscientist
Keith Briffa’s Yamal tree-ring analysis by one of the most remorseless
denialists, the retired Canadian mining executive Stephen McIntyre:
First, bloggers manufacture unfounded criticisms and accusations.
Then their close allies help spread them … Ross McKitrick writes an
op-ed piece in the right-wing National Post more or less accusing Briffa
of fraud … Individuals such as Marc Morano, Anthony Watts … UK
Telegraph blogger James Delingpole … spread the allegations through the
Internet echo chamber. That is all the justification that apparently is
needed for commentators such as Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun to
eventually propel the unfounded accusations onto the pages of widely
read newspapers.
By the process Mann describes, a confected controversy of utter
obscurity about ancient tree rings was presented within hours in living
rooms on the other side of the world as knockdown proof that all of
climate change science was a fraud.
Through the denialist websites a simple, endlessly repeated standard
narrative had by now taken shape. Climate scientists, who were called
“warmists”, were involved in a sinister conspiracy. They were
deliberately conjuring an environmental panic that they knew was
mendacious, and were lining their pockets with research grants at
taxpayers’ expense. In addition, on the more extreme edges of the
denialist movement, people like Marc Morano and Lord Monckton argued
that climate scientists were engaged in an international conspiracy to
destroy capitalism and to impose socialism and world government upon the
unsuspecting masses. On some websites the Jewish ethnicity of some
climate scientists was duly noted.
By now an ugly and altogether unrestrained language appeared on
websites and in comments responding to articles that criticised
denialists or merely accepted the conclusions of the climate scientists.
This verbal violence is to the personal computer what road rage is to
the motor car. No one knows how much is spontaneous and how much is
somehow organised.
What is known is the demographic profile of the main contributors. A
fascinating academic study of the American Gallup poll over ten years
called ‘Cool Dudes’, once more by McCright and Dunlap, showed that
ageing conservative white males are many times more likely than any
other segment of the population to be denialists. The denialism has
nothing to do with lack of education or ignorance. The more such people
think they know about climate change the more convinced they are that
the orthodox science is a fraud. To judge by the flood of vitriol that
inevitably follows any online defence of climate science or criticism of
the denialists, a goodly part of this group is very angry indeed. They
seem to dislike being told that industrial capitalism is threatening the
wellbeing of the planet and – to choose my words deliberately – that
man’s ambition to achieve mastery over the Earth has spiralled out of
control.
The aim of the verbal violence is clearly intimidatory. Morano – the
inspirer of the ‘swift boat’ advertisements that converted presidential
candidate John Kerry from Vietnam hero to coward – by now routinely
published the email addresses of climate scientists on his website,
Climate Depot. By the time of Climategate, most had become accustomed to
frequent deranged abuse and occasional death threats.
*
As late as 2009, most writers on the politics of climate change were
convinced that the denialist movement would fail. In 2005, Ross Gelbspan
told James Hoggan “the denial campaign was kaput”. In 2006, George
Monbiot wrote in Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning: “After years
of obfuscation, denial and lies about climate change, all but the most
hardened recidivists in the US government are re-branding themselves as
friends of the earth.” In 2008, Gwynne Dyer argued in Climate Wars “the
denial industry is in full retreat”. Shortly after, in Merchants of
Doubt, Oreskes and Conway concluded: “Until recently the mass media
presented global warming as a raging debate … Maybe now the tide is
turning.” Mann tells us that by 2009, even among the climate scientists,
a “troubling complacency” could be observed; many believed that “the
climate wars had been won”.
This turned out to be a mistake. Towards the end of 2009, two
principal events occurred. The first had nothing to do with the
denialists – the abject failure of the Copenhagen conference, where
rational hope that the Kyoto Treaty would be replaced by some more
effective international agreement died. The second was all their work.
By that time, a new breed of denialists, most importantly Stephen
McIntyre, had been pursuing several leading climate scientists
remorselessly, searching for methodological or empirical mistakes in
their work and demanding from them, frequently with a blizzard of
Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, the raw data from which their
conclusions had been drawn and even the computer codes they had devised.
As a result, a small number of minor errors were unearthed – in Michael
Mann’s statistical work, for example, or in the Chinese weather station
data that had been used in a seminal study of the urban heat island
effect. As soon as a real or supposed error was discovered, an article
was published in a journal as prestigious as could be found. And as soon
as it was published, the error’s existence became known to the world
through the denialist echo chamber. The political logic was captured
perfectly by Johann Hari in the The Nation: “The climate scientists have
to be right 100% of the time, or their 0.01% error [is used to show]
they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01% of
the time for their narrative … to be reinforced by the media.”
This strategy was highly effective. For the climate scientists,
pursuit by McIntyre was probably a greater source of frustration and
anxiety than Morano’s vile abuse or even Joe Barton’s attempted
Congressional inquisitions. One of those pursued by McIntyre was Phil
Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit. On the eve of the
Copenhagen conference more than a thousand private emails to and from
climate science colleagues were somehow acquired and published on
denialist websites. This coup immediately made its way to the front
pages of the newspapers and the television news in countries where the
long denialist campaign had already raised questions in the public mind
about the reliability of climate science. The actions of the denialists
had been very carefully planned. They had already found damaging
sentences in the emails – like the one concerning the need to “hide the
decline” in temperature, or the one which said, “The fact is that we
can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty
that we can’t” – whose meaning could be twisted to suggest the
fraudulence of climate science. Some of the emails revealed the intense
frustration of the scientists. One email suggested that if peer-reviewed
journals published denialists, the status of those journals should be
reconsidered. In another, anxiety about McIntyre-style FOI harassment
led to Phil Jones’s foolish suggestion that certain emails might need to
be deleted.
Many journalists accepted the language that denialists had used as
their frame – Climategate, the “smoking gun”, the “final nail in the
coffin”. Even the best informed climate change journalists – like Andrew
Revkin of the New York Times and Fred Pearce of the Guardian – treated
the accusations of the Climategate conspirators with a far greater
seriousness than they deserved. George Monbiot even called for Phil
Jones’s resignation. Months later, when the political damage was already
done, Jones was exonerated by three separate enquiries (Monbiot duly
published a retraction: “It was unfair to call for his resignation”). In
a culture war of this kind, where the enemy is so ruthless and the
stakes are so high, ill-judged overscrupulousness by decent people
anxious to appear fair can do real harm.
By now the denialists were on a roll. A serious error was discovered
in the most recent IPCC assessment – a claim that the Himalayan glaciers
might melt by 2035. A few essentially trivial ones followed.
‘Glaciergate’ was born. Just as a few email comments had been used to
discredit all climate scientists in Climategate, so was one foolish
error used to discredit the entire work of the IPCC in Glaciergate.
It was obvious that climate change denialism had influenced Americans
more than elsewhere. Yet it was only after the combination of
Copenhagen and Climategate that the denialists’ political victory in the
US became clear. According to Gallup’s annual opinion polls on global
warming, in 2008, 35% of Americans thought the media was exaggerating
the threat from global warming. By 2010, the number had risen to 48%. In
2008, 58% believed that global warming was caused by human beings while
38% attributed it to nature. By 2010, 50% blamed human activity and 46%
blamed nature. A 20-point difference had been reduced to four. It had
taken 20 years of work, but the triumph of doubt over reason had been
secured.
Global warming had never been a major political priority of the
American people but the issue now seemed to drop off the map. In the
year to 2010, according to one survey, climate change coverage on the
networks’ Sunday shows fell by 70%. An even more remarkable achievement
of the denialist campaign was transformation of climate change in the
American public mind from a question of science to one of ideology. In
the 1990s, climate change disagreements between Democrats and
Republicans were modest. By 2010, there was a 30–40% gap between
Democrats and Republicans and between self-identified liberals and
conservatives on all the fundamental global-warming questions. Most
extreme were Tea Party supporters: half say that global warming is
naturally caused, and one fifth that it is not happening at all.
Yet there is more to this question than the movement of public
opinion. Following the 2010 Congressional election it became clear that
the Republicans had become the first major political party in the
Western world to be wholly captured by climate change denialism. In
April 2011, a bill was introduced into the House of Representatives to
overturn the findings of the Environmental Protection Authority about
the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. It received unanimous
Republican support. A Democrat amendment supporting the science received
just one vote from a Republican. In 2008, the Republican presidential
candidate, John McCain, had been almost as fervent about the danger of
climate change as Barack Obama. In the 2012 contest for the Republican
candidacy, every contender was and indeed had to be a climate change
denier. A once nearly bipartisan issue had by now been transformed into
contested territory in the increasingly bitter American culture war
being fought between the political parties.
This destroyed all possibility of American participation in the
international struggle against global warming. In 2008, Obama pledged
that he would lead the world struggle to combat climate change. The
words ‘climate change’ now rarely pass his lips. As Michael Mann points
out, in 2000 Bill Clinton based his State of the Union on the solidity
of the consensual core of climate science; in his 2010 State of the
Union, Obama argued: “I know that there are those who disagree … But
even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy
efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.” A
once idealistic President had been neutralised by the bloody-minded
ideological intransigence of the Republican Party and the denialism and
indifference pervading the political culture. If Obama had honoured his
promise to lead the world in the struggle against global warming the
chance of serious progress would still have been minimal, but with
America’s withdrawal it is certain in the near term at least that
nothing serious can be achieved.
In June 2011, a reporter from the New York Times attended the annual
conference in Washington at what was then the most important denialist
organisation in the United States, the Heartland Institute. It had about
it, she said, “the air of a victory lap”. The jubilation was warranted.
The long war the denialist movement had fought against science and
against reason, in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, had
indeed achieved a famous victory. This is a victory that subsequent
generations cursing ours may look upon as perhaps the darkest in the
history of humankind.
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