Do You Accept the Science of Climate Change? [Excerpt]

Some reject global warming science thanks to a misinformation campaign funded by fossil-fuel companies

By William Hewitt

Image: Courtesy of William Hewitt

Editor's Note: Excerpted from A Newer World?Politics, Money, Technology, and What's Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis, by William F. Hewitt. With permission from the publisher, University of New Hampshire Press. Copyright ? William F. Hewitt, 2012. (University of New Hampshire Press is an imprint of University Press of New England, www.upne.com.)

A concerted, focused, and well-funded campaign of disinformation has been waged against climate change.

This attempt to discredit the science, to instill a sense of doubt about the conclusiveness and the extent of the agreement within the scientific community, is a story well told by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt. Oreskes looked at 928 ? 10 percent ? of all the papers published on climate change in peer-reviewed science journals over a ten-year period. She chose the 928 papers at random. Not one disputed the view that manmade greenhouse gases (GHGs) were causing a catastrophic environmental crisis.

Greenpeace, for one, has published well-documented reports on the funding for climate change denial by ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, among others. Journalists James Hoggan and Ross Gelbspan have also done considerable spadework in uncovering the campaigns mounted by fossil fuel special interests to discredit climate science. Hoggan writes, for instance, that "it's a story of deceit, of poisoning public judgment ? of an anti-democratic attack on our political structures and a strategic undermining of the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest."

Gelbspan says, "The reason most Americans don't know what is happening to the climate is that the oil and coal industries have spent millions of dollars to persuade them global warming isn't happening." Greenpeace notes that the ongoing "campaigns against climate science continue to receive funding from big oil and energy interests ? not just ExxonMobil, but a raft of other companies and foundations whose profits are driven by the products that cause global warming."

A prominent public relations consultant, Frank Luntz, wrote a memo in 2000 that was widely circulated among conservatives seeking to debunk climate science and blunt any public policy progress on the issue. "Voters believe there's no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

The problem lies in the fact that even though the misinformation and doubt promulgated by the denialists flies directly in the face of the unequivocal evidence produced by scientists over more than 30 years ? and wholly accepted within the scientific community ? the media has too often taken the misinformation at its face value. At best, the media has continuously opined that there is a "debate" in scientific circles. At worst, they have broadcast the most outrageous of the claims being touted.

As early as 1994, Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer saw the danger: "What they've done is try to take scientific understanding and put it on the same level with political opinion. After all, if scientific understanding is the same as political opinion, then everybody's opinion is equally valid. There are no facts. And if there are no facts, there is no extra validity to acting on environmental problems than not acting." (As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.")

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