Petroleum and Propaganda

Politicians and the Mainstream Media

The oil companies control rafts of state and federal politicians through the system of campaign contributions. This is hardly news, and Powell devotes little space to the hordes of Senators and Congressional Representatives with campaign contributions from the energy industry. The fundraising champion in the Senate is James Inhofe (R-OK), who has received more oil company money than any other Senator, raking in over $662,000 between 2000 and 2008. Over in the House, Congressman Joe Barton has taken over $1 million in oil and gas company money during his twenty-seven-year House career.

Ken Cuccinelli, Attorney General of Virginia, is a favorite of the Tea Party, which was shown to be a Republican front group by Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio.7 Cuccinelli issued a Civil Investigating Demand (CID) in 2010, demanding that the University of Virginia produce a wide range of documents relating to Michael Mann, a former professor at Virginia (and now at Penn State). Claiming to be determining whether or not Mann defrauded the taxpayers of Virginia by researching global warming, Cuccinelli demanded every document relating to Mann over the previous eleven years. To its credit, the University of Virginia rejected Cuccinelli’s demands and fought him. Cuccinelli lost in court on August 20, 2010, but his CID was dismissed without prejudice, meaning that he could file again. At the time of the original CID, three university committees had exonerated Mann, and three more committees exonerated him later. Cuccinelli attempted to continue his fishing expedition in August 2010 when he filed a new CID, but in March 2012 it was also dismissed, this time with prejudice.

Powell compares global-warming deniers to various other groups, including: the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic Church (the book cover depicts the trial of Galileo); Lysenko and his associates, who did a tremendous amount of damage to biological science in the Soviet Union; Creationists, who do not believe in Darwinian evolution; and AIDS denialists, who deny that HIV causes AIDS. In fact, “there is more evidence that HIV causes AIDS than there is for any other single human disease caused by an infectious agent, past or present,” according to Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus.

Powell also attributes some of the success of the deniers to a failure of the mass media. The mainstream media typically are limited to one of two “frames” of the issue:

The first is open support for climate change denial by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, etc. The second is “fake balance” from the more responsible mainstream media. The media loves controversy—at least if it can be kept within certain controlled limits. There must be two sides to every controversy. So climate change deniers, representing 3 percent of climate scientists (if that), are granted equal weight with the vast majority of climate scientists, representing 97 percent of climate scientists.8

In an Appendix, Powell lists thirty-three countries or regions whose scientific academies have accepted the basic findings of human-caused global warming, as well as sixty-seven professional societies. None of these scientific academies have denied the basic science of human-caused global warming. (Powell has excluded denier websites and front groups.)

The Tobacco Strategy: “Doubt Is Our Product”

http://monthlyreview.org/2012/05/01/petroleum-and-propaganda

Popularizers and Propagandists

Powell discusses and dismisses several non-scientist deniers, including former weatherman Anthony Watts, British journalist Christopher Monckton, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, and fictional thriller writer Michael Crichton. Powell also sketches a small number of contrarian scientists; in addition to Frederick Seitz, Sallie Baliunas, and Willie Soon, Powell discusses S. Fred Singer, Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen, and Tim Ball.

Singer, a physicist, is a “utility infielder” of contrarian science, with claimed expertise on second-hand smoke, the ozone hole, and global warming. His swell-sounding Science and Environmental Policy Program (SEPP) has only one employee—Fred Singer himself.

Freeman Dyson is a mathematical physicist at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. His mathematical abilities are impressive, but he knows very little about climate or climate science. Dyson is member of the Jasons, a group of scientists, mostly physicists, who advise the Pentagon. In the 1970s the Jasons did some computer modeling of climate, although nobody in the group had any background in climate science. Powell remarks, “If Dyson’s last brush with climate models was in the 1970’s, no wonder he scoffs at the models and derides those who use them” (69). Dyson advocates developing a “supertree” that can gobble carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground or convert it to useful liquid fuels. Selective breeding of plants goes back to Luther Burbank over a century ago, but there is no evidence that such a supertree is anything but a figment of Dyson’s imagination.

Richard Lindzen actually does have climate-related expertise. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, and holds an endowed chair in meteorology at MIT. His CV runs to 350 publications, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He helped to prepare the 1995 and 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Lindzen is convinced that the climate system somehow has negative feedbacks that tend to cancel out the effect of any external change. He proposed a specific model that he thought would produce negative feedback, the “adaptive iris” model. Unfortunately for Lindzen, when field measurements were made, they disproved his model instead of confirming it. The vast majority of climate scientists believe the feedbacks are positive, over the time scales relevant to humanity, decades to hundreds of thousands of years, with negative feedbacks (caused by weathering of rocks) operating on a longer time scale of millions of years or longer.5 He claims that the mainstream climate scientists have not proven global warming. This naturally raises the issue of how much proof is required. Lindzen has such an extremely high standard of proof that he believes that the link between cigarette smoking and cancer is unproven.

Lindzen has accused mainstream science of selling out for money, while claiming that skeptics of global warming have lost their grants. Actually, Lindzen himself has been awarded over $3.5 million since 1975 from the National Science Foundation alone.

Timothy Ball, a less well-known denier, is a former professor at the University of Winnipeg. Over the last decade he has given over 600 public talks on science and the environment, at the breakneck pace of over one talk every six days. Between 2002 and 2007 he wrote thirty-nine opinion pieces and thirty-two letters to the editor in twenty-four Canadian newspapers, a rate of one a month. Despite this rapid pace, he found time to write for the denier website Tech Central Station, and to appear in both the denier documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle and in a Fox News special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, hosted by Glenn Beck. Ball was associated with Friends of Science, a great-sounding name but in practice funded by oil and gas companies. Ball then left Friends of Science in order to establish the (even greater sounding) Natural Resources Stewardship Project. Two of its three directors were PR flacks for energy industry clients.

In 2006, Ball rashly initiated a battle that ended in defeat. In an opinion piece published in the Calgary Herald newspaper, he claimed both that he held Canada’s first Ph.D. in climatology, and that he was a professor of the subject at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight years. Ball also disparaged another Canadian professor, Dan Johnson, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge. Johnson wrote a letter to the Herald accusing Ball of inflating his (Ball’s) resume, and claiming that Ball “did not show any evidence of research regarding climate and atmosphere.” Ball sued everybody in sight.

In the ensuring legal battle, Ball confessed to inflating his resume, admitted that he had been a professor for only eight years (not twenty-eight), and acknowledged that his doctoral degree was in geography, not climatology. The Herald newspaper expressed confidence in Johnson’s letter, and wrote “The plaintiff (Ball) is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.” In June 2007, the time came to show up in court; with his reputation in ruins, Ball dropped his lawsuit (72).

Four years later, Ball appeared to have learned nothing from his defeat in 2007. He wrote an article in 2011 for the Canada Free Press (CFP), a conservative website, in which he attacked Professor Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Weaver sued. The CFP folded, issuing a groveling apology:

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.” We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified…. CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

The CFP removed Ball’s article from its website, and for good measure removed nearly all of the 200 other articles that the prolific Ball had written from the CFP website as well.

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