If you haven’t read George Monbiot’s Heat yet, you need to check out this week’s Newsweek. In this week’s edition, the news periodical does an excellent job exposing the shameful, yet intricate workings of the global warming denial industry. Click here to read the article.
This is significant, because as far as I know, this is the most mainstream and widely circulated piece of literature to date breaking down the tactics of climate change naysayers.
The article does a good job naming names, connecting the dots, and following the money trail. Let’s hope this wakes up politicians and the general public, because we cannot afford to be paralyzed by pseudoscience while the world becomes increasingly destabilized by climate change.
Though I highly recommend reading this Newsweek piece in its entirety, regardless of how you feel about climate change, I’ve summarized some major tactics used by naysayers below, as mentioned in the article:
- Exxon Mobile, the world’s most profitable corporation, has been paying “scientists” $10,000 to write articles undercutting peer-reviewed climate change reports.
- The deniers have been employing similar tactics used by the tobacco industry, such as relying on the notion that there is too much “scientific uncertainty”; to do this, they regularly print white papers and “studies” (not empirical research, but critiques of others’ work).
- Former employers from the coal/oil industries landing high-ranking government jobs related to environmental action, largely resulting from connections with Washington conservatives who feel action taken to fight global warming will harm business (and thus, those lining their campaign pockets), have been avoiding action, and even editing the research and reports of top climate scientists to portray “scientific uncertainty”.
- Constantly changing their story; for example, first they claimed the “world is not warming”, then they claimed warming was occurring, but that it was natural instead of anthropogenic (caused by humans). Now, their most recent claim is that the world is warming, but the effects will be small and harmless.
- Their main goal is not to argue global warming is good, or even neutral, but to create doubt among politicians and the general public that it poses a serious threat to global stability. This, they hope, will keep us from achieving the consensus and support necessary to act.
- Making up “think tanks” and disguising them with names like “The Global Climate Coalition” and “Information Council on the Environment” (aka ICE - a not so subtle acronym).
- The use of lists and petitions that aim to portray climate science as divided; funny thing is these “petitions” are mostly signed by a motley crew of folks who’ve never done any real climate research.
Though the Newsweek piece does a solid job exposing the global warming denial industry, I still recommend Monbiot’s book, Heat. He does an even better, more comprehensive job articulating how the denial industry functions.
I am a regular reader of your article. And I am very impress with your blog upon Global Warming. Now I am also write a blog upon effects and causes of Global Warming. This blog is collection of news & reviews like the study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays. Some researchers had also suggested that the latter might influence global warming because the rays trigger cloud formation.
now lets talk about the infinitely more in money and funding going to scientists who support the theory that global warming is man made so ultimately governments can tax the bejesus out of citizens all in its holy name. The fact is that more and more scientists are leaving the bandwagon as new information is showing otherwise. Please wise up before going either way until you know the truth. I’m not saying it is or isn’t man made but to go either way without proper research would be shortchanging your education.
Course, Newsweek also published an article about the inevitability of Global cooling, and a possible new ice age back in 1975…..
google it….It’s good for a laugh….
Global cooling? Yeah, pretty silly. However, the recent article is MUCH more thorough, and it’s being written within a much different context.
This is the kind of thing the denial industry cooks up. As stated in the Newsweek piece (and countless other well-documented sources), the denial industry wins by sewing doubt and indecision among climate scientists to the public. Here’s a page that does a good job breaking down this contradiction, though it predates the most recent Newsweek piece: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/global-cooling-again/