Alan Liefting
2005-04-18 07:51:25 UTC
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html
WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd
in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have
seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular
author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his
new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting
of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the
Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and
undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist
page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather
disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change.
However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an
expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush
Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and
former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for
conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.”
The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”
Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9
inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He
describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day
did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the
last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global
warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by
what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental
issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.”
Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature
change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted
by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise.
Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a
disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a
counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading
as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed.
The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject
what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for
conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair
of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming
“a hoax.”
This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market,
and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there’s another factor at
play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and
ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by
ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied
some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to
undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or
have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists
who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes
quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website
providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received
$95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even
religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations
received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for
which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless
otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice
chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000
in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center
for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received
another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center’s executive
director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying,
“Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.”
(By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted
a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)
During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton
drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi
eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton
asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment
that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize
science. The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening
attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British
House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David
King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and
international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
(CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting
in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired
counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow.
Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free
Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and
a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’”
Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style
emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is
entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”).
Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in
helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide
research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues,
indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote
responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001
essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among
scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and
politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”
THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think
tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than merely
fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But then, in
1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business
association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in
the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol
memorably counseled that “corporate philanthropy should not be, and
cannot be, disinterested,” but should serve as a means “to shape or
reshape the climate of public opinion.”
Kristol’s advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public
policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In
its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups that
are “dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy problems.”
What the company doesn’t say is that beyond merely challenging the Kyoto
Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act on economic
grounds, many of these groups explicitly dispute the science of climate
change. Generally eschewing peer-reviewed journals, these groups make
their challenges in far less stringent arenas, such as the media and
public forums.
Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that “ExxonMobil has
been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do
multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers,
believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains
inconclusive and that studies must continue.” She also hastens to point
out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research programs—for
example, the company plans to donate $100 million to Stanford
University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds the
hallowed National Academy of Sciences.
Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those
who debunk global warming. “Many corporations have funded, you know,
dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that
there was a bigger one than Exxon,” explains Ebell of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the
government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the
impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher
Horner—whom you’ll recall from Crichton’s audience—was the lead attorney
in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI.
In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for “legal
activities.”
Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He’s proud of
ExxonMobil’s funding and wishes “we could attract more from other
companies.” He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general
project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but
admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the
topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is “adamantly
opposed” to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that “we are only
working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding.”
EXXONMOBIL’S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying
expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the
Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out
of the company’s net earnings—$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless,
“ideas lobbying” can have a powerful public policy effect.
Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work
of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four
years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an
intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study
warned that the Arctic is warming “at almost twice the rate as that of
the rest of the world,” and that early impacts of climate change, such
as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and “will
drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals,
and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.” Senator John
McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he called for a
Senate hearing.
Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to
marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead.
“Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice,” blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven
Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000
from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two
days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column.
Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming
concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from
ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the
Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s
home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents.
ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action
Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of
the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy
publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social
responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for
comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is
“affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive
funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly
from Exxon.”
Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a
purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept.
Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page,
fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document “pretty much
debunks itself” because high Arctic temperatures “around 1940” suggest
that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural
variability. “In order to take that position,” counters Harvard
biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report,
“you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that
reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle.”
Nevertheless, Milloy’s charges were quickly echoed by other groups.
TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11
“climate experts,” who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at
all unusual in comparison to “natural variability in centuries past.”
Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000)
issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on
“unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance
to reality and how the future is likely to evolve.” In response, McCain
said, “General Marshall was a great American. I think he might be very
embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this disgraceful
fashion.”
The day of McCain’s hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put
out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if
they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively
reviewed Arctic report: “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite
its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out numerous
flaws and distortions.” The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute ($60,000
from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic warming
report “an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the
anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about
the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list
of scary projections.” In the same release, the Fraser Institute
declared that “2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history.”
A month later the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization
would pronounce 2004 to be “the fourth warmest year in the temperature
record since 1861.”
Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Trust, likens ExxonMobil’s strategy to
that of “a football quarterback who doesn’t want to throw to one
receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of different
receivers.” In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber offense had the
effect of creating an appearance of scientific controversy. Senator
Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and gas companies,
including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection campaign—prominently cited
the Marshall Institute’s work in his own critique of the latest science.
TO BE SURE, that science wasn’t always as strong as it is today. And
until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels
industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined
ExxonMobil in challenging it.
The concept of global warming didn’t enter the public consciousness
until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA
climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with “99
percent confidence” that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably
caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in
Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels, industry fought back.
In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National
Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to
oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later
ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum
Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond has
twice served as chairman. “They were a strong player in the Global
Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy,” says
former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.
Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and
mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate
science and attack the mathematical models used to project future
climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for
action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than
man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists, how
ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group focused
its energies on making economic arguments rather than challenging science.
Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an
international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the
terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United
Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific
body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to
evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In
the IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, the science
remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC’s second report,
completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping
the climate, humankind’s distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with
the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus
had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability,
human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up
global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4
degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one
that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science
Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.
Even some leading corporations that had previously supported
“skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and
British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford,
General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate
Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.
Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American
Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained
recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining
a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific
views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key
audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved
when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional
wisdom.’” It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and
Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed:
“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the
‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also
the means of establishing a controversy.”
Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of
this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no
evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved
have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from
ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive
director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan,
as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants
included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, then
with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was never
implemented because “the envisioned funding never got close to being
realized.”
Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently
retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during George
W. Bush’s first term. Less than a month after Bush took office, Randol
sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert Watson, a
leading atmospheric scientist, as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” whose
real objective was to “get media coverage for his views.” (When the
memo’s existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious position that
Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor anyone else at the
company wrote it.) “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the
U.S.?” the memo asked. It went on to single out other Clinton
administration climate experts, asking whether they had been “removed
from their positions of influence.”
It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached to
the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked
Watson’s reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.
PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil’s support of the think
tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its close ties
to the Bush administration (which cited “incomplete” science as
justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it’s hard to see why
the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover. In 1998, Dick
Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the Clinton
administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than three weeks
after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with ExxonMobil CEO Lee
Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the corporation also met with
Cheney’s notorious energy task force.
ExxonMobil’s connections to the current administration go much deeper,
filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of policymaking.
For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol recommended that Harlan
Watson, a Republican staffer with the House Committee on Science, help
the United States’ diplomatic efforts regarding climate change. Watson
is now the State Department’s “senior climate negotiator.” Similarly,
the Bush administration appointed former American Petroleum Institute
attorney Philip Cooney—who headed the institute’s “climate team” and
opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief of staff of the White House Council
on Environmental Quality. In June 2003 the New York Times reported that
the CEQ had watered down an Environmental Protection Agency report’s
discussion of climate change, leading EPA scientists to charge that the
document “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.”
Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the
deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department
of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s
Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm
Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her
sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global
affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently
headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto
Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that
we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of
warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”
Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula
Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the
AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of
greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as
are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50
or 100 years in the future is difficult.”
Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as
little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001,
within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with
ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For
her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking
points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected
Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that
Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just
days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed
that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with
pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of
California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers on
global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was unable to
find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans
are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to add, that
doesn’t mean no such studies exist. But given the size of her sample,
about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she thinks it’s
safe to assume that the number is “vanishingly small.”
What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an
obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their
scientific significance. A case study is the “controversy” over the work
of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing upon
the work of several independent teams of scientists, including Mann and
his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001
report asserted that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is
likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000
years.” This statement was followed by a graph, based on one of the Mann
group’s studies, showing relatively modest temperature variations over
the past thousand years and a dramatic spike upward in the 20th century.
Due to its appearance, this famous graph has been dubbed the “hockey stick.”
During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the “hockey
stick,” calling it “sloppy work.” He’s hardly the first to have done so.
A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis, much
of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent congressional
briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator Inhofe described
Mann’s work as the “primary sci- entific data” on which the IPCC’s 2001
conclusions were based. That is simply incorrect. Mann points out that
he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph—other
teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past
temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that
served as the basis for the IPCC’s statement on the temperature record
are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that
humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole
independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.
Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack
Mann’s work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming
concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon
and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Both have been “senior scientists” with the Marshall Institute. Soon
serves as “science director” to TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct
scholar with Frontiers of Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser
Institute’s pamphlet “Global Warming: A Guide to the Science.” Baliunas,
meanwhile, is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentral, and is on science
advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the
Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from
ExxonMobil), and has given speeches on climate science before the AEI
and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would
provide comment for this article.)
In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the
American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate
Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new
research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the
warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.”
They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing
presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around. Another
version of the paper was quickly published with three additional
authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime
skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil
connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center
in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar
at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got
$205,000 between 2000 and 2003).
Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver
the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted
half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to
testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the
editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper
originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review
process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von
Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science
skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some
editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise
common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a
blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American
Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that
they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past
temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”
ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the
Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil
scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that
would inevitably result from America’s failure to sign this
international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional briefing
was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing room, the
event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the Crichton
talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the George C.
Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the briefing’s panel
of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher Horner, and
Marshall’s CEO William O’Keefe, formerly an executive at the American
Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition.
But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit of
the event. Stating that Crichton’s novel should be “required reading,”
the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who had
finished it. He attacked the “hockey stick” graph and damned the Arctic
Climate Impact Assessment for having “no footnotes or citations,” as
indeed the ACIA “overview” report—designed to be a “plain language
synthesis” of the fully referenced scientific report—does not. But never
mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He whipped out a 1974 issue of
Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read from a 30-year-old article
that expressed concerns over cooler global temperatures. In a folksy
summation, Inhofe again called the notion that humans are causing global
warming “a hoax,” and said that those who believe otherwise are
“hysterical people, they love hysteria. We’re dealing with religion.”
Having thus dismissed some 2,000 scientists, their data sets and
temperature records, and evidence of melting glaciers, shrinking
islands, and vanishing habitats as so many hysterics, totems, and myths,
Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth, as he sees it, and “fight the
battle out on the Senate floor.”
Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist
Randy Randol looked on approvingly.
Chris Mooney is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, where
he helped create the popular blog Tapped. His writing focuses on the
intersection of science and politics, and his first book, The Republican
War on Science, will be published in September.
WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd
in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have
seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular
author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his
new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting
of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the
Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and
undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist
page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather
disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change.
However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an
expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush
Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and
former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for
conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.”
The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”
Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9
inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He
describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day
did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the
last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global
warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by
what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental
issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.”
Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature
change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted
by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise.
Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a
disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a
counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading
as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed.
The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject
what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for
conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair
of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming
“a hoax.”
This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market,
and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there’s another factor at
play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and
ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by
ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied
some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to
undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or
have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists
who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes
quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website
providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received
$95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even
religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations
received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for
which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless
otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice
chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000
in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center
for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received
another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center’s executive
director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying,
“Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.”
(By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted
a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)
During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton
drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi
eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton
asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment
that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize
science. The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening
attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British
House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David
King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and
international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
(CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting
in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired
counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow.
Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free
Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and
a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’”
Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style
emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is
entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”).
Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in
helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide
research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues,
indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote
responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001
essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among
scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and
politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”
THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think
tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than merely
fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But then, in
1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business
association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in
the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol
memorably counseled that “corporate philanthropy should not be, and
cannot be, disinterested,” but should serve as a means “to shape or
reshape the climate of public opinion.”
Kristol’s advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public
policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In
its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups that
are “dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy problems.”
What the company doesn’t say is that beyond merely challenging the Kyoto
Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act on economic
grounds, many of these groups explicitly dispute the science of climate
change. Generally eschewing peer-reviewed journals, these groups make
their challenges in far less stringent arenas, such as the media and
public forums.
Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that “ExxonMobil has
been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do
multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers,
believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains
inconclusive and that studies must continue.” She also hastens to point
out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research programs—for
example, the company plans to donate $100 million to Stanford
University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds the
hallowed National Academy of Sciences.
Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those
who debunk global warming. “Many corporations have funded, you know,
dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that
there was a bigger one than Exxon,” explains Ebell of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the
government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the
impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher
Horner—whom you’ll recall from Crichton’s audience—was the lead attorney
in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI.
In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for “legal
activities.”
Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He’s proud of
ExxonMobil’s funding and wishes “we could attract more from other
companies.” He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general
project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but
admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the
topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is “adamantly
opposed” to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that “we are only
working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding.”
EXXONMOBIL’S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying
expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the
Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out
of the company’s net earnings—$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless,
“ideas lobbying” can have a powerful public policy effect.
Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work
of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four
years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an
intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study
warned that the Arctic is warming “at almost twice the rate as that of
the rest of the world,” and that early impacts of climate change, such
as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and “will
drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals,
and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.” Senator John
McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he called for a
Senate hearing.
Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to
marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead.
“Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice,” blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven
Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000
from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two
days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column.
Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming
concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from
ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the
Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s
home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents.
ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action
Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of
the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy
publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social
responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for
comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is
“affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive
funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly
from Exxon.”
Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a
purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept.
Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page,
fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document “pretty much
debunks itself” because high Arctic temperatures “around 1940” suggest
that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural
variability. “In order to take that position,” counters Harvard
biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report,
“you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that
reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle.”
Nevertheless, Milloy’s charges were quickly echoed by other groups.
TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11
“climate experts,” who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at
all unusual in comparison to “natural variability in centuries past.”
Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000)
issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on
“unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance
to reality and how the future is likely to evolve.” In response, McCain
said, “General Marshall was a great American. I think he might be very
embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this disgraceful
fashion.”
The day of McCain’s hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put
out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if
they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively
reviewed Arctic report: “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite
its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out numerous
flaws and distortions.” The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute ($60,000
from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic warming
report “an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the
anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about
the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list
of scary projections.” In the same release, the Fraser Institute
declared that “2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history.”
A month later the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization
would pronounce 2004 to be “the fourth warmest year in the temperature
record since 1861.”
Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Trust, likens ExxonMobil’s strategy to
that of “a football quarterback who doesn’t want to throw to one
receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of different
receivers.” In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber offense had the
effect of creating an appearance of scientific controversy. Senator
Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and gas companies,
including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection campaign—prominently cited
the Marshall Institute’s work in his own critique of the latest science.
TO BE SURE, that science wasn’t always as strong as it is today. And
until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels
industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined
ExxonMobil in challenging it.
The concept of global warming didn’t enter the public consciousness
until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA
climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with “99
percent confidence” that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably
caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in
Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels, industry fought back.
In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National
Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to
oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later
ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum
Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond has
twice served as chairman. “They were a strong player in the Global
Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy,” says
former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.
Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and
mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate
science and attack the mathematical models used to project future
climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for
action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than
man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists, how
ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group focused
its energies on making economic arguments rather than challenging science.
Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an
international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the
terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United
Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific
body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to
evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In
the IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, the science
remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC’s second report,
completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping
the climate, humankind’s distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with
the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus
had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability,
human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up
global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4
degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one
that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science
Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.
Even some leading corporations that had previously supported
“skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and
British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford,
General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate
Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.
Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American
Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained
recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining
a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific
views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key
audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved
when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional
wisdom.’” It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and
Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed:
“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the
‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also
the means of establishing a controversy.”
Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of
this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no
evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved
have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from
ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive
director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan,
as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants
included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, then
with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was never
implemented because “the envisioned funding never got close to being
realized.”
Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently
retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during George
W. Bush’s first term. Less than a month after Bush took office, Randol
sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert Watson, a
leading atmospheric scientist, as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” whose
real objective was to “get media coverage for his views.” (When the
memo’s existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious position that
Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor anyone else at the
company wrote it.) “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the
U.S.?” the memo asked. It went on to single out other Clinton
administration climate experts, asking whether they had been “removed
from their positions of influence.”
It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached to
the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked
Watson’s reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.
PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil’s support of the think
tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its close ties
to the Bush administration (which cited “incomplete” science as
justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it’s hard to see why
the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover. In 1998, Dick
Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the Clinton
administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than three weeks
after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with ExxonMobil CEO Lee
Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the corporation also met with
Cheney’s notorious energy task force.
ExxonMobil’s connections to the current administration go much deeper,
filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of policymaking.
For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol recommended that Harlan
Watson, a Republican staffer with the House Committee on Science, help
the United States’ diplomatic efforts regarding climate change. Watson
is now the State Department’s “senior climate negotiator.” Similarly,
the Bush administration appointed former American Petroleum Institute
attorney Philip Cooney—who headed the institute’s “climate team” and
opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief of staff of the White House Council
on Environmental Quality. In June 2003 the New York Times reported that
the CEQ had watered down an Environmental Protection Agency report’s
discussion of climate change, leading EPA scientists to charge that the
document “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.”
Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the
deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department
of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s
Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm
Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her
sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global
affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently
headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto
Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that
we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of
warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”
Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula
Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the
AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of
greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as
are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50
or 100 years in the future is difficult.”
Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as
little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001,
within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with
ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For
her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking
points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected
Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that
Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just
days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed
that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with
pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of
California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers on
global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was unable to
find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans
are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to add, that
doesn’t mean no such studies exist. But given the size of her sample,
about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she thinks it’s
safe to assume that the number is “vanishingly small.”
What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an
obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their
scientific significance. A case study is the “controversy” over the work
of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing upon
the work of several independent teams of scientists, including Mann and
his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001
report asserted that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is
likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000
years.” This statement was followed by a graph, based on one of the Mann
group’s studies, showing relatively modest temperature variations over
the past thousand years and a dramatic spike upward in the 20th century.
Due to its appearance, this famous graph has been dubbed the “hockey stick.”
During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the “hockey
stick,” calling it “sloppy work.” He’s hardly the first to have done so.
A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis, much
of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent congressional
briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator Inhofe described
Mann’s work as the “primary sci- entific data” on which the IPCC’s 2001
conclusions were based. That is simply incorrect. Mann points out that
he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph—other
teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past
temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that
served as the basis for the IPCC’s statement on the temperature record
are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that
humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole
independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.
Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack
Mann’s work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming
concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon
and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Both have been “senior scientists” with the Marshall Institute. Soon
serves as “science director” to TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct
scholar with Frontiers of Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser
Institute’s pamphlet “Global Warming: A Guide to the Science.” Baliunas,
meanwhile, is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentral, and is on science
advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the
Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from
ExxonMobil), and has given speeches on climate science before the AEI
and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would
provide comment for this article.)
In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the
American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate
Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new
research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the
warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.”
They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing
presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around. Another
version of the paper was quickly published with three additional
authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime
skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil
connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center
in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar
at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got
$205,000 between 2000 and 2003).
Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver
the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted
half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to
testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the
editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper
originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review
process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von
Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science
skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some
editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise
common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a
blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American
Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that
they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past
temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”
ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the
Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil
scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that
would inevitably result from America’s failure to sign this
international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional briefing
was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing room, the
event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the Crichton
talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the George C.
Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the briefing’s panel
of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher Horner, and
Marshall’s CEO William O’Keefe, formerly an executive at the American
Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition.
But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit of
the event. Stating that Crichton’s novel should be “required reading,”
the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who had
finished it. He attacked the “hockey stick” graph and damned the Arctic
Climate Impact Assessment for having “no footnotes or citations,” as
indeed the ACIA “overview” report—designed to be a “plain language
synthesis” of the fully referenced scientific report—does not. But never
mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He whipped out a 1974 issue of
Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read from a 30-year-old article
that expressed concerns over cooler global temperatures. In a folksy
summation, Inhofe again called the notion that humans are causing global
warming “a hoax,” and said that those who believe otherwise are
“hysterical people, they love hysteria. We’re dealing with religion.”
Having thus dismissed some 2,000 scientists, their data sets and
temperature records, and evidence of melting glaciers, shrinking
islands, and vanishing habitats as so many hysterics, totems, and myths,
Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth, as he sees it, and “fight the
battle out on the Senate floor.”
Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist
Randy Randol looked on approvingly.
Chris Mooney is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, where
he helped create the popular blog Tapped. His writing focuses on the
intersection of science and politics, and his first book, The Republican
War on Science, will be published in September.