The media laps up fake controversy over climate change
Proof of paid-for climate denial at the Global Climate Coalition comes as no surprise, but it is no less depressing for that.
There are three kinds of climate change denier. There are those who simply don’t want to accept the evidence, because it is too much to bear, or because it threatens aspects of their lives that they don’t want to change. These are by far the most numerous, and account for most of those whose comments will follow this post.
I have some sympathy for their position. Denial is most people’s first response to something they don’t want to hear, whether it is a diagnosis of terminal illness or the threat presented by the rise of the Axis Powers. The moral, intellectual and practical challenge of climate change is unprecedented. The urge to duck it almost irresistible.
Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism. It has kept David Bellamy in the news, long after his wonderful career on television sadly (and wrongly, in my view) ended. It has lent more recognition to people like Philip Stott and Tim Ball than anything they published during their academic careers. It attracts adoring fanmail (from people in category one) for journalists like Christopher Booker and Melanie Philips. It permits men like Lord Monckton to indulge their fantasies of single-handedly rescuing humanity from its own idiocy. Their intellectual acrobatics are as blatant as that of the people in the third category, but they appear to be driven by vanity, not cash.
The third category consists of those who are paid to deny that climate change is happening. Patrick Michaels and Steve Milloy, whose work for fossil fuel companies has been repeatedly exposed, are good examples. There are probably a few paid stooges contributing to the Guardian’s discussion threads as well.
Even when the risk of exposure is high, journalists working for newspapers, television or radio have secretly taken money from undisclosed interests to champion their views. Fossil fuel companies have inserted their message into every medium by means of hired hands who don’t reveal their sources of funding. Why would they not take advantage of the anonymity of these threads? Some of the contributers here are astroturfers, but we’ll probably never know which ones they are.
Whenever you challenge anyone in categories two or three, they come over all innocent, claiming that the science is unsettled, that the other side are all liars, and all they are doing is telling the public what it needs to hear. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or who subscribes to Science or Nature knows that they cannot possibly believe this, or are able to believe it only by tying their minds into such elaborate knots that they have succeeded in deceiving themselves.
We knew it, but we couldn’t prove it. But now we have a smoking gun. Last week the New York Times revealed that the Global Climate Coalition, the industry-funded body that led the campaign to persuade people that manmade climate wasn’t happening, knew all along that it was. In 1995 its own experts warned that:
The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied … The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change
It seems to me that the real suckers in this story are the media organisations – the BBC and Channel 4 are the outstanding examples – that gave 15 years of free access to companies like ExxonMobil, by inviting their paid experts to “balance” the views of genuine scientists, without demanding that they disclosed their sources. (Channel 4 appears determined to continue being suckered).
They had only to look at Exxon’s annual accounts to see that the people they introduced as independent experts were neither expert nor independent. But they chose not to, as fake controversy provided better copy than the boring old scientific consensus. Now we know just how fake it was.