Exposing the lies of the climate change deniers

The Royal Society (the UK’s academy of science) has written to the oil company ExxonMobil to insist it stop funding climate change deniers. These groups (nothing more than PR fronts for the oil industry) have created so much doubt and confusion about limate change that the environmentalist George Monbiot argues they have set back action on the issue by a decade. And, all the while, the world desperately runs out of time.

A key passage from the Royal Society letter to ExxonMobil reads:

I was very surprised to read the following passage from the section on Environmental performance under the sub-heading of “Uncertainty and Risk” (p.23) in the “Corporate Citizenship Report”.

“While assessments such as those of the IPCC have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgement rather than objective, reproducible, statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human action”

These statements also appear, of course, in the ExxonMobil document on “Tomorrow’s Energy” which was published in February. As I mentioned in our meeting in July, these statements are very misleading. The “expert judgement” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was actually based on objective and quantitative analyses and methods, including advance statistical appraisals, which carefully accounted for the interplay of natural variability, and which have been independently reproduced.

And there you have a good example of how these PR firms create confusion. On reading ExxonMobil’s report, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the IPCC were a bunch of astrologers plucking ideas on climate change out of the air. If you had never heard of the IPCC before, would you believe that they their judgements were scientific and proper?

Do just a moment of Googling and it's easy to discover that the IPCC is an august group that sets the scientific standard in climate research. But how many people will bother to look that up? And, of those that don't, how many will be left confused?

Is there really a debate amongst scientists about the reality of human-influenced climate change? The answer is no. But the damage done by ExxonMobil (among others) done by creating the doubt in the first place is tough to repair.

Big oil has a lot to lose with any cutbacks on carbon emissions imposed by legislation to deal with climate change. So it’s no surprise that they have a vested interest in sewing doubt about whether climate change is really a problem. They do it by labelling any research that doesn’t support their proposition “junk science” and labelling anything that doubts climate change “sound science”.

The anti-climate change lobby groups (mostly US-based) have a range of impressive-sounding names meant to instil the idea that they are academic think tanks or grassroots citizens’ organisations: TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and the Congress of Racial Equality, for example.

Why scientists haven’t got more riled about this, and earlier, is anybody’s guess. Much of Monbiot’s thesis is well-known, if not in well publicised. Relying on the slow and steady scientific method to convince the rest of the world that climate change is happening isn’t a good idea - perhaps scientists (and journalists) need to use the same campaigning tactics used by big oil, as described by Monbiot in an extract from his new book in the Guardian. The Royal Society should be applauded for using its clout (there are many climate scientists in its ranks) to point out the hypocrisy and lies touted by climate change deniers.

Most surprising (and sinister) is the description of how the climate change denial industry sprung from Big Tobacco’s desperate attempts to discredit research suggesting that smoking caused lung cancer.

Read Monbiot’s new book (called Heat and published by Allen Lane) and open your eyes to the distortion that is possible with a sinister PR machine that will vociferously argue for anything as long as the price is right.