Craig Isherwood of the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia (?) sent a rant justifying the "Swindle" show.
It revealed a split in the ranks of the skeptics:
"The ABC had told William Kininmonth, the head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre (for twelve years until 1998) and a former Australian delegate to the World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology, that he was not required on the expert panel, despite the fact that he said he would be available. Why would the ABC prefer to feature Mont Pelerinite Ray Evans and former punk rock band member, Michael Duffy over Kininmonth?"
Granted Duffy's snarl is pure Johnny Rotten and, as a musician, I wouldn't trust another musician. But why pick on Ray? For being a member of "the Mont Pelerin Society"? It is "an international organization composed of economists, intellectuals, business leaders, and others who favour classical liberalism; the society advocates free market economic policies and the political values of an open society." (Wikipedia)
I thought all skeptics were neoclassical neoliberals, fans of the Hidden Hand? So we have learned something new: people who quote Plato in a scientific debate are likely to be linked in to the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche (Craig is LL's front man in Australia). LL is known to hate Jews and admire Plato's fascist state. The "Plato Question" was asked by "LaRouche Youth Movement member Lucas Duncan". (He also asked an equally obscure and mangled question about "eugenics" and "the Duke of Edinburgh"- echoing a similar reference by another LaRouche plant in the audience. More later...).
Craig's CEC was originally created by the Australian League of Rights, an extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic organisation founded by Eric Butler who could have been shot as a traitor during World War 2 for the following: In December 1939, Butler wrote: "The real enemy is not Hitler and Germany, but the powers which control Britain, and which are working for the complete bolshevisation of the nation." In a 1940 pamphlet he wrote: "A stream of Australian youth is leaving to be smashed to bloody pulp in the second war to 'save democracy', which like the first war, was fomented by Jewish International Finance, will be financed and controlled by the same group and will mean their undisputed world domination." Meanwhile Hitler was gassing 6 million Jews - something Butler and his psychopaths would deny ever happened. In the 1960s the League infiltrated the National Party by using the Citizens Electoral Councils. This was successful in areas such as Gippsland, the Riverina, the Darling Downs, the Yorke Peninsula and the Western Australian wheatbelt. Butler was clearly insane: he claimed that Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Curtin were covert communists.
Now LaRouche, he's another peach. He says the Queen is a drug pusher! NBC News broadcast March 4, 1984,"Of course she's pushing drugs...that is in the sense of a responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it is happening and she isn't stopping it" Man-made global warming is a hoax: Larouche says "The Crab Nebula emits cosmic rays which have significant effect on developments in the earth's atmosphere." LaRouche endorsed The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr went so far into Marxism he's come out thinking like Hitler (who was, after all, a National Socialist). He is fascinating. I'd love to meet him.
"Eugenics"and Prince Philip - it seems he and the Queen (when she's not selling drugs) are part of a conspiracy to commit genocide against millions of people not fit to be alive. WFF is the front organisation for Gore and their majesties and others to wipe out humans so "Nature" can rule Earth. (Evidence: Prince Philip once said wants to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to kill off human beings. But we know about the Royals, don't we? His son Charles once said that wanted to be his lover's underpants...)
So lesson: Climate Skeptics come from all sides of the Right and Left, and they have the mental agility to believe anything is possible. Except man-made global warming.
Here we have come full circle. Skeptic Craig being nasty to Skeptic Ray. Why?
Monday, July 23, 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Swindlers: How would Christ respond?
There is a lot of ad hominum arguing (playing the man, not the issue) surrounding The Great TV Sceptics Doco Swindle. Witness the Australian's single-minded approach. Ad Hominum is good so long as it is done with compassion. It helps to know who's talking in these debates. There was no mention of the connections the three sceptics on the panel have with right wing front organisations funded by fossil fuel companies and links to right wing 'think tanks' and 'astroturfing' bodies in the USA. Guy Pearce's book High & Dry traces the links between the Institute of Public Affairs, the Australian Environment Foundation and the Lavoisier Group and the fringe organisations George Bush is enthralled by in the US. So does Clive Hamilton's book Scorcher. (Google 'sceptics' and 'climate change deniers' for more). You have a pattern emerging among the 'experts' they employ. Most - according to the documentary The Denial Machine - have received funding from fossil fuel companies or their agents. Most haven't published in a peer-reviewed journal for years. Most have qualifications periferal to the issue. Most appeared as experts in the passive smoking issue, ozone hole issue, asbestos issue, etc. on behalf of the sceptics (and their backers, the big polluters). Mining magnate Hugh Morgan's hatred for the environment and aborigines has driven him to grandfather all these Australian organisations. (All that resentment can cause cancer. Look at what happened to Stan.) Another great source of negative energy resides at the top of Exxon-Mobil. Read the literature. Britain's Royal Academy of Science had to make a special request to Exxon to cease funding front organisations to spread confusion about climate change and thus cause delays in fighting the problem. That's what "Swindle" is about. And what Bob Castle and Ray Evans and Michael Duffy are about. Delay. But why? I believe they are honest men and are not corrupted by financial support from mining companies. But are they trying to save the fossil fuel companies from having to pay the full cost of their products: including the cost of disposal of wastes into the atmosphere? Yes and No. These people describe themselves as 'neoliberals' - lovers of freedom, 80's style. The freedom to pollute. The freedom to lay waste to community assets. They don't believe in community or society. Margaret Thatcher said: "There is no such thing as society. There is only an economy." The perfect mechanism for regulating human life is the market. Markets always make the right decisions. Markets cannot fail. To admit man-made CO2 is behind climate change would be to admit that markets can fail. It would undermine their entire neoliberal ideology to which they cling. They are not merely defending unrestrained capitalism and 'greed is good' morality. They are defending the very essence of their inner beings. For if the Bible is wrong - and God didn't mean 'do whatever you like to her' when he commanded man to 'subdue the Earth' - what else have they got wrong? BTW The sceptics need to watch out for looking like victims of Grumpy Old Man Syndrome? There were 3 GOM on the panel last night. (The former head of BT now with WWF is the flipside of GOM. He's a HOD. (Hip Old Dude). Christ would respond to the afflicted with His great love. Love is all we have left to solve this dilemma.
THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE - REAL SCIENTISTS RESPOND
To coincide with the ABC’s broadcast of the controversial UK documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” on Thursday 12 July at 8.30pm, the Australian Science Media Centre is providing this reaction from Australian climate scientists.
Reaction from Australian Scientists
Climate scientists from the National Climate Centre (Australian Bureau of Meteorology) have prepared a critique on the documentary, just published in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS).
The group summarise the documentary as follows:
" The Great Global Warming Swindle does not represent the current state of knowledge in climate science. Scepticism in science is a healthy thing, and the presence of orthodox scientific scepticism in climate change is ubiquitous. Many of the hypotheses presented in the Great Global Warming Swindle have been considered and rejected by due scientific process. This documentary is far from an objective, critical examination of climate science. Instead the Great Global Warming Swindle goes to great lengths to present outdated, incorrect or ambiguous data in such a way as to grossly distort the true understanding of climate change science, and to support a set of extremely controversial views."
Reaction from Australian Scientists
Dr Andrew Ash, Acting-Director of the CSIRO Climate Change Adaptation Flagship
"There is now almost no doubt that human-induced climate change is happening.
Our planet's climate is complex so it is not surprising that there are still uncertainties, but that should not be an excuse for denying the impacts that humans and our greenhouse gas emissions are having on the earth's climate and environment.
CSIRO is at the forefront of producing useful climate projections. We are in the business of informing government, industries and communities about the threat of climate change and its impacts. We are also developing practical and effective adaptation options so that society can better cope with the inevitability of climate change.'
There is overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming, that it is very likely that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is due to human induced increases in greenhouse gases (IPCC). What's more, we can say with confidence that this warming will accelerate if emissions are allowed to continue unabated."
Snow Barlow is Professor of Horticulture and Viticulture and Head of the School of Agriculture and Food Systems at the University of Melbourne
"Climate change has now reached a level of scientific and political acceptance that demands a greater understanding of this complex scientific phenomena by the voting public prior to undertaking significant and meaningful action at the national and global scale.This global action will inevitably mean changes to our lifestyles which will not necessarily be disadvantageous. The key to public acceptance of this action is a balanced public debate of the scientific knowns and unknowns and an understanding of the costs of inaction as well as action, particularly for our grandchildren. It is critical that this debate is based on science and economics rather than evangelism and political correctness.The popular press have a particular responsibility to promote this debate based on knowledge-based discussion rather than sensationalism
The Great Global Climate Swindle has missed a great opportunity to lead this important balanced debate by opting for 20th century sensationalism for a 21st century problem.The producer of this program has blatantly adopted a position and assembled footage to support his position. Recent data and advances in climate science meticulously gathered over the past 40 years have been completely ignored in favour of the correlative science that we began with in the 1960s and 1970s.The enormous increases computing power in the past 30 years has allowed scientists to investigate simultaneously all factors that may contribute to climate change rather than one at a time as done in this program.This is also reflected in the emeritus status of many, but not all, the scientists and commentators featured in the program .
Climate change as the first truly global environmental challenge to our society deserves a more balanced and up-to-date debate than projected in this program. Its producer has succumbed to the very problem he was seeking to address , a balanced debate , by being very selective in his evidence and failing to consider recent peer reviewed science in critical areas.As such the program has become a political intrument rather than a science based environmental argument."
Professor Nathan Bindoff is a physical oceanographer and Director of the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC). Partners include the University of Tasmania, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC. He was a Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 chapter on oceanic climate change and sea level observations (Chapter 5).
"I have watched this video twice. The casual watcher would think the storyline was plausible.
On the second time, I realised time series of past temperatures were quoted out of context, were ancient science, not current science, and could well have been bogus. I am appalled. All of the climate science portrayed in the program is out of context, incorrect, or neglects other processes that are well known. The cooling from the 1940s to 1970s is an example of this deceptive discussion. It is well known that this cooling is driven mostly by aerosols (ie pollution) in the atmosphere. Nothing contradictory about this cooling when all sources of radiation changes are considered.
The claims about IPCC and the IPCC process were extraordinary. Some of the scientists were or have been part of the previous and current assessments from IPCC, they know how the process works, they know how transparent it is, they have participated in the review processs. The IPCC is an extraordinarily open and transparent review process with a range of checks and balances to ensure a balanced assessment of the science. No single document published in the scientific literature receives this level of scrutiny and comment by scientists, government and the public. The reviewers comments and the authors responses are publicly available. There are literally thousands of comments on each chapter of these assessments. Each comment has a formal response. It is difficult to imagine how the IPCC could be any more comprehensive in its engagement with the scientific community.
The last part of the video discussed poverty in Africa. The Kyoto Protocol specifically omitted under-developed and developing nations from having to meet a carbon emissions target, so that these nations have not been penalised.
Relevant science, with profound impacts on every level of society, with important economic and social consequences, should of course attract strong funding to ensure that sound decisions about the future can be made. This is why climate change is an Australian priority area for research."
Professor Barry Brook is Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle (GGWS) is a deeply deceptive and propagandist portrayal of the science of global warming. But this is not really surprising, when you consider that the producer, Martin Durkin, has been previously charged by the UK Independent Television Commission for using selective editing to misrepresent and distort the views of interviewees in his earlier anti-environmentalist documentary, 'Against Nature'. Indeed, the running time of the 75 minute original GGWS, screened in the UK in March this year, has since been pruned by Durkin to 52 minutes, for the ABC. Deletions include the blatant out-of-context quotes of Carl Wunsch (he threatened legal action after the UK screening), a removal of a slew of false statements (such as that volcanoes release far more CO2 than humans, when volcanoes actually release about 100 times less), and a number of distorted graphics, such as the 20th century temperature rise (alas, many others remain).
Amongst the select cadre of contrarian 'experts' Durkin has rallied to his cause, there includes Tim Ball and Patrick Michaels (who also happen to deny that CFCs cause damage to the ozone layer), and Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen (who, in earlier incarnations, had been active denialists of the link between passive smoking and lung cancer, despite neither having any medical expertise). Investigative journalism has revealed that many of the interviewees have received 'research funds' in various forms from the fossil fuel industry.
The GGWS programme is riddled with errors and distortions, including howlers from 'climate scientist' Tim Ball who says the atmospheric content of CO2 is 0.054% (it is 0.038% - someone who purports to understand the atmosphere should get this basic fact right!) and Fred Singer mis-attributing a statement made by James Lovelock to the UK Chief Scientist, Sir David King. Durkin never states that the mythical chart, which apparently shows a medieval warm period and Holocene climatic optimum that were warmer than the present day, actually comes from doctored diagrams produced by a German school teacher, E.G. Beck.
Nor is it mentioned that solar activity has declined over the last 30 years - at the same time as the major spike in global temperature. This list goes on (and on), and has been detailed by numerous scientific and media outlets. Essentially all the 'contradictory science' presented, such as that the upper atmosphere is not warming, has been debunked by later research.
The IPCC lead author, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, has previously rebuked the arguments of political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, contained in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, for 'selective inattention to inconvenient literature and overemphasis of work that supports his lopsided views'. This is indeed an apt description of the GGWS. It is remarkable that for each apparent 'inconsistency' presented in the programme, the alternative (and evidence-based) scientific explanation is never offered. For instance, the cooling from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s is attributable to global dimming (primarily sulphur pollution from post-war industry, prior to implementation of clean air acts). The 800-year lag between the beginnings of temperature increase and CO2 rise in the polar ice record is because the initial warming that provoked the end of the ice ages was caused by changes in the Earth's alignment and orbit around the sun; not anthropogenic CO2.
But it was an eventual increase in CO2, subsequently released by the oceans and biosphere after they had begun to warm, that caused much more substantial global heating, and an eventual sea level rise of 120 metres.
The 'expert views' presented in the GGWS represent the opinion of far fewer than 1% of scientists engaged worldwide into research on the causes and consequences of global warming. It is therefore staggering that such minority views are given such air time by the ABC, and moreover, that they are presented in current promotions as providing 'the answer to the lies'. One must wonder what's next, a documentary on the reality of a 6000-year-old flat Earth, orbited by the sun and other planets, and resting on the shell of a giant turtle?"
Professor Paul Cally is a solar physicist at Monash University's Centre for Stellar and Planetary Astrophysics in Melbourne.
"The results described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society paper by Lockwood and Fröhlich are very much in accord with many other recent studies. It is very clear that variations in solar activity over periods of decades and beyond have influenced climate in the past, although the exact mechanisms are still unclear. There is both a direct effect through variations in solar irradiance (brightness), and an effect through changes in the flux of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, which in turn is affected by solar activity.
Indeed, the ramp up of solar activity through the first half of the 20th century probably did contribute to global warming at that stage. However, it is equally clear that it could not explain it all, especially in the last two or three decades. Perhaps 30% of 20th Century global warming is likely to be solar.
As solar physicists, my colleagues and I would love to claim global warming for the Sun. Imagine how much it would increase our funding! However, it is clear that the data does not support the hypothesis that the Sun is the dominant cause of the observed temperature increases."
Dr Marc Duldig is a senior principal research scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division (Atmospheric Science Research - Ice, Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Program). He is an astrophysicist with expertise in solar physics, cosmic rays and space weather.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle program has caused much controversy and this is largely due to its selective use of data and only using the parts of those data that suit its arguments.
There are some serious questions about the veracity of some of the data presented in the original UK Channel 4 program, particularly the date scale quoted on the 'World Temp - 120 Years' graph where the last 20 years were clearly not correct or matched to the NASA source. A similar concern exists for the 'Temp & Solar Activity 400 Years' graph. Between about 1690 and 1750 almost no sunspots were visible indicating very very low solar activity. The program uses this dip to explain the little ice age (which was not a global phenomenon but only present in Europe) yet the dip to the lowest possible levels did not appear on the graph. If it was there, as it should have been, then the global temperature would be very different from the solar activity of that period. Many of the graphs were changed or deleted for the current release of the program.
The use of selective data periods is most clear when considering solar activity and global temperature. The claimed match between the sun's activity and global temperature breaks down entirely after 1985 as is demonstrated most rigorously in a paper by Lockwood and Fröhlich to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on Wednesday this week (11 July at 9am AEST). These authors show that there is no relationship between five different indicators of the activity of the sun with the global temperature over the last 30 years. It is interesting that the swindle program chooses to ignore all data after 1980 in its presentation, precisely when their claims fail entirely."
Dr Paul Fraser is a Chief Research Scientist in the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research. He has been working on climate change and the role of greenhouse gases for over 30 years.
"It is prudent to constantly question and test the science of climate change. This is a major strength of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process, which relies on robust scientific debate.
The best way to debate the science is through the peer-reviewed publication process. The so-called 'facts' [stated in the GGWS documentary] do not stand up to critical scientific evaluation, and their foundations cannot be found anywhere in the peer-reviewed scientific literature."
Professor Nick Harvey, is a coastal zone expert from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide and a Lead Author in Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"The Channel 4 Great Global Warming Swindle documentary paints a sceptical view of climate change science using short grabs of selective material, often out of date and out of context. Two of the program’s sceptics professors Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels pushed similar storylines in another Channel 4 documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy screened in Australia on SBS in 1991. Both programs criticise funding of climate change science but strangely neither program details their own source of funding.
The documentary notes that CO2 and temperature are linked over geological time with atmospheric CO2 rises following global temperature rises as the world emerges from a glacial cycle. The major global warming cycles are clearly related to the earth’s orbit and once the oceans begin to warm they release more CO2. What the program doesn’t explain is that in addition to this natural oceanic release of CO2, the post industrial human contribution to atmospheric CO2 has pushed the atmospheric concentration well beyond the limits of any natural changes shown in the geological record for the last 650,000 years.
On the issue of temperature, the program uses a 17 year old European climatic reconstruction to argue that the whole world was warmer in the medieval period. What the program doesn’t show are the up-to-date scientific temperature reconstructions for the whole globe revealing that recent decades are in fact much warmer than the medieval period. The program also fails to point out that it is only the models, which ‘include’ human influence factors in addition to natural factors that can explain the recent global pattern of temperature change.
It is interesting to note what is left out of the Great Global Warming Swindle such as a major section of the program screened in the UK using evidence from Professor Carl Wunsch. The section was removed after he publicly complained that he had been misrepresented. The issue of sea-level rise is also noticeably absent from the program even though the earlier Channel 4 program The Greenhouse Conspiracy suggested that there was no evidence for any global sea-level rise linked to global warming. Perhaps the recent satellite data on sea-level rise make it too difficult to mislead the viewing public on this issue?"
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and a Contributing Author to the IPCC AR4 Working Group 2 report (Chapter 11 - Australia & New Zealand).
"The act of presenting this documentary is hugely disappointing given the problems with its independence and factual basis. This is propaganda not a quality documentary. Where is the rational consideration of all the evidence? Where is the representation of the many responses that exist to the trite claims made in the documentary by the so-called ‘experts’? One wonders whether the ABC has now resorted to sensationalism in the pretence of airing the ‘other point of view’? If so, then perhaps the ABC should consider airing documentaries on UFO and Elvis sightings? They are just as credible and should assist with ratings in a similar way."
Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
"The Channel 4 film is indeed a great global warming swindle. It purports to show scientific evidence casting doubt on the conclusion that most of the recent climate change is due to human burning of fossil fuels. In fact, most of the "science" is either wrong or selective, so the film does not pose any real question about even the cautious conservative conclusions of the IPCC. If it is shown without an appropriate public health warning, it could give the misleading impression that the science is still uncertain and delay even further the urgently-needed concerted response..”
.............................................................................................................................................
Dr Mike Raupach is a research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and is co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international program that studies the global carbon cycle.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle is sending a shiver of excitement through those for whom global warming is somewhere between a bad dream and a dangerous plot. Can we breathe a sigh of relief and forget climate change?
The major scientific claims in the Swindle are either wrong or are true statements so out of context as to create falsehoods.
Why, then, do a handful of scientists torture the evidence to claim that human activities do not induce climate change? The answer often quoted, that these scientists are in the pockets of oil companies, is probably inadequate (like the counterclaim that most climate scientists are in the pockets of neo-Marxists). A more fundamental reason may be philosophical: those who attack the links between CO2 and human-induced climate change believe that the planetary machinery is too vast and intrinsically variable to be thrown off course by mere humankind, and that the earth's environment is in no way threatened by human exploitation.
Sound science now shows that this view is dangerously misplaced. We have the power to alter the workings of the planet, and are already doing so through climate change. The leap we must make in just a few decades is to accept global stewardship of our shared environment. The position taken in the Swindle is a dangerous dead weight as we endeavour to face this entirely new and critical challenge.
Dr Penny Whetton, Leader of the Climate Impact and Risks Group, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research
"Martin Durkin's documentary purports to show that climate change is neither unusual nor due to human activity. In making these claims, the film ignores the vast amount of evidence that supports human-caused climate change, and selects a few points which, with some careful spin, can be made to appear to support the film's case.
None of the arguments presented in the film are new, and none have passed scientific scrutiny when they were raised previously. As a result, the film is highly misleading."
Friday, June 22, 2007
Who is Bob Carter?
Professor Robert (Bob) Carter (RIGHT)* is a member of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, and a founding member of the Australian Environment Foundation, a front group set up by the Institute of Public Affairs. He is Adjunct Research Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University of North Queensland. He is described as 'retired' in a Sydney Morning Herald article by environment writer Wendy Frew: "Professor Carter, whose background is in marine geology, appears to have little, if any, standing in the Australian climate science community."
The classic charcteristics of the professional sceptic, as described in The Denial Machine (4 Corners expose of pseudo academic smokescreens designed to delay action on climate change, funded by fossil fuel companies.)
1. Denies the scientific consensus of 2500 climate scientists whose work is peer reviewed.
2. Has connections with fossil fuel companies.
3. Is not strictly a climatologist.
4. Is not highly published on climate matters in peer-reviewed journals.
5. Campaigns actively against the findings of legitimate climate scientists.
Prof. Carter claims the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had uncovered no evidence the warming of the planet was caused by human activity.
He has curious views for an academic:
1. Not a big believer in the process of peer review whereby a scientist's methodology and conclusions are checked by other scientists toensure there is no fraud, hanky panky or mistakes made.
2. Not worried that taking money from the fossil fuel industry would affect the validity of research. "I don't think it is the point whether or not you are paid by the coal or petroleum industry," said Professor Carter. "I will address the evidence."
Former CSIRO climate scientist, and now head of a new sustainability institute at Monash University, Graeme Pearman, said Professor Carter was not a credible source on climate change. "If he has any evidence that [global warming over the past 100 years] is a natural variability he should publish through the peer review process," Dr Pearman said. "That is what the rest of us have to do." He said he was letting the fossil fuel industry off the hook.
Bob Carter is a favourite of the Federal Government. He was chosen to attend a Conference on Managing Climate Change: Practicalities and Realities in a post-Kyoto Future staged by APEC held in Parliament
House, Canberra in April 2005. Described as 'the first Conference held on the scientific evidence supporting the Kyoto Protocol following its ratification', it included representatives from the USA and China - Harlan Watson, Senior Climate Change Negotiator and Special Representative, US Department of State; and Qingqing Zhao, First Assistant Secretary (Science and Technology), Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Australia. The Australian contingent was heavily stacked with climate change sceptics, including the following:
• Professor Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Queensland;
• William Kininmonth, Author of "Climate Change: A Natural Hazard" and formerly of the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology;
• Dr John Zillman, President, Australia Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
and former Principal Delegate of Australia (1994-2004) to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change;
• Dr Brian Fisher, Director, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics;
• Meg McDonald, General Manager Corporate Affairs, Alcoa World Alumina Australia;
• Professor Aynsley Kellow, University of Tasmania;
• Dr Alan Moran, Director, Deregulation Unit, Institute of Public Affairs; and
• Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge, retired Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern
Ocean Studies, University of Tasmania and former Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO
Division of Atmospheric Research.
John Howard's former Environment Minister Ian Campbell appointed Carter as a judge for the Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism.
John Howard's Finance Minister, Nick Minchin, uses Bob Carter as a scientific authority to support his denial of the link between fossil fuels and greenhouse gas pollution. In a letter he wrote to Clean Up Australia's founder, Ian Kiernan, Senator Minchin took issue with Mr Kiernan's criticism "that anyone who remains to be convinced that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are the cause of climate change is a scientific loony." Senator Minchin appears to have taken his advice in part from a collection of columns written by the Canadian newspaper columnist Lawrence Solomon. Among those was one promoting the work of Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark. But that research has proved to contain numerous calculation and methodological errors, say some other scientists.Senator Minchin also referred Mr Kiernan to a critique of the economic review of global warming by Sir Nicholas Stern. One author of the critique was the Bob Carter. Of Senator Minchin's letter, he said: "I am worried that a federal minister would believe this crap."
*. Pictured with Bob at the Australian Environment Foundation conference last year was Professor Mike Archer, Dean of Science, UNSW. He said, in 2001 on ABC Radio's Background Briefing: "Now I don't want to be an overt defender of the mining industry but we're talking about 2% of Australia's land surface is affected by mining, but 65% is being destroyed by agriculture." (AEF is an anti-green movement front organisation for the right wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.) Prof. Archer advocates taking 20% of Australia's agricultural lands out of production.
The Denial Industry: Jonestown Repeated?
For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. Who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco.
(The following is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy, go to Guardian.co.uk/bookshop.)
George Monbiot is one of Britain’s foremost thinkers and activists. He has been named by the Evening Standard as one of the twenty-five most influential people in Britain, and by the Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and his website, currently receives some 40,000 hits a month. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.
…………………………..
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "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." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.
(The following is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy, go to Guardian.co.uk/bookshop.)
George Monbiot is one of Britain’s foremost thinkers and activists. He has been named by the Evening Standard as one of the twenty-five most influential people in Britain, and by the Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and his website, currently receives some 40,000 hits a month. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.…………………………..
ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.
By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.
This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.
But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.
The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.
The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.
Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.
All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.
In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."
Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.
Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."
To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."
So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs.
By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".
By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."
The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:
"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it?
"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."
There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "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." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".
But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.
The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.
He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.
TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".
The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.
I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.
Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.
"The Land": Last refuge of Sceptics
The Land seems to be one of the last bastions of free speech for members of right wing think tanks who fight on against the notion of Climate Change. Great to see The Institute of Public Affairs' Jennifer Marohasy still gets a run, despite her links to an overtly political group that calls itself an "Institute" and calls its writers "Fellows" to make it sound like a serious academic organisation, like the CSIRO or a university. "The Institute of Public Affairs" sounds credible and independent. But it is not independent. it is funded by big business and its web pages link only to extremist right wing organisations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
JENNIFER & RIGHT WING ABC COMMENTATOR MICHAEL DUFFYThe Tobacco Institute took the same approach to presenting itself as independent and scholarly. This is part of the pattern of deception practiced by far right front organisations. The recent documentary aired on ABCTV's 4Corners called "The Denial Machine" revealed that retired and semi-retired academics, attached to political 'think tanks', were being funded by the fossil fuel industry to spread confusion about climate change to delay government action. The same faces were employed by the tobacco industry, it turns out, to run the same denial/confusion line about lung cancer in the 1980s, to delay government legislation. The Institute of Public Affairs falsely denied that it was accepting funding from Philip Morris while it was attacking tobacco taxes proposed by governments in Australia. The Institue's links to Big Toabacco were close. A former Board member of the Institute of Public Affairs Donna Staunton questioned the medical consensus that cigarette smoking was addictive when she was chief executive of the Tobacco Institute of Australia. Ms Staunton is also a former senior associate with the Clayton Utz law firm, which has acted for tobacco companies.
Big Tobacco has been replaced as the majort funding source for these organisations by Big Coal and Big Oil. In the USA in the last 12 months, Exxon-Mobil has admitted funding "think tank" 'experts' to argue, first, that climate change did not exist, and when that became difficult to maintain in the face of weather events, to argue that mankind's activities have nothing to do with it. But now even Exxon has stopped this secret funding of professional sceptics.
If 2500 climatologists from all around the world are wrong and Jennifer Marohasy is right, what's the worst that can happen if we act on climate change? At worst, a global recession bought on by a giant environmental scam. But we've survived global recessions before. If Jennifer Marohasy is wrong and the 2500 climatologists are right, what is the worst that can happen if we don't act on climate change? Global environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, warfare over scarce resources, spreading new diseases, uncontrollable migration: the Pentagon predicts a sea-borne invasion of Australia equivalent to thousands of Tampas arriving. Now, given that the actuaries of the major insurance companies were among the first to raise the alarm about climate change (they count the costs of unusual weather events and started seeing new patterns 10 years ago), I am inclined to believe the 2500 scientists that don't belong to political think tanks. Even if I'm wrong, it's like insurance. I don't want to use it, but it's nice to know it's there.
Michael Kiely
Carbon Coalition Against Global Warming
PS. You can tell a lot about a girl by the company she keeps. In February 2007, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the American Enterprise Institute had sent letters to scientists, offering US$10,000 plus travel expenses and additional payments, asking them to critique a consensus report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The letters alleged that the IPCC was "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and asked for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs." The AEI received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil. Former ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond is the vice-chairman of the Institute's board of trustees. Competitive Enterprise Institute's founder Fred Smith said of global warming: "Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we’re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture". CEI released a controversial ad campaign with two television commercials arguing that global warming is not a problem. The commercials used the tagline "Carbon Dioxide - They call it pollution; We call it life." One ad stated that the world's glaciers are "growing, not melting... getting thicker, not thinner." The ad cited two Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor for Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to back their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said.
The second ad in the campaign claimed that carbon dioxide is misrepresented as a pollutant, stating that "it’s essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in... They call it pollution. We call it life." The consensus among real scientific organizations worldwide is that greenhouse gases are causing Earth's surface temperatures to warm. ExxonMobil Corporation was a major donor to CEI, with over $2 million in contributions between 1998 and 2005. In 2004 it gave CEI $180,000 that was earmarked for "global climate change and global climate change outreach."
JENNIFER WITH DON BURKEPPS. The Australian Environment Foundation is a front group founded by the Institute of Public Affairs. Director of the environment unit of the IPA, Jennifer Marohasy was the founding Chairwoman and is listed as a Director. Mahorasy is also the listed registrant of the group's website, although the address and phone number for the website registration are identical to the address and phone number for the Victorian office of the logging industry front group, Timber Communities Australia. Former television celebrity Don Burke was appointed chairman. Mike Nahan, the former Executive Director of the IPA, also a director. Nahan describes AEF as "pro-biotechnology, pro-nuclear power, pro-modern farming, pro-economic growth, pro-business and pro-environment." Keynote speakers at the 2007 AEG conference are global warming skeptic Prof Bob Carter, pro-nuclear enquiry leader Dr Ziggy Switkowski and global warming skeptic and Kyoto basher Prof Aynsley Kellow. "Independent?"
Saturday, May 19, 2007
The Scientists who sow doubt
Below is a list of high profile climate change sceptics who are undermining the world community's attempts to take united action against global warming. You might want to print and keep a copy for later reference.
Australians among them include this subset:
Dr.Robert M. Carter - Geologist - James Cook University
Dr.Ian Castles - Fellow - Australian National University
Dr.Aynsley Kellow - Professor - University of Tasmania
Mr.William Kininmonth - Former Head - National Climate Centre
Dr.Garth W. Paltridge - Director - The Cooperative Research Centre for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean
Dr.Ian Plimer - Professor - University of Adelaide and University of Melbourne
THE LIST:
Khabibullo Abdusamatov - Scientist - Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)
Dr.William J.r.Alexander - Professor Emeritus - University of Pretoria (South Africa)
Dr.Claude Allegre - Geophysicist - Institute of Geophysics (France)
Dr.August H. Auer - Former Professor of Atmospheric Science - University of Wyoming (USA)
Mr.Dennis Avery - Environment Economist - Center for Global Food Issues (USA)
Dr.Sallie L. Baliunas - Astrophysicist - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA)
Dr.Timothy Ball - Canadian Climatologist and Former Professor - University of Winnipeg (Canada)
Dr.Robert C. "Balling Jr." - Climatologist - Arizona State University (USA)
Dr.Jack Barrett - Chemist and Spectroscopist - Formerly with Imperial College London (UK)
Dr.David Bellamy - Horary Professor for Adult and Continuation Education - Durham University (U.K.)
Dr.Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen - Reader - University of Hull (U.K.)
Dr.Simon Brassell - Geologist - University of Indiana (USA)
Dr.Reid Bryson - Meteorologist - University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
Mr.Nigel Calder - Former Editor - The New Scientist Magazine (International)
Dr.Robert M. Carter - Geologist - James Cook University (Australia)
Dr.Ian Castles - Fellow - Australian National University (Australia)
Dr.Petr Chylek - Physics and Atmospheric Science Adjunct Professor - Dalhousie University (Canada)
Dr.George Chilingar - Professor - University of Southern California (USA)
Dr.Ian D. Clark - Earth Sciences Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Paul Cooper - Professor Emeritus - Laurentian University (Canada)
Dr.Richard S. Courtney - Climate and Atmospheric Science Consultant - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Switzerland)
Dr.Chris de Freitas - Associate Professor and Climate Scientist - The University of Auckland (New Zealand)
Dr.David Deming - Geology Professor - The University of Oklahoma (USA)
Dr.Freeman J. Dyson - Emeritus Professor of Physics - Institute for Advanced Studies (USA)
Dr.Hugh W. Ellsaesser - Physicist/Meteorologist - Formerly with Livermore National Laboratory (USA)
Dr.Robert H. Essenhigh - Professor of Energy Conversion - The Ohio State University (USA)
Dr.Christopher Essex - Applied Mathematics Professor - University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Dr.Bill Gray - Professor Emeritus - Colorado State University (USA)
Dr.Vincent Gray - Expert Reviewer - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (France)
Dr.Keith D. Hage - Meteorology Professor Emeritus - University of Alberta (Canada)
Dr.Howard Hayden - Emeritus Professor of Physics - University of Connecticut (USA)
Dr.Douglas Hoyt - Retired Scientist - Raytheon Company (USA)
Dr.Craig Idso - Founder and Chairman - Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (USA)
Dr.Keith E. Idso - Vice President - Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (USA)
Dr.Sherwood Idso - Adjunct Professor - Arizona State University (USA)
Dr.Andrei Illarionov - Chief Economic Adviser - Russian President Vladimir Putin (Russia)
Dr.Zbigniew Jaworowski - Physicist and Chairman - Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (Poland)
Dr.Ola Johanneseen - Professor - Nasen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (Norway)
Dr.Wibjorn Karlen - Emeritus Professor - Stockholm University (Sweden)
Dr.Aynsley Kellow - Professor - University of Tasmania (Australia)
Dr.Madhav Khandekar - Former Research Scientist - Environment Canada (Canada)
Dr.Leonid F. Khilyuk - Professor - University of Southern California (USA)
Mr.William Kininmonth - Former Head - National Climate Centre (Australia)
Dr.Hans H.J. Labohm - Former Advisor to the Executive Board - Clingendael Institute (Netherlands)
Dr.Douglas Leahey - meteorologist and air-quality consultant - Calgary (Canada)
Dr.David r.Legates - Associate Professor in Climatology - University of Delaware (USA)
Dr.Marcel Leroux - Climatology Professor Emeritus - University of Lyon (France)
Dr.Dennis Lettenmaier - Hydrology Professor - University of Washington (USA)
Dr.Richard Lindzen - Meteorologist - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Dr.Bjorn Lomborg - Associate Statistics Professor - University of Aarhus (Denmark)
Dr.Alister McFarquhar - International Economist - Downing College (U.K.)
Dr.Ross McKitrick - Associate Economics Professor - University of Guelph (Canada)
Dr.Ross McKitrick - Associate Professor - University of Guelph (Canada)
Dr.Patrick J. Michaels - Professor of Environmental Sciences - University of Virginia (USA)
Dr.Fred Michel - Associate Professor - Carleton University (Canada)
Dr.M. r.Morgan - Climate Consultant - First Minister of Wales (U.K.)
Dr.Nils-Axel Morner - Emeritus Professor - Stockholm University (Sweden)
Dr.Tad Murty - Adjunct Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Mr.David Nowell - Fellow - Royal Meteorological Society (Canada)
Dr.Garth W. Paltridge - Director - The Cooperative Research Centre for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (Australia)
Dr.Timothy Patterson - Paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology - Carelton University (Canada)
Dr.Benny Peiser - Professor of Social Anthropology - Liverpool John Moores University (UK)
Dr.Al Pekarek - Associate Professor of Geology - St. Cloud State University (USA)
Dr.Roger "Pielke Sr." - Meteorologist and Emeritus Professor - Cooperative Institute of Research and Environmental Sciences and University of Colorado (USA)
Dr.Ian Plimer - Professor - University of Adelaide and University of Melbourne (Australia)
Dr.Harry N.A. Priem - Emeritus Professor - Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Dr.Andreas Prokoph - Adjunct Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Paul Reiter - Professor - Institut Pasteur (France)
Dr.Art Robinson - Founder - Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (USA)
Dr.Arthur Rorsch - Emeritus Professor of Molecular Genetics - Leiden University (The Netherlands)
Dr.Rob Scagel - Principal Consultant - Pacific Consultants (Canada)
Dr.Frederick Seitz - Former President - The National Academy of Sciences (USA)
Dr.Gary Sharp - Director - Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study (USA)
Dr.Nir J. Shaviv - Astrophysicist - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Dr.Fred Singer - Climatologist - The Competitive Enterprise Institute (USA)
Dr.Graham Smith - Associate Professor - University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Dr.Willie Soon - Physicist - Harvard University (USA)
Dr.Roy Spencer - Principal Research Scientist - The University of Alabama (USA)
Dr.Phillip Stout - Emeritus Professor - School of Oriental and African Studies (England)
Dr.Henrik Svensmark - Climate Scientist - Danish Space Research Institute (Denmark)
Dr.Gordon E. Swaters - Applied Mathematics Professor - University of Alberta (Canada)
Mr.George Taylor - State Climatologist - State of Oregon (USA)
Dr.Hendrik Tennekes - Retired Director of Research - Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (The Netherlands)
Dr.Gerrit J. van der Lingen - Climate Change Consultant - Geoscience Research and Investigations (New Zealand)
Dr.G. Cornelis van Koten - Environmental and Climate Change Professor - University of Victoria (Canada)
Dr.Jan Veizer - Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Boris Winterhalter - Retired Senior Marine Researcher - Geological Survey of Finland (Finland)
Dr.David E. Wojick - Senior Editor - """Electricity Daily"" International Magazine" (USA)
Australians among them include this subset:
Dr.Robert M. Carter - Geologist - James Cook University
Dr.Ian Castles - Fellow - Australian National University
Dr.Aynsley Kellow - Professor - University of Tasmania
Mr.William Kininmonth - Former Head - National Climate Centre
Dr.Garth W. Paltridge - Director - The Cooperative Research Centre for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean
Dr.Ian Plimer - Professor - University of Adelaide and University of Melbourne
THE LIST:
Khabibullo Abdusamatov - Scientist - Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)
Dr.William J.r.Alexander - Professor Emeritus - University of Pretoria (South Africa)
Dr.Claude Allegre - Geophysicist - Institute of Geophysics (France)
Dr.August H. Auer - Former Professor of Atmospheric Science - University of Wyoming (USA)
Mr.Dennis Avery - Environment Economist - Center for Global Food Issues (USA)
Dr.Sallie L. Baliunas - Astrophysicist - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA)
Dr.Timothy Ball - Canadian Climatologist and Former Professor - University of Winnipeg (Canada)
Dr.Robert C. "Balling Jr." - Climatologist - Arizona State University (USA)
Dr.Jack Barrett - Chemist and Spectroscopist - Formerly with Imperial College London (UK)
Dr.David Bellamy - Horary Professor for Adult and Continuation Education - Durham University (U.K.)
Dr.Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen - Reader - University of Hull (U.K.)
Dr.Simon Brassell - Geologist - University of Indiana (USA)
Dr.Reid Bryson - Meteorologist - University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
Mr.Nigel Calder - Former Editor - The New Scientist Magazine (International)
Dr.Robert M. Carter - Geologist - James Cook University (Australia)
Dr.Ian Castles - Fellow - Australian National University (Australia)
Dr.Petr Chylek - Physics and Atmospheric Science Adjunct Professor - Dalhousie University (Canada)
Dr.George Chilingar - Professor - University of Southern California (USA)
Dr.Ian D. Clark - Earth Sciences Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Paul Cooper - Professor Emeritus - Laurentian University (Canada)
Dr.Richard S. Courtney - Climate and Atmospheric Science Consultant - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Switzerland)
Dr.Chris de Freitas - Associate Professor and Climate Scientist - The University of Auckland (New Zealand)
Dr.David Deming - Geology Professor - The University of Oklahoma (USA)
Dr.Freeman J. Dyson - Emeritus Professor of Physics - Institute for Advanced Studies (USA)
Dr.Hugh W. Ellsaesser - Physicist/Meteorologist - Formerly with Livermore National Laboratory (USA)
Dr.Robert H. Essenhigh - Professor of Energy Conversion - The Ohio State University (USA)
Dr.Christopher Essex - Applied Mathematics Professor - University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Dr.Bill Gray - Professor Emeritus - Colorado State University (USA)
Dr.Vincent Gray - Expert Reviewer - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (France)
Dr.Keith D. Hage - Meteorology Professor Emeritus - University of Alberta (Canada)
Dr.Howard Hayden - Emeritus Professor of Physics - University of Connecticut (USA)
Dr.Douglas Hoyt - Retired Scientist - Raytheon Company (USA)
Dr.Craig Idso - Founder and Chairman - Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (USA)
Dr.Keith E. Idso - Vice President - Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (USA)
Dr.Sherwood Idso - Adjunct Professor - Arizona State University (USA)
Dr.Andrei Illarionov - Chief Economic Adviser - Russian President Vladimir Putin (Russia)
Dr.Zbigniew Jaworowski - Physicist and Chairman - Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (Poland)
Dr.Ola Johanneseen - Professor - Nasen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (Norway)
Dr.Wibjorn Karlen - Emeritus Professor - Stockholm University (Sweden)
Dr.Aynsley Kellow - Professor - University of Tasmania (Australia)
Dr.Madhav Khandekar - Former Research Scientist - Environment Canada (Canada)
Dr.Leonid F. Khilyuk - Professor - University of Southern California (USA)
Mr.William Kininmonth - Former Head - National Climate Centre (Australia)
Dr.Hans H.J. Labohm - Former Advisor to the Executive Board - Clingendael Institute (Netherlands)
Dr.Douglas Leahey - meteorologist and air-quality consultant - Calgary (Canada)
Dr.David r.Legates - Associate Professor in Climatology - University of Delaware (USA)
Dr.Marcel Leroux - Climatology Professor Emeritus - University of Lyon (France)
Dr.Dennis Lettenmaier - Hydrology Professor - University of Washington (USA)
Dr.Richard Lindzen - Meteorologist - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Dr.Bjorn Lomborg - Associate Statistics Professor - University of Aarhus (Denmark)
Dr.Alister McFarquhar - International Economist - Downing College (U.K.)
Dr.Ross McKitrick - Associate Economics Professor - University of Guelph (Canada)
Dr.Ross McKitrick - Associate Professor - University of Guelph (Canada)
Dr.Patrick J. Michaels - Professor of Environmental Sciences - University of Virginia (USA)
Dr.Fred Michel - Associate Professor - Carleton University (Canada)
Dr.M. r.Morgan - Climate Consultant - First Minister of Wales (U.K.)
Dr.Nils-Axel Morner - Emeritus Professor - Stockholm University (Sweden)
Dr.Tad Murty - Adjunct Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Mr.David Nowell - Fellow - Royal Meteorological Society (Canada)
Dr.Garth W. Paltridge - Director - The Cooperative Research Centre for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (Australia)
Dr.Timothy Patterson - Paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology - Carelton University (Canada)
Dr.Benny Peiser - Professor of Social Anthropology - Liverpool John Moores University (UK)
Dr.Al Pekarek - Associate Professor of Geology - St. Cloud State University (USA)
Dr.Roger "Pielke Sr." - Meteorologist and Emeritus Professor - Cooperative Institute of Research and Environmental Sciences and University of Colorado (USA)
Dr.Ian Plimer - Professor - University of Adelaide and University of Melbourne (Australia)
Dr.Harry N.A. Priem - Emeritus Professor - Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Dr.Andreas Prokoph - Adjunct Professor - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Paul Reiter - Professor - Institut Pasteur (France)
Dr.Art Robinson - Founder - Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (USA)
Dr.Arthur Rorsch - Emeritus Professor of Molecular Genetics - Leiden University (The Netherlands)
Dr.Rob Scagel - Principal Consultant - Pacific Consultants (Canada)
Dr.Frederick Seitz - Former President - The National Academy of Sciences (USA)
Dr.Gary Sharp - Director - Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study (USA)
Dr.Nir J. Shaviv - Astrophysicist - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Dr.Fred Singer - Climatologist - The Competitive Enterprise Institute (USA)
Dr.Graham Smith - Associate Professor - University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Dr.Willie Soon - Physicist - Harvard University (USA)
Dr.Roy Spencer - Principal Research Scientist - The University of Alabama (USA)
Dr.Phillip Stout - Emeritus Professor - School of Oriental and African Studies (England)
Dr.Henrik Svensmark - Climate Scientist - Danish Space Research Institute (Denmark)
Dr.Gordon E. Swaters - Applied Mathematics Professor - University of Alberta (Canada)
Mr.George Taylor - State Climatologist - State of Oregon (USA)
Dr.Hendrik Tennekes - Retired Director of Research - Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (The Netherlands)
Dr.Gerrit J. van der Lingen - Climate Change Consultant - Geoscience Research and Investigations (New Zealand)
Dr.G. Cornelis van Koten - Environmental and Climate Change Professor - University of Victoria (Canada)
Dr.Jan Veizer - Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences - University of Ottawa (Canada)
Dr.Boris Winterhalter - Retired Senior Marine Researcher - Geological Survey of Finland (Finland)
Dr.David E. Wojick - Senior Editor - """Electricity Daily"" International Magazine" (USA)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
