"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 DUFFY
The 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 BURKE
PPS. 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?"