The Sham of the Climate Change Deniers
The NYT Friday writes this must read piece of reporting on how the corporate climate change deniers came to ignore their own internal review panel — who wrote:
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
Instead of listening to their scientific experts, the industries and industry associations most affected by being associated with the causes of climate change banded together to create a massive PR and disinformation campaign. That campaign spent years and huge amounts of money to do nothing more than to create a sense among the public that the real work of scientists and engineers actually studying this issues was illegitimate. And they did this by creating the “scientists differ” narrative:
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
And that narrative was supported by a huge machine that provided prepared talking points as well as prepared pundits ready to sit with the media who inexplicably persisted with their so-called “objectivity” on this subject. A stance that has nothing to do with facts and how science is done, and a stance hat these deniers — even as their coalition has fallen apart (even XOM thinks that climate change is real now). That need to pretend to some objectivity has placed some of the best scientists we have in opposition to alchemists.
Friday, Vice President Al Gore testified about climate change in Congress (video coming up), and pointedly compared the climate change deniers (we’re lookin’ at you, Barton) to Bernie Madoff. The deniers are perpetuating a massive sham designed to try to kick the can down the road on even thinking about the effects of climate change, much less effort to mitigate it.
Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change
Wow, corporate climate change deniers were just as honest as corporate tobacco researchers.
They give scientists who work for corporations a bad name. The vast, vast majority of scientists who work for corporations are good scientists, and not industry shills. The shills generally gather in industry coalitions, and as you see, their own scientists were telling them the truth. The PR machine just kept on churning.
It does make me ill that there is always something with a Ph.D. willing to lie to the public for money. It makes us all look bad, since most people don’t have the skills to judge who is right and who is wrong.
Indeed they were — and if cigarettes were an issue right now, wingnuts would be falling all over themselves to fall in line with the corporate “scientists differ” line.
seriously, what do scientists know. they attend those fancy-schmancy liberal elite colleges and just want capitalism to die
DV,
Are you trying to pick a fight?
DV’s probably already drunk.