Who are the climate skeptics?
Sean McDonagh
What is their agenda?
IT IS not often that we see egg on a judge's face. But some egg must have dribbled down the chin of Justice Barton on October 12, 2007. Early in the week he had highlighted "nine scientific errors" in Al Gore's documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.
While agreeing that the film was broadly accurate he ruled in the United States of America (US) High Court that the film could be shown in schools only if it was accompanied by guidance notes to balance what he termed Al Gore's "one-sided" views.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee did not share Judge Barton's view when they decided that the 2007 Nobel Peace prize should be shared equally between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore. The committee's statement commended Gore and praised him "as one of the world's leading environmental politicians."
Who are the climate skeptics and what is their agenda? The High Court case was brought by Stewart Dimmock, a governor in a school in Kent and a member of a political group called New Party. This body is opposing any effort by the government to show Gore's film in secondary schools. They claim that it presents "an apocalyptic vision"that seriously misrepresents what is happening on the climate front.
But Stewart Dimmock is not your average civic-minded John Smith from a middle-class neighbourhood. He has support of petrochemical and mining companies. The New Party, which supported his case at the High Court, received one million pounds sterling between 2004 and 2006 from a single donor, Robert Durward. He is the owner of Cloburn Quarry Limited which is based in Lanarkshire, United Kingdom.
The New Party advised Channel 4 on the editing of a television documentary, Great Climate Swindle. In the wake of that programme, John Houghton, former director general of the UK Meteorological Office, wrote to the Catholic journal, The Tablet. He pointed out that the programme was a confused mixture of truth, half-truths and falsehoods and extremely misleading.
Professor Karl Wunsch, one of the scientists who was interviewed on the programme, complained to Ofcom that he was misled and misrepresented in the programme. Houghton concluded that " while recognising the role that sunspots play in climate change, the increase in CO2 during the past 40 years is the main cause of the current crisis (March 13, 2007) .
Energy and mining corporations have used all kinds of tactics to hijack the climate change debate over the past 20 years. During the 1990's in the run up to the Kyoto conference, a group called the Carbon Club tried to undermine the growing consensus that climate change was a direct result of burning fossil fuel.
The Carbon Club was a Who's Who of US business and industrial interests. It included Exxon-Mobile, Shell, Ford, General Motors and leading steel, coal, aluminum and energy corporations. They ran advertisements on TV disputing the conclusions of the IPCC. They succeeded admirably in sowing seeds of confusion in the minds of the public.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor at the University of California, has analysed 923 papers on climate change in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003. Her article in the journal Science in December 2004, notes that not a single author had disputed the fact that human activity is causing a rise in global temperatures.
An analysis of popular media for the same period found that 53% of articles expressed doubt about the cause of climate change. This is exactly what the Carbon Club wants. If there is a doubt about the science of climate change, politicians are prevented from taking decisive action to curb greenhouse gases. In the past few years as the scientific consensus on climate change has grown, many companies such as Shell and British Petroleum have left the Carbon Club, but Exxon-Mobile continues to fund research by climate change skeptics.
Writing in Vanity Fair (May 2007) Michael Shnayerson reported that between 1998 and 2005, Exxon-Mobile spent an estimated $16 million funding climate studies in over 30 institutes. The recipients of these subsidies range from the well-known American Enterprise for Public Policy Research, which received $240,000 in 2005 to the obscure Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow which received $90,000 in same year.
Though none of these studies were peer-reviewed which puts them in the category of not real science, they were cited by the Bush Administration as an excuse for not signing the Kyoto Protocol and for blocking any mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006, the Royal Society in Britain has written to Exxon-Mobile imploring it to stop funding climate skeptics. This is why many people are boycotting their products.
