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Climate change
The Rise of climate science denialism
The author attends a roundtable at UBC where leading lights of the denial community clash with truth seekers
By Hugh Brisse
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It’s become a cliché of the Google era that the media-sphere has been and will continue to be increasingly democratized through the internet. Just look at the spectrum of ideas being disseminated through blogs, online magazines, and indymedia sites and you’ll see that there is a great deal of truth to this conceit. And yet there is also an extremely powerful, countervailing force in the form of the consolidation and monopolization of the media (including the Net) by giant interests that hope to sway the public, not so much in the direction of truth as towards certain consumer choices and compliant political positions.
Perhaps the starkest, most epochal, example of this phenomenon occurred when FoxNews, a transparent right-wing propaganda machine that’s garnered an incredible amount of legitimacy in the world’s most powerful and influential nation, seized the presidency for George W Bush by falsely declaring him the winner of the 2000 election. It was bad enough that a major media outlet was allowed to publicize tendentious lies to the naïve American public. But what was even more stupefying was the domino effect that ensued as all the other major television, radio, and internet news outlets unthinkingly scrambled to toe the line.
But all of that is ancient history. And the game hasn’t stopped evolving. In fact, one of the most significant and least publicized fronts in the war on critical thinking has been the rapid proliferation of so-called political think tanks.
For years now, American right-wing think tanks have exercised an enormous amount of influence over both the media and the two political parties. Unfortunately, what we don’t read in the newspapers that give these think tanks credence is that many of the climate change skeptics are funded by giant fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil.
Canada not immune
It turns out that naïve, oil-rich Canada is far from immune to such crass manipulation. A few weeks ago, Toronto’s Desmogblog got a hold of and leaked the Fraser Institute’s attack on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion that key heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere "have increased markedly as a result of human activities." The blog also exposed the not-so-incidental fact that the Fraser Institute has received over $120,000 from ExxonMobil over the last three years.
All of these issues were paramount at UBC’s roundtable discussion on climate change on March 6. The panelists were James Hogan (founder of the DeSmogBlog), Chris Mooney (author of the The Republican War on Science), Ross Gelbspan (noted Washington Post journalist and author of Boiling Point), Kirk LaPointe (managing editor of The Vancouver Sun), and Hadi Dowlatabadi (UBC Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability).
The main thrust of the discussion was the disjunction between the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change and the incredible amount of skepticism that oil and coal companies have been able to inject into the public arena.
Gelbspan and Mooney, both engaging and articulate advocates of countering the war on climate science with the cold hard facts, have meticulously documented the Bush administration’s methods of stifling an informed discussion on climate change. According to Gelbspan, 46% of American federal scientists have at some point during the Bush administration’s tenure felt pressure to eliminate the words "climate change," "global warming" or similar terms from communications about their work.
The illusion of ambiguity
Mooney is particularly focused on the role that pseudo-objective think tanks funded by oil and coal corporations play in creating the illusion of ambiguity on the issue of human contribution to climate change. In the US, groups with esteemed-sounding names, such as the Cato Institute, the Free Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Insitution, the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, and the Hudson Institute—all of which have received copious funding from Exxon—are working round the clock to convince the general public that the science is much more ambiguous than the scientists would have us believe.
James Hogan, who is hugely influenced and inspired by Gelbspan’s and Mooney’s work, pointed out that, as a result of this obfuscation flowing from the collusion between government and industry, the public is in fact much more unsure about the issue than the scientists are. Even in Canada, a mere 53% of the population is convinced that we are contributing to global warming.
While Hogan joins Gelbspan and Mooney in asserting that it is essential for journalists to take a proactive stance towards “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science” at every turn by exposing groups like the Fraser Institute, Hadi Dowlatabadi, a self-congratulatory Exxon-funded UBC scientist, wants the media to stop focusing so much on climate change. He also made a point of voicing his disdain for Al Gore and his documentary, though he didn’t supply any reasons as to why Gore’s environmentalism is so reprehensible. Not surprisingly, Dowlatabadi’s most progressive advice on how to take care of the environment was that people should switch to low-sulphur diesel.
What the big media
think of you
Far more chilling, however, was LaPointe’s more innocuous-sounding view on the role newspapers should play in public life. According to Vancouver Sun editor LaPointe, at bottom, the public is far more interested in Britney Spears’ haircut than the effects of global warming. For editors like him, newspapers have no guardian role to play and thus have no reason to educate an indolently indifferent public.
The problem with this worldview is it makes journalists lazy exponents of the status quo that companies like Exxon are so eager to capitalize on. A complacent, compliant newspaper that panders to the lowest common denominator and doesn’t ask the difficult questions may make for good breakfast-hour entertainment, but in so doing it does the community it claims to serve an immense disservice—while Exxon and the Fraser Institute get away with murder.
Just the fact that Harper’s government can shamelessly take so many pages right out of the Bush playbook on the environment and the nebulous War on Terror and still be surging in the polls proves that now, more than ever, the Canadian public needs brave, conscientious journalists and editors that aren’t afraid to tell people the inconvenient truths that some or even most of us don’t want to hear.
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