Core Dump

This is going to be a much longer post than usual, but I think it's worth reading.

There have been some really interesting articles this week, all dealing with the subject of climate change and how public opinion is being manipulated by the manufactured doubt industry -- the same people who kept the tobacco industry in business for many years despite medical research showing it caused cancer and who fought banning CFCs despite clear evidence they were destroying the Earth's ozone layer. Now they're working for the oil industry, sowing the seeds of doubt about man-made climate change.

First we have this superb post, The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy by Dr. Jeff Masters. Here, in one short excerpt, you'll see what's at work here:

Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):

Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000

Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:

Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000

If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Next, we have this article from the Globe and Mail, about a group dubiously calling itself Friends of Science, who are sponsoring a spectacularly wrongheaded series of radio ads.

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month's United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

I heard one of these on Q107 and I almost had to take a blood pressure pill. "The Earth isn't warming. It's coooling." I'd like to see the evidence for that statement, especially in light of this article in the Globe and Mail, which descirbes recent research that clearly refutes one of the claims often made by climate change deniers - that Arctic polar ice is increasing, not decreasing.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multiyear frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can't support the weight of the bears.

“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice – the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,” said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

“Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice] has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice.”

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Dr. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.

The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.

“As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multiyear ice floe broke up into pieces,” Dr. Barber said. “This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes.”

The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.

Multiyear sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Dr. Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now two metres at most.

Maybe it's getting colder in Calgary, where the group is located, close to their oil-industry sponsors. There may be reason to doubt the role of humanity in climate change (although I think that it's pretty well settled), but that statement is a Big Lie in the same class with Holocaust denial.

Here's an article by Tyler Hamilton of the Toronto Star in which he looks at how the media are handling the climate change story, and finds them wanting.

I apologize on behalf of my profession.

If it's true that Canadians and Americans have become less concerned about the potential impact of climate change, and that more consider global warming a hoax, some blame can certainly be directed at the news media.

"The media (are) giving an equal seat at the table to a lot of non-qualified scientists," Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told a group of environment and energy reporters during a week-long learning retreat in New Mexico.

I was among them, listening to Betancourt and two of his colleagues describe the measurable impacts climate change is having on the U.S. southwest. Drought. More frequent and damaging forest fires. Northward migration of forest and animal species. Hotter, longer growing seasons. Less snow pack. Earlier snow melt.

"The scientific evidence reported in peer-reviewed journals is growing by the day, and it suggests the pace of climate change has surpassed the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years ago.

Here's what he has to say about the recent hacking of climate change scientists' emails, about which I posted earlier this week.

The emails, from what I've read, do show that not all scientists agree, that some scientists don't like other scientists, and that some scientists are struggling with the complexity of their work. What these emails do not show is that there's any conspiracy or that consensus around the reality of human-influenced global warming is beginning to crack.

Still, that won't stop the skeptics from cherry picking what's in those emails and claiming this is some kind of smoking gun that will derail Copenhagen. The blogosphere is abuzz, and news media are never ones to turn down a juicy controversy. The timing of the hack makes it all the more suspicious, but no less dramatic.

It's a shame.

It really is. And we and our children are going to pay the price.

Finally, a column from the Star by Peter Gorrie looking at the issue of the Anglia emails. He ties the hack into both the campaign of disinformation that this post started out describing and the effects of the real warming that our planet is experiencing.

Black, they thunder, is white, and – skilled and persistent communicators that they are, with plentiful political, media and industry backing – they manage to convince, or at least confuse, many people.

Keep that in mind when considering the hacking of 4,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, a major centre of climate change study.

Climate skeptics claim a few bits extracted from those generally innocuous discussions among climate scientists – misunderstood or taken out of context – constitute a scandal. The gist: the scientists faked and fudged numbers, then masked their chicanery by attacking their opponents.

They skeptics got what they wanted from what many journalists, apparently without embarrassment, call "Climategate." We're now parsing emails and reporting demands for inquiries instead of focusing on the evidence of human-made climate change.

Tellingly, coverage of a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are rising and impacts are happening much faster than previously forecast was dwarfed by excitement over the emails.

This is one article that Tyler Hamilton won't have to apologize for.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science