The Deadly Game of Climate Change Denial

Posted by Briony Penn
November 23, 2009

Last December, the odds looked about 50/50 that North Americans would take action on climate change. The US Pew Centre polls put the proportion of Americans thinking global temperatures are rising as a result of human activities at nearly 50%. According to Environics, Canadian interest in climate change was declining but the majority of us still wanted Canada to act and take a strong leadership role in curbing emissions. In the town of Poznan, Poland, the international climate talks were underway setting the agenda for the final summit in Copenhagen this month. There was guarded optimism that a legally-binding international agreement on curbing emissions was possible. That same month, British Columbia passed a law limiting government emissions—laying the groundwork for new tools to fight climate change. Something else happened last December, the cool cycle of La Nina reached its low and it snowed—a lot. 

2008 was a relatively cold year—the coolest in a three-year dip of the last decade. Perceptually, it was the worst thing that could happen to a society wavering in its commitment to act on climate change. The recession had trumped environment as number one issue; so when the snow came, it did more than blanket the landscape, it put a chill on our resolve to venture out and tackle the problem. It also provided the perfect opportunity for the well-oiled, public relations, climate change denial industry to come out with all cylinders firing, propped up by the flagging fourth estate, desperate for a cheap, lucrative story for their sponsors.

On the lead up to Copenhagen, the Pew Centre poll noted showed a drop to a third of Americans believing that global temperatures are rising as a result of human activities. Not surprisingly, US and Canada are poised to reject to a legally-binding deal. Canada is an international disgrace, and now the strategy is how to do damage control so that the failure of Copenhagen won’t be laid at our collective North American doorstep. Over the last month, I’ve had calls from highly respected people across the political spectrum who have asked. “Is it true, that climate change has gone away? What do you make of all the reports telling us that there’s nothing to worry about?” According to pollster, Keith Neumann, from Environics, Canadian interest in climate change has diminished because the average Canadian has yet to see “compelling or tangible signals of climate change” in their own lives. As Neumann describes it, “There is an underlying resistance to change in the absence of crisis because change is difficult and will always encounter resistance – this is how human societies have always operated since civilization began.” The public relations war devoted to denying climate change has capitalized on our wavering mood and a cyclical cooling.  Have we headed into a societal La Nina in our commitment to climate change?

When Andrew Weaver, UVic’s Nobel prize-winning climatologist, was quizzed by a reporter with the Associated Press about the results of the Pew Centre polls, he suggested that “It’s a combination of poor communication by scientists, a lousy summer in the Eastern United States, people mixing up weather and climate, and a full-court press, by public relations firms and lobby groups trying to instill a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public.” When I asked him why his voice wasn’t being heard over the din of the denial stories, such as the radio spots funded by Friends of Science broadcast on CFAX last month, he replied: “We, as a community of international scientists, are refusing to continue to engage anymore in these false debates, because there isn’t one. If we do, then they say there is a debate and they’ve won the PR game.” So what has shaken people’s confidence most? The weather? An effective PR denial machine for the status quo? The lack of scientists’ voices? A deadly combination of the three? And has it led us to effectively kill Copenhagen and an urgent need for global policy on energy?

An understanding of the denial machine and the scientists’ decision not to engage in debate are critical pieces of the puzzle, but first, what is the truth behind the story on the weather? In case you missed it on CFAX last month—we are being told that the earth had cooled this decade, so don’t worry about climate change anymore. The denialists claim the reason you aren’t hearing scientists like Weaver refuting the claims is that they’re too scared to debate. You might have learned from the Times-Colonist, the National Post or even the BBC that earlier warming was all due to sunspots, and because there aren’t many right now that proves climate change has nothing to do with us humans. Other denial arguments point to volcanoes, water vapour and other things beyond human control.  Graphs, like this one from the one from Friends of Science website: http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=2, show dropping global temperatures in the last three years as evidence that the crisis has been averted.

So has it? No, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Paste that butchered graph of the last decade back onto the long upward trend of rising global temperatures from 1880 on and you have a completely different story. The twelve years between 1997 and 2008 constitute the top ten hottest years since we started recording. 2008 is still the tenth hottest year on record. The slight dip in temperatures within this decade is called a cyclical variation. Cyclical variations of the climate are due to natural factors, discussed below, like El Nino oscillations and solar irradiance. The more important line to keep your eye on is the big black line showing the general upward trend of global surface temperature, which is due to increasing greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide. Atmospheric CO2 has now risen to 389 parts per million (ppm) and is rising by more than 2 ppm per year. The Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t had this much carbon dioxide in it for over a million years, and contrary to what you hear from the denial side, that is a big, big problem. Carbon dioxide traps heat.

Against this backdrop, are the strong natural El Nino-La Nina oscillations caused by shifting tropical ocean currents. We notice these cycles living around the Pacific because this is what brings the tuna and the turtles to our waters in the hot phases—or El Nino periods. We hit all-time high temperatures in the El Nino peak years of 1997/98. La Nina peaked last winter; when the world’s scientists were in Poland reaching consensus that their predictions had been conservative and in fact, we faced higher temperatures and a bleaker future than had been previously anticipated. They were watching the climate, but we were watching the weather, and there’s the rub. Weather is what happens in the short term—that we notice. Climate is what happens in the long term—that the scientists research.

The other myth is that global warming is entirely due to the sun. Solar irradiance is another natural cyclical variation that has a smaller effect on climate. When sunspots flare, global temperatures rise slightly. When sunspots diminish, global temperatures cool slightly. Solar cycles generally last between10-12 years from peak to peak. The last cycle has had a longer than normal period of reduced solar irradiance. Whether the sunspots flare or not though, has little impact on the long-term upward trend caused by human-induced greenhouse gases.

Other natural cycles that can influence climate include volcanic activity, Milankovitch’s variations in the Earth’s orbit, and a host of other factors. Singling out each of these variables and testing what drives rising temperatures, is what scientists have been doing in earnest for the last 20 years. There is no debate anymore in the international community, there is consensus—the planet is warming due to human activity, and the real culprit is increasing levels of greenhouse gases. This is caused by burning fossil fuels and the deforestation and degradation of natural ecosystems. By devastating the world’s forests and compromising the world’s oceans, we have reduced our carbon sinks. Plants in forests and oceans are what pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it. Nobody has invented anything more efficient than plants for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. And nothing on the face of this earth pulls carbon and stores it as effectively as a temperate rainforest, like the ones that line the western shores of our island. Our forests are being devastated and so we lose twice: we release CO2 to the atmosphere when they are chopped down and we lose our prime global sinks.

Meanwhile, why is the debate being kept alive by the “full-court press: by public relations firms and lobby groups trying to instil a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public”? The Times Colonist published an article this June called “Settle the Science of Climate Change” pointing to a group allegedly representing 9,000 scholars that state, “As we embark on policy changes that affect nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s important to recognize that the debate on climate change and its causes should continue.” Peter Foster, printed a week later in the National Post: “This is surely one of the remarkable aspects of the climate-change industry. It depends on the utterly non-scientific notion that the enormously complex science of climate is “settled,” even if average global temperatures have actually been falling for the past decade, and the only “consensus” is coming from highly politicized reports issued by the UN and governments trying to justify draconian legislation, such as that of President Barack Obama.”

Andrew Weaver and respected investigative journalists from largely independent news sources like George Monbiot of The Guardian (author of Heat  www.monbiot.com), Andrew Revkin (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com) from the New York Times and Charles Montgomery of the Globe and Mail have been tracking the denial arguments for over a decade. Weaver, in his book Keeping our Cool: Canada in a Warming World, commits the entire first chapter to the cycles of denialism over the course of his career—starting with the non-reporting of the issue to the current “unsettled science” claims. Both Weaver and Monbiot cite the sources, the players, the role of the media, the predictability of increases in denialism material with the approach of international climate talks, and both emphasize the seriousness of the game.

Vancouverite James Hoggan, author of the recently released Climate Cover Up: the Crusade to Deny Global Warming, has researched this issue over the last five years, specifically following the money trails back to their sources. A seasoned public relations businessman himself, he has the advantage of knowing the tricks of his trade—a sort of takes-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief approach. His book, drawn from posts on his website www.desmogblog.com, paints a definitive picture of the players, their tactics in the game, and their motives. When I asked him about the latest cycle of denialism, he replied: “In 35 years of public relations, I have never seen anything close to the magnitude of this current manipulation of the media. It is my view that the climate denial PR machine is working extremely well and we need to stop it. We cannot have the energy industry shaping the policy on climate change.”

According to law professor and expert on denialism, Chris Hoofnagle at the University of California, “denialism is the use of rhetorical techniques and predictable tactics to erect barriers to debate and consideration of any type of reform, regardless of the facts.” The classic tactic is to give the appearance of legitimate debate when there isn’t one, i.e., look for language like “unsettled” and “uncertainty.” Other tactics include cherry-picking facts, using fake experts and sowing confusion through conspiracy theories and fallacies of logic. It is a strategy by which scientific consensus is rejected by groups or individuals for corporate, religious or ideological reasons. Hoofnagle’s research into this phenomenon also reveals similar patterns on topics like Creationism/Intelligent Design, HIV/AIDS denialism, Holocaust denial, 9/11 conspiracies and the first corporate-organized denial machine obfuscating the carcinogenic qualities of second-hand smoke.

The success of the tobacco industry in sowing confusion and slowing public policy on this issue established a now recognizable pattern: Fund fake experts in fake think-tanks and use the media to capitalize on public confusion; call all science that doesn’t agree with your view “junk science;” use fake grass roots organizations (coined “astroturf” groups) to lobby so that they appear to be representing and acting for the common good; accuse those who want to move on public policy of being part of the herd mentality and those refusing to be drawn into false debate of shutting-down debate. These industries have succeeded in selling us dangerous goods longer that we could ever have anticipated, not because of uncertain science but by convincing the public that there was uncertainty.

The oil industry followed hot on the heels of the tobacco industry, even using some of the same PR companies like APCO, fuelling the climate change denial cycles. ExxonMobil alone has funded well over 100 research institutes, websites and lobby groups, with benign-sounding names like the National Environmental Policy Institute, Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation and their famous fake expert scientists such as S. Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz. (For a full list of “experts” and their affiliations start with desmogblog.com). Each of these groups, (for years known collectively as the Global Climate Coalition), has sold scientific uncertainty as their prime product and there’s been no lack of buyers from car manufacturers to politicians and our own Victoria newspaper. Both Monbiot and Weaver cite one of the masterminds behind this tactic Frank Luntz, political consultant to George W. Bush, who said to the Republican Party back in 2002: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Last year, Exxon and two-dozen members of the oil lobby, had the first lawsuit brought against them for conspiring to cover-up the threat of human-induced climate change. The people of Kivalina in Alaska (seventy miles north of the Arctic Circle), who brought forward the lawsuit, are being forced to abandon their homes because of melting permafrost. The Village of Kivalina brought the complaint for damages against the oil industry because they “conspired to create a false scientific debate about global warming in order to deceive the public. Further, each defendant has failed promptly and adequately to mitigate the impact of these emissions, placing immediate profit above the need to protect against the harms from global warming.”

The case is moving from the district court to federal appeal. A similar case, to compensate for the effects of climate change brought forward by Hurricane Katrina victims, recently went on to federal appeal court. The approach of stopping the deception through litigation is beginning to gain traction in the US, and in the wake of lawsuits by US states (now Canadian provinces) against tobacco companies for conspiring to cover up the threat of smoking to human health, Exxon is likely to a face a similar outcome, but by then the opportunities of Copenhagen will be long past.

The best-documented lobbyist for the denial side is Dr. S. Fred Singer, who headed up the Science and Environmental Policy Project with his colleague Frederick Seitz. Both have long and lucrative ties to ExxonMobil. In 1998, they brought out the Oregon Petition, signed by their stable of scientists, which stated there was no convincing evidence for human-induced climate change. Ten years has elapsed since the Oregon Petition, during which a lot of time and energy has gone into researching the signatories to the Oregon Petition and their claims. The world’s accredited scientific community, has reached consensus that this group and their claims have no scientific validity.

Most of the stories in this recent La Nina cycle emanate from Singer’s recent release of his Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change  (as distinct from the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change). Another source is the recent book released by his colleague, Australian mining geologist, Ian Plimer: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - the Missing Science. Hanging on Singer’s every word in Canada are Vancouver’s Exxon-funded Fraser Institute and The Friends of Science, based in Calgary, whose spokesman Tim Ball, a retired geography professor, is Victoria’s most cited climate denial advocate.

The Friends are self-described as “active and retired engineers, earth scientists and other professionals, as well as many concerned Canadians, who believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable.” The Center for Media and Democracy has written a thorough analysis of their pedigree and affiliations. When The Globe and Mail published an article in 2006 identifying significant funding from the oil industry being funnelled to the group through a University of Calgary trust account for “research,” the university conducted an internal review and audit. The account was shut down and Elections Canada was also notified as there were allegations that those same funds had been used to fund third-party election advertising. Funds in trust accounts must be for legitimate research. Like many investigations going to Elections Canada, there was no definitive conclusion but the University of Calgary professor involved, Barry Cooper, was reprimanded last year for acting outside of his authority in directing $170,000 to the PR company APCO, (the same one that served the  tobacco industry so well), and $54,000 to Morten Paulsen Consulting. Morten Paulsen was a spokesperson for the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper during the 2006 election.

Friends of Science are back in the saddle again this year, hosting cross-Canada tours with British denialist celebrity, Lord Christopher Monckton, and Irish filmmakers, Phelim McAleer and wife Ann McElhinney with a documentary called Not Evil Just Wrong. Monckton’s claim to legitimacy is his four years as a policy advisor to British Prime Minister Thatcher in the early 80s. (Which is ironic, because Thatcher clearly didn’t listen to him. She recognized the threat of climate change back in 1988 at a speech to the Royal Society and set up the internationally-renowned Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.) The Irish couple are in the business of producing pro-industry documentaries; their last being Mine Your Own Business that, according to Hoggan, was sponsored by a Canadian gold mining company attempting to set up a gold strip mine in a Romanian village.

Meanwhile the lobby group Americans for Prosperity and the US Chamber of Commerce, amongst others, are running their own PR campaigns and cross-country tours with a similar cast of characters on how climate change policy will destroy the US economy. Hoggan remarks, “make no mistake, these are not grass-roots organizations but very well-funded and well-organized public relations exercises.” As he writes in his book: “Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.”

With legitimate scientists refusing to get drawn into false debate, how are we able to recognize deliberate obfuscation in the media, and differentiate between weather and climate? The Guardian is one of the few newspapers to consistently challenge the latest set of allegations coming out of the denialist camp. The Australian newspaper invited astronomer Michael Ashley to evaluate Plimer’s sunspot theory (Plimer used as evidence an article about the sun being “a plasma diffuser”). Ashley stated that  “It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis.”  But has anyone in the Canadian media challenged the denialists? On the contrary, our media is top heavy with denialists and contrarians. In addition to Peter Foster, the National Post sports his colleagues Terence Corcoran and Larry Solomon; Rex Murphy, burns up space in the Globe and Mail and CBC; and Herb Guenther holds up his end for the Financial Post.

When will the onslaught of denial let up? As Weaver clarifies, “We have a responsibility to educate the public of course, but it is very frustrating dealing with the denialists. They are only interested in proving that there is a debate, so they’ll claim anything. And this has been going on for over a decade. Frankly, I would rather be spending my time talking to high school students about the facts.” In my own discussions with people like Tim Ball, doing research for this article, the argument for and against debate quickly becomes intractable because it is like arguing over someone’s faith.  Monbiot’s final word is that “climate change denial is a matter of religious conviction. The quality of the evidence has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how comprehensively the sources have been discredited, or how ridiculous the claims are. People like Plimer will cling onto anything, however improbable, that allows them to maintain their view of the world.”

Andrew Revkin, of the New York Times, reached the same conclusion in an article called ‘Words are worthless in the climate fight.’ Revkin states that denial and worldview are what dictate the outcome. So if not evidence, nor words, then what is going to influence worldview? What are the social scientists saying —the experts who tackle the messy discipline of human values, religion and other beliefs, attitudes and behaviour?

Veteran British climate change researcher, Mike Hulme, has just written a book Why We Disagree about Climate Change? Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. The book’s hypothesis is that debates about climate change are really debates about our political aspirations, values, hopes and fears. Has climate change become yet another battleground, in which the lines are drawn based on whether one is a progressive thinker, hoping for reform and fearing a continuation of the status quo, or a conservative thinker with the opposite hopes and fears? To test this hypothesis, sample a random group of people and ask them first, if they fear climate change, and second, if they fear the changes that global action on the issue would bring. Then ask them their political leanings.

Enter Robert Gifford, an environmental psychologist from UVic, who has done precisely that. In one of his recent research projects, Gifford questioned a random group of 185 people about their knowledge of climate change, their belief in climate change and what their values were. Not surprisingly, the results show that if we have strong materialistic habits, which we believe will be restricted by efforts to preserve the environment, we will tend to have a high degree of apathy towards the environment and deny that human activities are harmful to it. The findings corroborate those of other researchers who have explored the relationship between values and environmental apathy.

Like Hulme, Gifford has analysed why climate change provides such a “wicked” social problem. A “wicked” problem is a new concept that applies to problems, like poverty and environmental degradation, that can’t be resolved by, and in fact are often exacerbated by, traditional institutional structures. Having studied the psychology of the “tragedy of the commons” for over 25 years, he has a fair idea why. Growing population and increasing pressures on our global commons, in this case the atmosphere, make the challenges to protecting it so wicked. History shows that our ability to manage our common resources inevitably breaks down as population grows. When population increases, it becomes progressively easier for people to cheat or hide their over-exploitation of common resources. It also becomes easier to avoid accountability to, and identify with, their community. Hence the justifiable reluctance of the developing nations to act in light of the industrialized nations’ refusal to take responsibility for mitigating the problem for which they are largely responsible. A sense of injustice is a huge deterrent to action. How, on a planet of 9 billion people, can we fairly adjudicate how much atmospheric carbon each individual is allowed to generate over a lifetime? Or how much each nation is allowed to generate over the course of a century?

In another research project, Gifford asked 1000 respondents what their greatest obstacles were to “becoming sustainable.” From the results, he identified thirteen inter-related obstacles to action, which he refers to as the “dragons” of unsustainability. The research demonstrates why we are so vulnerable to those sowing seeds of uncertainty—uncertainty enables some to entrench more deeply in their belief system—the dragon that the PR industry has tapped into so successfully. The other dragons are classic human qualities, from habit to hubris and the refusal to be told what to do by anyone. A quick review of some columnists in our national newspapers identifies similar traits: Rex Murphy is not going to be “Following the global-warming herd” while Peter Foster is not going to join the “Green hysteria.” Our own prime minister believes that climate change is a socialist plot! The common denominator of these self-styled contrarians or libertarians is, according to Gifford, reactance—a strong determinant of inaction, which ties into a strong belief in free market ideology.

Moderate dragons of inaction include, what Gifford calls ‘environmental numbness’—“I don’t think about it, I’m too busy raising my kids”; a strong desire for fairness, as mentioned above—“If they aren’t doing it in China, then why should we?”; tokenism—“I have a hybrid SUV so I’ve done my part”; and conflicting goals—“I have to drive my SUV to keep my kids safe.” However, these all pale in comparison to the biggest dragon for most of us, our perceived lack of control over an overwhelming situation—the “What can I do?” syndrome. Hoggan’s observations of human nature in the PR business corroborate Gifford’s findings. “I think the biggest obstacle is not that people don’t know, it is that they feel too overwhelmed to act.”

This summer, at the 11th European Congress of Psychology, Gifford presented his thirteen dragons on non-sustainability with a call for his profession to step up the research into the human problem of climate change inaction. Part of the solution, as he sees it, is to provide information to people not just into the science of climate but the science of our minds. Currently, there are no social scientists on the IPCC, yet all the effort, time and expense of proving the science is wasted if it is falling on deaf ears. As Gifford remarks, “It’s not always about the data. People want their beliefs confirmed. And if that means, that the world is fine and things can go on as normal, then that’s what they’ll hear.”

What people hear is what people receive through the media, so Hoggan’s solution is reigning in the media under a professional ethics code: “Journalists should be required to ask “the experts” two important questions: What are your credentials? And who is funding your research?” I asked Hoggan those two questions: He’s a PR guy investigating his own industry and is mostly self-funded with support from John Lefebvre, internet gambling entrepreneur. Hoggan is a contributor to EnergyBoom, an online blog for the alternative energy sector and his clients in the past have included this sector, but all of this is clearly disclosed on his website. 

Weaver’s answer is to keep people informed and make it illegal to (as the people of Kivalina identified) “create a false scientific debate in order to deceive the public.” Regulations should be in place that require full transparency of  “astroturf” organizations and fake research institutes, like Friends of Science. Hoggan goes one step further and recommends that they be brought under the same lobbying legislation that was originally set up to safeguard the public from manipulation by lobbyists for the same reasons. According to Hoggan, industry started sidestepping the legislation and hiring PR firms to set up these fake organizations when they found that the public held little trust in their industry spokespeople.

George Monbiot identifies one other obstacle to inaction and that is the influence of post-career professionals who have nothing to gain financially but have aspirations of going down in history as “the guys who perceive that they single-handedly rescued humanity from its own idiocy.” Monbiot was pointing to the British TV celebrities Lord Monckton and David Bellamy, as examples. This personality trait could fall on either side of the fake debate, as our celebrity-hungry society searches for a hero to rescue us. I put it to Hoggan if he places any value on heroics, and he points out, “it will be civil society that rescues humanity from itself.”

If civil society cannot agree to set the rules of the game, which demand transparency, then I fear we are in for inaction. I imagine that I will be telling my grandchildren in a few years, that the reason Canada did nothing at Copenhagen this December was because a group of influential post-career oil engineers and geologists managed to make a compelling PR case out of bad weather to prolong a lifestyle that they hoped would last at least as long as their lives. But as all natural phenomena cycle through, no one, not even the Friends of Science sitting in their comfortable offices in Calgary, are going to be able to ignore the weather or the climate or my fury, because the likes of me haven’t gone away either. I hope, for our sakes, it won’t be too late for the Earth’s sake as well.

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Editor’s note: versions of Dr. Penn’s article have been also published in the December issue of Focus Magazine: ”A Climate of Denial,“ as well as the Gulf Islands Driftwood: “Questioning of climate change heats up.”