Inside the Global Warming Hysteria Machine

This week's cover story on Newsweek promising an inside look at the Global Warming Denier's well-funded machine. It is actually a hatchet job. This article is just one example of a concerted effort to convince the country that there is no real argument about Global Warming and that anyone who says differently has been paid by ExxonMobil. This begins in the first paragragh:

{...} As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on.

This is a clever statement. It is factually correct - Boxer was told this but what Boxer was told was incorrect, or at least misleading. The think-tank in question had received less than 1% of its funding from ExxonMobil and it was offering a standard honorarium to scientists to compensate them for the time needed to write a peer-reviewed article.

Since 2005 at least, there has been a movement to shout down any skepticism to Global Warming. It has several features reflected in this article. The primary one is to insist that Global Warming is settled science. Al Gore did this in an Inconvenient Truth. This article echoes Gore.

In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes." Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people's. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.

This paragraph also denigrates skeptics. It would be more accurate to call the skeptics "Meteorologists" than "TV weathermen" but that would imply that they know a lot about weather. Instead, the Hysteria Machine wants to depict skeptics as people working out of their field or paid stooges.

Look at this example:

Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")

Of course it is a hatchet job. There is no mention of the World Climate Report's total budget or what percentage that $165,000 was or the circumstances of how it was granted. The reader does not know if this was 100% of Michaels' budget or 0.1%. It is quite likely that Newsweek has received more money from ExxonMobil over the years than any of the skeptics.

Another way that the Hysteria Machine manipulates public opinion is through careful use of smear terms. There are no "skeptics", only deniers.

Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said.

Gee - why would they hate a term that equates them with Holocaust Deniers? This is the only time that they are not called deniers in the article.

The other smear is here:

Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Now warming skeptics have been equated with Nazi sympathizers and cigarette makers. As a topper, it's supposed to be the same companies charging you $3+ per gallon. It makes you want to stone them on sight, doesn't it?

The article also uses some of the same tricks it attributes to the skeptics. It has this to say of the skeptics:

ICE ads asked, "If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?" This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

Newsweek is not above picking and choosing its facts to prove global warming. They have a graphic showing the breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica. While this looks scary, they neglect to mention that Antarctic warming is limited to this small portion of the continent and the rest is staying constant or cooling. Giving that sort of factoid might lead you to think that there is some debate about climate science.

For a real look at the debate, look at the book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. The author meant this to be an attack on Republicans as a follow up to his book The Republican War on Science. ALong the way he discovered that the skeptics couldn't be dismissed so easily. In interviews he has said that he isn't sure which side is true. This doesn't fit in at all with the Hysteria Machine's world view so it is never mentioned.

Also missing from the article and the Hysteria Machine's message in general is any recognition of the limits of Kyoto.

MIT's Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he'd done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would "do nothing, at great expense."

This is exactly right. Kyoto was originally meant as a "first step" with most of the cuts being made by America. If Kyoto had been successfully implemented, emissions would still be higher than in 1990 because China and India are excluded from making cuts.

The Hysteria Machine does not represent science. They pick and choose. They exaggerate (remember Gore's prediction of a 20+ rise in ocean levels - that didn't come from any scientist). When a preliminary copy of the most recent IPCC report failed to be scary enough they lobbied the writers to punch it up. They also pressured the IPCC to put numbers on their estimates - a percentage of how sure the IPCC is that their figures are correct.

With this article, Newsweek established itself as a partner on the Hysteria Machine. They didn't quote scientists, they quoted Democrats. They used the Hysteria Machine's terminology. We can only be thankful that they didn't join Robert F Kennedy jr and call for skeptics to be treated as traitors - just corporate stooges.