The Denial Industry

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After this disappeared from the ATS front page, I had a heck of a time finding it again. Decided to memorialize it in a thread all its own.

For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco.

...The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world. ...By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.

The denial industry

There's a fund of hard data here.

Go at it, add more, whatever.

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The Royal Society, an international science organization, asked Exxon Mobil to stop financing "anti-climate change" lobbying groups and to change its public reports to accurately reflect scientists' opinions on climate change. The Royal Society dates back to the 1600’s - Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein belonged to the organization - and currently has 1,400 members.

Exxon Mobil says, “We know that carbon emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change - we don’t debate or dispute this,” and that it is "taking steps to minimize emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from its operations."

There is a “false sense somehow that there is a two-sided debate going on in the scientific community” about the origins of climate change, said Bob Ward, the senior manager for policy communication at the Royal Society. ...The reality is that “thousands and thousands” of scientists around the world agree that climate change is linked to greenhouse gases, he said, with “one or two professional contrarians” who disagree.

Dozens of lobbying groups, some of them receiving financing from Exxon Mobil, are relying on these contrarians as experts, Mr. Ward said. Meanwhile, he said, Exxon Mobil writes in documents it distributes to the public that it is difficult to determine the extent to which climate change can be attributed to human actions, a view that, he said, the vast majority of scientists do not share. ...In 2005, Exxon Mobil sent $2.9 million to 39 groups active in the United States that spread misleading information about climate change, Mr. Ward said, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the International Policy Network and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil said...“We know that carbon emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change - we don’t debate or dispute this.” ...(and) was taking steps to minimize emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from its operations.

British Science Group Says Exxon Misrepresents Climate Issues

Hmmm.

wd



[edit on 23-9-2006 by soficrow]

Soficrow, thank you for this re-posting. Recent books by the investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan (such as Boiling Point) follow the money trail between far too many climate change skeptics, Big Oil, and others. Gelbspan's website, which includes worldwide follow-up reporting on climate change, is:

www.theheatisonline.org...

In November 2006, the documentary DVD An Inconvenient Truth will be available for purchase. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore will include new material on that DVD. In recent interviews, he notes that the most popular table from his slide show presentation on global warming (now also available as that DVD and in a book of the same title) is the summary of a scientific meta-analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change over many years. The number of peer-reviewed scientific articles arguing against global warming was zero, while during that same time period, the number of articles arguing against global warming in the popular press was over 50%. That's a really big disconnect.

On most days corporate interest and the interest of governments are aligned rather perfectly ( if government is not directly owned by corporate managers) but i believe that the global warming issue is one of the things they can't seem to agree on ...

Our governments as always aim to control people and since cheap energy makes us ever more independent governments will always seek to control it and generally restrict it's flow by whatever means possible.

Industry controls us trough convincing us what we need and when we need it and global warming just do not fit into that picture at all so they will do whatever they can ( whatever the reality may be) to deny that humans activity is a important factor in climate change...

Having established that ( well it's what i have come to believe anyways) one can ask which 'group' invests more money in scientific research and education as that may obviously play a very large part...

Based on what i have seen i can not understand how we save the environment ( if we are in fact responsible) by pathetic half measures like Kyoto ( will at best MAYBE buy us six years by 2100) and how we will in fact be able to change atmospheric conditions by anything other than deliberate and specific research to curb or negate certain emissions.

How many of you know that China and India ( and most of the third world) will be able to pollute as much as they like under the Kyoto treaty and that it will only restrict living standards in the West?

Beside the fact that Exxon and it's ilk is ripping us off daily do any of us imagine that they could do this without the help of policy makers in government? Why would they fund these groups with such small amounts of money while giving millions to staging uprisings in former Soviet republics? Why do i have to search so hard to hear anything about massive new glacier formation and declining sea levels in the arctic?

The human inspired, caused, significantly affected global warming myth is just another scarcity paradigm that is tailor made to appeal to intellectuals that want to save us by telling us we are evil people for living so well and aspiring to do ever better for ourselves our communities and our countries , WHATEVER the cost.

I really enjoyed your selective use of quoting Sofi; you must think we have done no research of our own.

Lets start with some basic graphs indicating what percentage of the so called global warming gases are in fact being released trough human activity....

Summing up the case is an article published earlier this year by Wallace Broecker in the prestigious pages of Science entitled "Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?" His answer is a resounding yes. As Craig and Keith Idso report in a March 7 editorial on their Webpage, Broecker recounts substantial evidence for a series of climatic warmings spaced at roughly 1,500-year intervals. Broecker explains the science of reconstructing the histories of surface air temperatures by examining temperature data from "boreholes." From some 6,000 boreholes on all continents, this evidence confirms that the Earth was significantly warmer a thousand years ago and two degrees Celsius warmer in Greenland. This data, Robinson warns, is less detailed and authoritative than the evidence from the Sargasso Sea and from the Chinese peat bogs. But together with the independent historical record, the collective evidence is irrefutable. Thousands of years of data demonstrate that in the face of a few hundred parts per million increase in CO2, temperatures today, if anything, are colder than usual. Temperatures in Antarctica, for example, have been falling for the last 20 years. The global satellite record of atmospheric temperature, confirmed by weather balloons, shows little change one way or another for the last three decades. Terrestrial temperature stations, on average, show more warming over the past century, but many are located in areas that were rural when the stations were established and are densely urban today, a change which causes local warming. The dominance of natural cycles globally is not surprising since, as Baliunas and Soon report, the impact of changes in sun energy output are some 70,000 times more significant than all human activity put together.

In the end, the global warming panic will take its place in the history books next to other environmental chimeras, such as the threat of DDT (but not of pandemic malaria), the peril of nuclear power (but not of coal mining), the brain-curdling effect of cellphones (but not of far more potent sun rays), the menace of powerlines (but not of poverty), the poison of alar (though not of rotten apple juice), the danger of asbestos in walls (but not of fire), the carcinogenic impact of PCBs (but not of carrots, peanut butter, coffee and other items that test more toxic in the same way) and the horror of radon and other sources of low-level radiation (despite its beneficial effect on health through a process called hormesis).

Overall, the situation is simple. Politicized scientists with government grants and dubious computer temperature models persuaded the world's politicians to make pompous fools of themselves in Kyoto. Socialist politicians were happy to join an absurd movement to impose government regulations over the world energy supply and thus over the world economy. The scientific claims and computer models have now blown up in their faces. But rather than admit error they persist in their fear-mongering. When this happened with DDT, hundreds of millions of people died of malaria. They continue to die. How many people would die as a result of an energy clamp on global capitalism?

www.oism.org...

Maybe there really is global warming. And maybe the 4.5 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases we humans generate is responsible for it, as opposed to the 95.5 per cent generated by nature. But, as long as the UN and others substitute hot air for hard science, Bush is right to suspect it's eco-bunk. Even American politicians who believe in global warming don't believe in Kyoto. Geoffrey Lean might like to note that the day that will live in infamy is not March 28, 2001 but July 26, 1997 - the date when the US Senate voted against the proposed treaty 95-0. Not one Senator - not even Ted Kennedy - voted in favour. In Kyoto, Al Gore signed anyway, but that old fraud Clinton never bothered sending it to the Senate for ratification because he needed 67 votes and he knew he was 67 short. Mr Lean and his chums have had four years to get used to the idea that Kyoto's dead, not because of one right-wing oil stooge but because of the entire American political establishment. It's doubtful whether even Senator Hillary Clinton would vote for this. When Bush announced he'd be drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, Hillary said his "charm offensive" was really a "harm offensive". When Bush decided against Federal regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, Hillary observed that "it looks like we've gone from CO2 to 'See you later'." When he scrapped proposed federally-mandated reductions on arsenic in the water supply, she jeered, "It's arsenic and about face". But when Bush scrapped Kyoto, Hill made no puns whatsoever. Even Hillary knows Kyoto's off the graph.

As for John Gummer's protests about the US invading European sovereignty, the whole treaty is an assault on national sovereignty, especially America's. The US cannot comply with the accords without substantial job losses - 100,000 in Michigan alone, 80,000 in Georgia. Worse, the treaty would set up an international emissions-trading market, whereby the only way to mitigate against the economic shrinkage would be for the US to buy "pollution permits" from Russia, India or various developing countries, which would be allowed to sell their "pollution rights" for billions of dollars which they could then use to reduce their own emissions. The US would wind up paying the Russian mafia or the Congo's nutcake of the month for the privilege of not closing an auto plant in Flint, Michigan. Do you really think the generals and the KGB are going to let the Kremlin spend an estimated $40 billion cheque from Uncle Sam on cleaner factories for lead-free Ladas? At best you'd have a greenhouse-gas version of the European Fisheries Policy, under which the British can't fish in their own waters but any passing Spaniard trailing his pantyhose off the back of the trawler can. The Kyoto treaty was a deranged proposal to give the world's loopier jurisdictions a veto over America's economy.

The US was supposed to go along with this because it would be a "symbolic gesture". But we've had eight years of symbolic gestures, and Bush feels it's time to get real, especially on the environment. Messrs Gummer, Lean and the overheated Europeans should chill out. Every significant environmental improvement - from lead-free gas to recycling - comes from America, and global warming, such as it is, will be solved - like most problems - by American ingenuity, not Euro-regulation. The era of Clintonian posturing is over, chaps. Wake up and smell the CO2.

www.oism.org...

Does the possibility exist that the whole GW thing is so ludicrous that not even the US government ( despite some press agencies best efforts) will touch it knowing full well that the Americans will never stand for such a open attack on their standards of living? I don't know but considering what scams they will attempt it's interesting that this one with it's obvious beneficial aspects ( social control ) is not being pushed by the government but by the media and people on the Internet? Don't believe anything till it has been officially denied? This is certainly one of the more interesting ATS topics.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX

I really enjoyed your selective use of quoting Sofi; you must think we have done no research of our own.

The opening paragraph:

"After this disappeared from the ATS front page, I had a heck of a time finding it again. Decided to memorialize it in a thread all its own."

The denial industry


FYI - There's a fund of hard information in the article - I just wanted it archived for easy access.


For actual examples of selective quoting, check out these threads:


Financing Pseudoscience: Intelligent Design and the Evolution "Debate."

Backgrounds of Global Warming Skeptics

Creating Disease: Pollution, Mutation, Adaptation and Evolution



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(I've reposted this information from my own thread which I requested be closed. It is very much the same story as soficrow outlined in this thread)

I watched CBC's Fifth Estate last night and this documentary certainly established my view that certain governments are spreading disinformation to undermine the public reaction to the effects of Global Warming.

www.cbc.ca...

The Denial Machine follows a small but powerful group of scientists who argue, among other claims, that global warming may be a good thing and it investigates their links to the oil and coal industries

-snip-

The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies.

Who is keeping the debate of global warming alive?
The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

It was (in my mind, anyways) a very convincing argument about the people who are travelling the country, giving speeches debunking the perceived threat to the environment in the interest of the oil, coal and gas sectors.


soficrow

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
fixed link

[edit on 25/11/06 by masqua]

Thanks for bringing this central topic to the surface again Sofi.

Your opening link The Denial Industri states...

It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.

In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."

Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.

Not sure if this means 1992 is reffered to when misinformation started. It goes much further back. It started with Hollywood black/white movies, with Humprey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson etc. heavily smoking through the plots of the gangster movies of the time. They made the role models.

And the deliberate funding of key persones in science and health started much earlier than 1992.

I have a Danish example which broke in the early 1990's, about Dr. Tage Voss, a prominent authority on health issues in Denmark, who was unveiled as a "patent agent" of Philip Morris and at least since 1987 on their payroll.

Doctor got Tobacco Money(site in Danish - my translation)
The American tobacco giant Philip Morris have for years secretly influenced the Danish debat on the dangers of tobacco and Danish policies on smoking. Since 1987 the Danish smokers society, called Hen-Ry (conciderate smokers) are now known to have recieved contributions from the tobacco giant for media coaching, promotions, conferences and such. Besides for a number of years the giant had the wellknown national doctor Tage Voss on their payroll. The now 82-year-old physician have repeatedly denied that any proffs between lungcancer and tobacco exist.

The only post in English on Dr. Tage Voss I've been able to find is in this link of case stories. It's on the middle of the page. Unfortunately the refference link within it doesn't seem to work anymore.

health.centreforce.com...
From TOBACCO NEWS Summer, 1996
A very prominent Danish doctor has for years been on the payroll of American tobacco giant Philip Morris for "being available" to journalists and politicians involved in the tobacco debate. Among other things, he has denied that smoking can cause cancer... "People would have consider Dr Tage Voss' statements on smoking differently if they had known that he was paid by Philip Morris," says the chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Danish Medical Association, Ms Hanne Mollerup, to the news bureau Ritzau. Philip Morris' own records show that the today 82-year old Tage Voss has been on the company payroll for years...
Source: www.tobacco.org...

This is just one example. From the Danish debate I can recall a handfull going back to the eighties. The first one I rember was when the effect of greenhouse gasses came to public awareness. Unfortunately I've forgotten the names of the two scientific opponents - who turned out to be paid by Shell.

A recent one on that subject - and the "bogus" of the Kyoto Protocol - is Bjørn Lomborg and his Environmental Assessment Institute of Copenhagen, a government institute to be set up in February 2002 as one of the first tasks of the new Danish neocon government. This guy, a flamboyant contra, was in 2004 named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. *sigh*

Might write a post on him.

Originally posted by soficrow
The opening paragraph:

"After this disappeared from the ATS front page, I had a heck of a time finding it again. Decided to memorialize it in a thread all its own."

The denial industry

So basically it's a 'lets avoid the debate by keeping the material we consider true in view to the exclusion of the rest' type of logic in action here? If you are unwilling to address the claims as they are made by individuals don't bother propagandizing me by 'bumping' material without adding to it or in response to some specific claim.

FYI - There's a fund of hard information in the article - I just wanted it archived for easy access.

For actual examples of selective quoting, check out these threads:

I know how selective reasoning and quoting work as that's what i have been forced to deal with on ATS for more than a year now...

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX

So basically it's a 'lets avoid the debate by keeping the material we consider true in view to the exclusion of the rest' type of logic in action here?

As you know, every ATS thread has a topic.

This thread's topic is corporate financing - of think tanks marketing policies that protect corporate industry.

There are numerous threads for discussing the science and pseudoscience.


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Originally posted by soficrow
As you know, every ATS thread has a topic.

Few deserve as much thought....

This thread's topic is corporate financing - of think tanks marketing policies that protect corporate industry.

Well do you think it's a successful campaign if corporations own the major media distributors in America but then choose to fund rather obscure organizations to spread their propaganda to a few thousand people per year? I do not see how it's logical for them to use fringe websites to promote the 'science' when they could easily propagandize people in the dozen ways they normally employ. Why do they 'need' to 'prove' your their propaganda in this instance when they so rarely bother?

Just what exactly is the point of these websites and why did thousands of scientist in the USA decide to put their name to paper to say it's simply not been proved that humans play a role in so called global warming? Why but your name on paper for such a controversially cause?

I am quite interested to discover why you think a few million USD to organizations no average person is going to hear about any decade soon will make a difference when they own the media that could spread their 'facts' and or lies daily?

There are numerous threads for discussing the science and pseudoscience.

So why not post something about our science establishments denial of the very real flaws in electrical engineering that could solve all problems related to this topic? Do you see me creating threads to grab attention to that obvious and far more massive and successful denial industry? I have created all of five threads in the last seventeen months yet you have a few hundred to your name? I am sorry but i would rather not propagandize anyone ( by trying to grab attention by creating hundreds of threads) or for that matter be propagandized by you or anyone else and it's interesting that you don't want a actual discussion ( i presume you would rather have what you say unchallenged?) on related matters when people notice what your attempting.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX

Just what exactly is the point of these websites and why did thousands of scientist in the USA decide to put their name to paper to say it's simply not been proved that humans play a role in so called global warming? Why but your name on paper for such a controversially cause?

You mean scientists like Perry Mason, Michael J. Fox, John C. Grisham, Geri Halliwel (ginger spice),Drs. Frank Burns, Honeycutt, and Pierce from M*A*S*H*?
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I'm going to take this opportunity to post a couple of reminders for everyone to read.
Your attention is needed please...
Derailing Threads

Let's all just be sure to keep to the topic of the thread from now on.

Thank you.

Originally posted by Umbrax
You mean scientists like Perry Mason, Michael J. Fox, John C. Grisham, Geri Halliwel (ginger spice),Drs. Frank Burns, Honeycutt, and Pierce from M*A*S*H*?
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I read the thread and while i found some of it interesting i find the motive far more so.... So if we can rule out those ten names we are still stuck with rather more than seventeen thousand other names; any comment on those or are happy dismissing it all based on some names you claim you found in the list? I just checked those names at the few i tried were not even on the list? I have no idea if they were removed or never there but suffice to say you might have to change tact in your attempt to discredit the thousands of Doctors... That being said i believe that consensus or the number of believers decide objective reality anyways but if you are going to dismiss them ( evidently this is important enough to be addressed) you will have to do far better than the last effort.

I'm going to take this opportunity to post a couple of reminders for everyone to read.
Your attention is needed please...

I understand that this will always present some problems but i am unsure what i must do when i detect as much bias as i did? I addressed his post ( and can do so with a few tens of thousands of words more if that's more useful than pointing out obvious bias on the other side) and just tried to make it clear that i know what his motive is.

I have no fear of playing the ball instead of the person as the evidence is my arguments are are in defense of good science and not the extremely biased invented reality of the global warming crowd.

Derailing Threads

Let's all just be sure to keep to the topic of the thread from now on.

Thank you.

I did not notice that before ( i have been working from some open tabs so have not looked at the particular forums new threads )and while i do not consider my comments as 'derailment' i will do my best to stay within those guidelines from now on.

Stellar

www.sourcewatch.org...

The Oregon Petition, sponsored by the OISM, was circulated in April 1998 in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by OISM's Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Zachary W. Robinson, the paper was titled "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also included was a reprint of a December 1997, Wall Street Journal editorial, "Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth, by Arthur and Zachary Robinson. A cover note signed "Frederick Seitz/Past President, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A./President Emeritus, Rockefeller University", may have given some persons the impression that Robinson's paper was an official publication of the academy's peer-reviewed journal.The blatant editorializing in the pseudopaper, however, was uncharacteristic of scientific papers.

[. . .]

In reality, neither Robinson's paper nor OISM's petition drive had anything to do with the National Academy of Sciences, which first heard about the petition when its members began calling to ask if the NAS had taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. Robinson was not even a climate scientist. He was a biochemist with no published research in the field of climatology, and his paper had never been subjected to peer review by anyone with training in the field. In fact, the paper had never been accepted for publication anywhere, let alone in the NAS Proceedings. It was self-published by Robinson, who did the typesetting himself on his own computer. (It was subsequently published as a "review" in Climate Research, which contributed to an editorial scandal at that publication.)

[. . .]

The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal," it stated in a news release. "The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.

[. . .]

Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel called it an "extraordinary response" and cited it as his basis for continuing to oppose a global warming treaty. "Nearly all of these 15,000 scientists have technical training suitable for evaluating climate research data," Hagel said.

[. . .]

In addition to the bulk mailing, OISM's website enables people to add their names to the petition over the Internet, and by June 2000 it claimed to have recruited more than 19,000 scientists. The institute is so lax about screening names, however, that virtually anyone can sign, including for example Al Caruba, a pesticide-industry PR man and conservative ideologue who runs his own website called the "National Anxiety Center." Caruba has no scientific credentials whatsoever,. . .

Gimme a break. . .

Stellarx
I have no idea if they were removed or never there but suffice to say you might have to change tact in your attempt to discredit the thousands of Doctors...

Bull puckey, to defend a hodge podge of redundant bile, such as the OISM, as sound science is ludicrous. To say we are discrediting "doctors" by examining different facets of the denial industry is, well, ignorant to say the least.


Sofi: Good thread, thanks for the link, it's an interesting site, along the lines of theyrule.net