Some Like It Hot

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html

 

Some Like It Hot

 

Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine

the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to

overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.

 

By Chris Mooney

 

May/June 2005 Issue

 

WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd

in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have

seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular

author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his

new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting

of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the

Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and

undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist

page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather

disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change.

However fantastical the book's story line, its author was received as

an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush

Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for

Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and

former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author

for conveying " serious science with a sense of drama to a popular

audience. " The title of the lecture was " Science Policy in the 21st

Century. "

 

Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player's stature (he's 6 feet 9

inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He

describes himself as " contrarian by nature, " but his words on this day

did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. " I spent

the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly

global warming, " Crichton told them solemnly. " I've been deeply

disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many

environmental issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and

unsubstantiated. " Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of

historic temperature change that has been repeatedly singled out for

attack by conservatives.

 

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases

emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to

rise. Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion

with a disinformation campaign employing " reports " designed to look

like a counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda

masquerading as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that

Crichton addressed. The think tanks provide both intellectual cover

for those who reject what the best science currently tells us, and

ammunition for conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe

(R-Okla.), the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee,

who calls global warming " a hoax. "

 

This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market,

and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there's another factor at

play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and

ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by

ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied

some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to

undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or

have maintained affiliations with a small group of " skeptic "

scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also

includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a

website providing " news, analysis, research, and commentary " that

received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist,

and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these

organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the

last year for which records are available; all figures below are for

that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee

Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI,

which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings

Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially

hosted Crichton, received another $55,000. When asked about the event,

the center's executive director, Robert Hahn—who's a fellow with the

AEI—defended it, saying, " Climate science is a field in which

reasonable experts can disagree. " (By contrast, on the day of the

event, the Brookings Institution posted a scathing critique of

Crichton's book.)

 

During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton

drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi

eugenicists. " Auschwitz exists because of politicized science, "

Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no

acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just

that: politicize science. The audience at hand was certainly full of

partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently

censured by the British House of Commons for " unfounded and insulting

criticism of Sir David King, the Government's Chief Scientist. " Ebell

is the global warming and international policy director of the

Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping

$1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting in the back of the room was

Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads

Coalition who's also a CEI senior fellow. Present also was Paul

Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive

Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise

($40,000 in 2003). Saying he's " heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple

of other groups have stood up and said, `this is not science,' "

Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style

emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book

is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see " Black

Gold? " ). Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can

play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets

" can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host

of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and

promote responsible social and economic agendas, " he advised companies

in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. " They have extensive

networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community

leaders and politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with

so little. "

 

THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think

tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than

merely fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But

then, in 1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a

business association in 1943) came to industry's rescue. In an essay

published in the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative

Irving Kristol memorably counseled that " corporate philanthropy should

not be, and cannot be, disinterested, " but should serve as a means " to

shape or reshape the climate of public opinion. "

 

Kristol's advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public

policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In

its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups

that are " dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy

problems. " What the company doesn't say is that beyond merely

challenging the Kyoto Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate

Stewardship Act on economic grounds, many of these groups explicitly

dispute the science of climate change. Generally eschewing

peer-reviewed journals, these groups make their challenges in far less

stringent arenas, such as the media and public forums.

 

Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that " ExxonMobil

has been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do

multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers,

believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions

remains inconclusive and that studies must continue. " She also hastens

to point out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research

programs—for example, the company plans to donate $100 million to

Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds

the hallowed National Academy of Sciences.

 

Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those

who debunk global warming. " Many corporations have funded, you know,

dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that

there was a bigger one than Exxon, " explains Ebell of the Competitive

Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the

government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing

the impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney

Christopher Horner—whom you'll recall from Crichton's audience—was the

lead attorney in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting

fee by the CEI. In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for

the CEI for " legal activities. "

 

Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He's proud of

ExxonMobil's funding and wishes " we could attract more from other

companies. " He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general

project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but

admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to

the topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is

" adamantly opposed " to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that " we

are only working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn't

attract funding. "

 

 

EXXONMOBIL'S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying

expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the

Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite

out of the company's net earnings—$25.3 billion last year.

Nevertheless, " ideas lobbying " can have a powerful public policy effect.

 

Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact

Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the

work of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had

been four years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an

intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study

warned that the Arctic is warming " at almost twice the rate as that of

the rest of the world, " and that early impacts of climate change, such

as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and " will

drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting

seals, and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction. "

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he

called for a Senate hearing.

 

Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to

marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead.

" Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice, " blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven

Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000

from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two

days later the conservative Washington Times published the same

column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global

warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money

from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to

the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to

Milloy's home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS

documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise

Action Institute—also registered to Milloy's residence. Under the

auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education

Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the

corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to

repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman

stated that Milloy is " affiliated with several not-for-profit groups

that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does

not receive funding directly from Exxon. "

 

Setting aside any questions about Milloy's journalistic ethics, on a

purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept.

Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page,

fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document " pretty much

debunks itself " because high Arctic temperatures " around 1940 " suggest

that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural

variability. " In order to take that position, " counters Harvard

biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report,

" you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that

reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle. "

 

Nevertheless, Milloy's charges were quickly echoed by other groups.

TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11

" climate experts, " who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at

all unusual in comparison to " natural variability in centuries past. "

Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000)

issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on

" unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance

to reality and how the future is likely to evolve. " In response,

McCain said, " General Marshall was a great American. I think he might

be very embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this

disgraceful fashion. "

 

The day of McCain's hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put

out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if

they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively

reviewed Arctic report: " The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite

its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out

numerous flaws and distortions. " The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute

($60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic

warming report " an excellent example of the favoured scare technique

of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable

assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to

conjure up a laundry list of scary projections. " In the same release,

the Fraser Institute declared that " 2004 has been one of the cooler

years in recent history. " A month later the United Nations' World

Meteorological Organization would pronounce 2004 to be " the fourth

warmest year in the temperature record since 1861. "

 

Frank O'Donnell, of Clean Air Trust, likens ExxonMobil's strategy to

that of " a football quarterback who doesn't want to throw to one

receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of

different receivers. " In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber

offense had the effect of creating an appearance of scientific

controversy. Senator Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and

gas companies, including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection

campaign—prominently cited the Marshall Institute's work in his own

critique of the latest science.

 

TO BE SURE, that science wasn't always as strong as it is today. And

until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels

industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined

ExxonMobil in challenging it.

 

The concept of global warming didn't enter the public consciousness

until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA

climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with " 99

percent confidence " that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably

caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in

Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of

fossil fuels, industry fought back.

 

In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National

Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to

oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later

ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum

Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon's CEO Lee Raymond has

twice served as chairman. " They were a strong player in the Global

Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy, " says

former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.

 

Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and

mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate

science and attack the mathematical models used to project future

climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for

action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than

man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists,

how ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group

focused its energies on making economic arguments rather than

challenging science.

 

Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an

international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the

terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United

Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific

body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to

evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In

the IPCC's first assessment report, published in 1990, the science

remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC's second report,

completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping

the climate, humankind's distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with

the release of the IPCC's third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus

had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability,

human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp

up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or

10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. " Consensus as strong as the

one that has developed around this topic is rare in science, " wrote

Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

 

Even some leading corporations that had previously supported

" skepticism " were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco,

and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford,

General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate

Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.

 

Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American

Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained

recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo

outlining a strategy to invest millions to " maximize the impact of

scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and

other key audiences. " The document stated: " Victory will be achieved

when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the `conventional

wisdom.' " It's hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and

Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed:

" Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the

`body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is

also the means of establishing a controversy. "

 

Though ExxonMobil's Lauren Kerr says she doesn't know the " status of

this reported plan " and an API spokesman says he could " find no

evidence " that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved

have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from

ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive

director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan,

as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants

included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell,

then with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was

never implemented because " the envisioned funding never got close to

being realized. "

 

Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently

retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during

George W. Bush's first term. Less than a month after Bush took office,

Randol sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality

(CEQ). The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert

Watson, a leading atmospheric scientist, as someone " handpicked by Al

Gore " whose real objective was to " get media coverage for his views. "

(When the memo's existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious

position that Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor

anyone else at the company wrote it.) " Can Watson be replaced now at

the request of the U.S.? " the memo asked. It went on to single out

other Clinton administration climate experts, asking whether they had

been " removed from their positions of influence. "

 

It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached

to the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked

Watson's reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.

 

PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil's support of the

think tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its

close ties to the Bush administration (which cited " incomplete "

science as justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it's hard

to see why the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover.

In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the

Clinton administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than

three weeks after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with

ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the

corporation also met with Cheney's notorious energy task force.

 

ExxonMobil's connections to the current administration go much deeper,

filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of

policymaking. For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol

recommended that Harlan Watson, a Republican staffer with the House

Committee on Science, help the United States' diplomatic efforts

regarding climate change. Watson is now the State Department's " senior

climate negotiator. " Similarly, the Bush administration appointed

former American Petroleum Institute attorney Philip Cooney—who headed

the institute's " climate team " and opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief

of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In June

2003 the New York Times reported that the CEQ had watered down an

Environmental Protection Agency report's discussion of climate change,

leading EPA scientists to charge that the document " no longer

accurately represents scientific consensus. "

 

Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently

the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the

Department of Energy—in which capacity she's charged with managing the

department's Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist

with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for

ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as

undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that

role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United

Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she

charged that " science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty

what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what

level must be avoided. "

 

Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula

Dobriansky's stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the

AEI, she declared, " the extent to which the man-made portion of

greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as

are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen

50 or 100 years in the future is difficult. "

 

Given Paula Dobriansky's approach to climate change, it will come as

little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001,

within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with

ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For

her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky's prepared

talking points was " POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance]

rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you. " The documents also

show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate

policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official

confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky

" meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well. "

 

RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of

California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers

on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was

unable to find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view

that humans are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to

add, that doesn't mean no such studies exist. But given the size of

her sample, about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she

thinks it's safe to assume that the number is " vanishingly small. "

 

What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an

obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their

scientific significance. A case study is the " controversy " over the

work of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing

upon the work of several independent teams of scientists, including

Mann and his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change's 2001 report asserted that " the increase in temperature in the

20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during

the past 1,000 years. " This statement was followed by a graph, based

on one of the Mann group's studies, showing relatively modest

temperature variations over the past thousand years and a dramatic

spike upward in the 20th century. Due to its appearance, this famous

graph has been dubbed the " hockey stick. "

 

During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the " hockey

stick, " calling it " sloppy work. " He's hardly the first to have done

so. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis,

much of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent

congressional briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator

Inhofe described Mann's work as the " primary sci- entific data " on

which the IPCC's 2001 conclusions were based. That is simply

incorrect. Mann points out that he's hardly the only scientist to

produce a " hockey stick " graph—other teams of scientists have come up

with similar reconstructions of past temperatures. And even if Mann's

work and all of the other studies that served as the basis for the

IPCC's statement on the temperature record are wrong, that would not

in any way invalidate the conclusion that humans are currently causing

rising temperatures. " There's a whole independent line of evidence,

some of it very basic physics, " explains Mann.

 

Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack

Mann's work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming

concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon

and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for

Astrophysics. Both have been " senior scientists " with the Marshall

Institute. Soon serves as " science director " to

TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct scholar with Frontiers of

Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser Institute's pamphlet

" Global Warming: A Guide to the Science. " Baliunas, meanwhile, is

" enviro-sci host " of TechCentral, and is on science advisory boards of

the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Annapolis Center for

Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from ExxonMobil), and has given

speeches on climate science before the AEI and the Heritage Foundation

($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would provide comment for this

article.)

 

In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the

American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate

Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new

research, the two concluded " the 20th century is probably not the

warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last

millennium. " They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC,

and in so doing presented global warming skeptics with a cause to

rally around. Another version of the paper was quickly published with

three additional authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware,

and longtime skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the

Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have

ExxonMobil connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for

their center in the year the study was published, while Legates is an

adjunct scholar at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy

Analysis (which got $205,000 between 2000 and 2003).

 

Calling the paper " a powerful new work of science " that would " shiver

the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd, " Senator Inhofe

devoted half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and

Legates to testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the

editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper

originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review

process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von

Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate

science skeptics " had identified Climate Research as a journal where

some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is

otherwise common. " Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate

scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas' paper in

the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other

flaws, that they'd used historic precipitation records to reconstruct

past temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was " fundamentally

unsound. "

 

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the

Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil

scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that

would inevitably result from America's failure to sign this

international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional

briefing was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing

room, the event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the

Crichton talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the

George C. Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the

briefing's panel of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher

Horner, and Marshall's CEO William O'Keefe, formerly an executive at

the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate

Coalition.

 

But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit

of the event. Stating that Crichton's novel should be " required

reading, " the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who

had finished it. He attacked the " hockey stick " graph and damned the

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for having " no footnotes or

citations, " as indeed the ACIA " overview " report—designed to be a

" plain language synthesis " of the fully referenced scientific

report—does not. But never mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He

whipped out a 1974 issue of Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read

from a 30-year-old article that expressed concerns over cooler global

temperatures. In a folksy summation, Inhofe again called the notion

that humans are causing global warming " a hoax, " and said that those

who believe otherwise are " hysterical people, they love hysteria.

We're dealing with religion. " Having thus dismissed some 2,000

scientists, their data sets and temperature records, and evidence of

melting glaciers, shrinking islands, and vanishing habitats as so many

hysterics, totems, and myths, Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth,

as he sees it, and " fight the battle out on the Senate floor. "

 

Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist

Randy Randol looked on approvingly.

 

Chris Mooney is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect,

where he helped create the popular blog Tapped. His writing focuses on

the intersection of science and politics, and his first book, The

Republican War on Science, will be published in September.