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Book review: Climate Cover-Up

As insights from climate sciences become more and more policy relevant, dominate international negotiations and begin to reshape industrial policies of advanced as well as developing economies, these insights become themselves a political issue. In recent months, some errors in the latest IPCC Assessment Report have been rightly uncovered, and there is appropriate pressure on climate scientists to work even more accurately. Yet these shortcomings have also been used to attack the credibility of (climate) sciences per se. To understand these public relations campaigns, a book published last autumn—i.e. before the campaign’s start—is of some interest. Entitled Climate Cover-Up - The Crusade to Deny Global Warming written by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, the book accumulates valuable insights on the backdrop to what they call “crusade”.

The main points can be summarized as follows:

• A number of fake grassroots organiziations (so-called astroturfs) produce and distribute documents and press releases featuring doubts on results from climate sciences.
• Grassroots organizations and higher level think-tanks (such as the Cato Institute of the Heartland Institute) are said to receive funding from the oil and coal industries.
• Initial focus is on provincial media that doesn’t have resources to do research on their own.
• A number of so-called climate “experts” are employed who typically lack expertise in climate science but - as a relevant qualification - know the PR business and how to frame messages.
• A main strategy is to induce doubts rather than to produce valuable counter evidence. Rather than winning the argument it is sufficient to keep climate science from winning the argument.
• The media is then overwhelmed with information and - rather than trying to understand the scientific literature itself - prefers to present a two-sided story with “experts” from different sides. Joe Romm specifically critizes The Washington Post and The New York Times for this. These two media should have sufficient resources to do real science reporting.

Another piece of strategy is labeled “The O.J. Simpson Moment” by Bill McKibben [see footnote below]. Altogether, Climate Cover-Up accumulates valuable information and evidence of how the public perception of climate change is formed by public relation agencies. On the downside, Climate Cover-Up is a sometimes tedious read - more a small encyclopedia on climate misconception than a brilliant piece of journalism. However, one can appreciate the author’s effort to gather this information as it provides the reader with the tools to understand the current wave of media outbursts. Of course, the dynamics have already changed again in the last months. It seems that rather than focusing on inducing doubts on climate facts, the post-Copenhagen game is now on to induce doubts on climate science institutions such as the IPCC. Finally, Climate Cover-Up focuses mostly on North America. However, it would be interesting to read about the European side, too.

Footnote “If anything, [O.J. Simpson’s defense team] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be. Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?  That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.”

Posted by Felix Creutzig on March 24, 2010 11:32 PM | Permalink