Collusion Among Climate Denial Lobbyists and Their Spokespeople

An interesting thing happened as the professional climate denier industry tried to suppress the release of Merchants of Doubt, a movie based on the book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. They accidentally proved that climate denier lobbyists are in collusion to misrepresent the science - exactly what the book and movie document.

For those not familiar with Merchants of Doubt you can read my review of the book or watch the trailer for the movie:

Oreskes and Conway carefully documented the science denial tactics of one of professional denier lobbying group, the George C. Marshall Institute. The Institute was started by Ronald Reagan appointees as lobbyist selling his lasers in space defense system dubbed "Star Wars." That program never got off the ground (let alone into space), so the Institute turned to denying whatever science issue was causing their paying customers grief, like smokestack emissions causing acid rain, CFCs causing ozone depletion, second hand smoke causing cancer, and now, greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. In all cases the Institute knew it was denying the science, and in all cases they were wrong, but they did it to service their corporate benefactors. You may have missed these previous episodes of climate denial, but you probably know that one of the denialist industry's favorite "skeptics" is Roy Spencer, who just happens to sit on the Board of Directors of the George C. Marshall Institute.

So you can see why the professional denial industry would be eager to suppress the movie, which features blunt interviews with professional denier spokespeople Fred Singer (who previously denied smoking caused cancer) and Marc Morano (a political operative with a long history of far right wing attacks on politicians, the science, and scientists). The book and movie note that both, along with others, have received substantial support from the denial industry lobbyists.

Which gets us to an interesting revelation as these deniers scrambled to attack the movie. Take a look at the following email distribution list:

The list comes from an email string in which Fred Singer asks his buddies in the climate denial industry how to attack Naomi Oreskes and/or the movie director Robert Kenner. The emails themselves are revealing in that they show how they plan to harass the principals - remember that Singer and Morano and others agreed to be interviewed for the movie. But even more revealing is that all the major "independent" climate deniers are in collusion with each other.

This isn't actually a surprise. While deniers claim that there are many people who dismiss the overwhelming scientific consensus, the truth is that there are a very small number of lobbyist-associated scientists and political operatives that are the focal point of denial - exactly as the book and movie document. You can see that the list includes the handful of scientists who act as skeptics, along with the people on whose behalf they act - paid lobbyists like Morano, Horner, Milloy, Ball, Taylor and Bast, and key disinformation outlets like Monckton, Delingpole, D'Aleo, Goddard, and Watts. They work together to create falsehoods and misinformation about the science, feed it out onto the media at all levels, and then encourage the amateur deniers to unskeptically plagiarize the misinformation so that it saturates the blogosphere.

In fact, these people and the lobbying organizations and their front groups are closely linked in collusion. The following shows just a subset of the supposedly "independent" scientists who act as "skeptics" for the lobbying industry. All have multiple connections to lobbyists and front groups.

But it doesn't stop there. The key players are actually connected to a web of front groups and secretive funding lobbyists.

And what is the goal of this network of denial? To "manufacture doubt." As Marc Morano admits in the Merchants of Doubt movie and others have documented repeatedly, the tactics of climate denial lobbyists, the ones they have used for every episode of science denial going back to the tobacco companies denying smoking causes cancer, are:

The email distribution list demonstrates that this denial network works in collusion to misinform the public and provide cover for policymakers (most of whom are already receiving substantial campaign donations from fossil fuel and libertarian/conservative interests directly). The denial lobby network routinely communicate with each other and plan their attacks, which is why when the lobbyists seed a particular misinformational talking point into the blogosphere it immediately saturates the internet with the same misinformation. It's an intentional strategy.

More on Exposing Climate Denialism in future posts.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Periodically I post reviews of relevant science communication books. The following is a reposted review of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

This book will make you angry.  The title "Merchants of Doubt" comes from the famous line of a tobacco company executive many years ago, that their goal was to "manufacture doubt" in the minds of the public and policy-makers so that no policy-making action would occur, or at least so that it should be delayed as long as possible.  And the tobacco industry succeeded for decades after they themselves knew that tobacco/nicotine was addictive, and caused cancer

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are science historians.  What they have uncovered with this book is how just a handful of scientists and their collaborators have had a hand in nearly every major science denial episode for the last 40 years.  And in the center of it all is the George C. Marshall Institute, Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow.

After the tactics were perfected in the fight to deny that smoking causes cancer, these handful of men with close ties to the Reagan and conservative ideologies employed them over and over again to deny that smokestack emissions causes acid rain, CFCs causes ozone depletion, second hand smoke causes cancer in non-smokers, and greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming.  In all cases the science has been right, and this group of men helped delay action for many years until even their deceit couldn't hide the truth.

And those tactics, repeated to deny the science in each of these issues, were all the same: employ a few scientists willing to shill for the industry or who are "skeptical" (to create the illusion of credibility), focus the efforts through well-funded right wing think tanks (to create the illusion of independence), create "new" science specifically designed to create uncertainty (i.e., not to answer questions, but to create contrasting data they can misrepresent), hyperventilate about how "the science is not settled" (knowing that science is never settled, as there is always more research that can be done), and of course, using their PR skills, Frank Luntz wordsmithing, and punchy catchphrases like "sound science" to make it sound like they are saying something when they are not saying anything.

What I found amazing was how the origins of the George C. Marshall Institute and all of its subsequent science denialism came out of the cold war fight against communism.  These handful of scientists were atomic bomb builders and astrophysicists who had no expertise in any of the science they were denying.  But they had connections, most notably with the Reagan administration and the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) for which the George C. Marshall Institute was started to sell to the public, the military, and conservative legislators.  Yet despite this lack of any expertise they continued to insert themselves into the acid rain debate, the CFC debate, the second hand smoke debate, and the climate change debate.  And each and every time their goal was to push the denial of the science.  They equated environmentalism with communism ("green on the outside, red on the inside").  And using their lobbying skills and influence they were able to create the impression that there was still a raging debate in the science, even though in all cases the science was overwhelming and they represented a very minority opinion (and an opinion not backed by any science).  Actually, in all cases they were not being scientists at all, but rather advocates for non-action (all of these men had long-since stopped doing actual research, and none of them had ever done research in the areas of science they were denying).

What is most disturbing is that they routinely employed unscientific methods and deceit to wage personal attacks on scientists, including taking advantage of Roger Revelle on his death bed, then going after his student Justin Lancaster, then Ben Santer and now climate scientists like Michael Mann and Phil Jones have become the victims of the latest iterations of harassment in the denialist industry's tactics.

Oreskes and Conway end their book with "A New View of Science," which I'll let people read for themselves.  And they should.  In fact, they must.  This book must be on the reading list of anyone and everyone interested in science, so they can read for themselves how just a handful of unscrupulous scientists with deep political connections and a near religious anti-communism fervor have been at the heart of every denial of science in the last several decades. 

Postscript: You'll notice that many of the "go-to" people that climate change deniers like are associated with the George C. Marshall Institute and other denial lobbyist groups like the Heartland Institute. Roy Spencer, for example, is on the George C. Marshall Board, and William Happer is its Chair. It's not surprising that every one of the tiny percentage of scientists who deny man-made climate change is associated with denial lobbyist organizations.


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