Of course many researchers would argue such money didn't influence their climate contrarian work. It seems some may have been motivated by something else. Most of the organisations opposing or denying climate change science were right-wing think tanks, who tended to be passionately anti-regulation.
These groups made convenient allies for the oil industry, as they would argue against action on climate change on ideological grounds. Jerry Taylor spent 23 years with the Cato Institute - one of those right wing think tanks - latterly as vice president. Before he left in , he would regularly appear on TV and radio, insisting that the science of climate change was uncertain and there was no need to act.
Now, he realises his arguments were based on a misinterpretation of the science, and he regrets the impact he's had on the debate. That is what climate sceptics have done. This ideological divide has had far-reaching consequences. Unfortunately many of the "expert scientists" quoted by journalists to try to offer balance in their coverage of climate change were - like Jerry Taylor - making arguments based on their beliefs rather than relevant research. She began digging into the background of leading climate sceptics, including Fred Seitz, a nuclear physicist and former president of the US National Academy of Sciences.
She found he was deeply anti-communist, believing any government intervention in the marketplace "would put us on the slippery slope to socialism". She also discovered that he had been active in the debates around smoking in the s. We realised this was not a scientific debate. A person with expertise about climate change would in no way be an expert about oncology or public health or cardiovascular disease, or any of the key issues associated with tobacco. That's what led us to discover this pattern of disinformation that gets systemically used again and again.
Naomi Oreskes spent years going through the tobacco archive at the University of California at San Francisco. It contains more than 14 million documents that were made available thanks to litigation against US tobacco firms. A strikingly familiar story emerged. Decades before the energy industry tried to undermine the case for climate change, tobacco companies had used the same techniques to challenge the emerging links between smoking and lung cancer in the s.
The story began at Christmas In New York's luxurious Plaza Hotel, the heads of the tobacco companies met to discuss a new threat to their business model. Details of the night's anxious conversations were recorded in a document written by public relations guru John Hill from Hill and Knowlton. Widely read mass-market magazines like Readers Digest and Time Life had begun publishing articles about the association between smoking and lung cancer.
And researchers like those who had found that lab mice painted with cigarette tar got cancer were attracting increasing attention. As John Hill wrote in the document, "salesmen in the industry are frantically alarmed, and the decline in tobacco stocks on the stock exchange market has caused grave concern".
Hill recommended fighting science with science. There is no public relations [medicine] known to us at least, which will cure the ills of the industry. The IPCC assessment reports?
CRU researchers. Climate science is based on global temperature data from the past millennium reconstructed from multiple sources. Disputes about collection accuracy aside, procuring this data is a gargantuan task that only a few institutions can afford.
If the processing done by these institutions is incorrect, in any way, their errors propagate to all research based on their data. For climate research to maintain its credibility, these centers must be beyond reproach.
Did you know that hottest year in record in the U. Wait, no, actually GISS admitted it was off by a few decades. It was Fundraiser organized for missing UA student. SGA approves funding requests for eight student organizations, deducts from others.
UA student missing since Sunday morning. UA upholds test-optional admissions through fall Email Signup. RSS Feed. The Crimson White. Search this site Submit Search.
The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "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. But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
The website it has financed - JunkScience. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas".
I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there. The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris.
Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases.
Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place.
Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests. TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people.
Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets. In , Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities.
The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry.
Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet".
0コメント