Feelingย bored?
Hereโs a fun activity for the afternoon. Have a look at this list of 129 supposed โexpertsโ on climate change on the website of the notorious Heartland Institute.
Now go to our global warming denier research database the Greenpeaceโs ExxonSecrets and see how many of the names affiliations follow all the way back to the fossil fuel industry.
It doesnโt work for everyone, but it seems about half of the names on the list are entwined in some way with the giant network of groups like the Heartland Institute that receive funding from ExxonMobil and their ilk to downplay the dangers of climate change.ย
Now why would the oil industry doย that?
A far better question is โwhy wouldnโt theyโ? The fossil fuel industry is worth between $8 and $9 trillion โ about six times bigger than the next biggest global industrial sector, which happens to be cars. With that kind of money at stake, you can bet there will be some serious push-back around meaningful regulation of carbon dioxide.
When tobacco was threatened by pesky regulation aimed at curbing its dangerous product, they went and hired some phony scientists to conduct one of the most successful and heinous PR campaigns in history.
A now infamous internal memo leaked from tobacco giant Brown and Williamson statedย coldly:
โDoubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the โbody of factโ [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversyโฆif we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking andย health.โ
Back to Big Oil. They simply borrowed the PR campaign pioneered so successfully by Big Tobacco and went and hired some phony scientists of their own to churn up climate change misinformation in the mainstream media.
The difference between oil and tobacco is size. The tobacco industry is worth a mere $300 billion annually. That is less than less than 4% the size of the behemoth that is the fossil fuelย industry.
Big Oil has some big money to spread around in order to massage public opinion to their benefit, and they are of course not shy about doing whatever it takes to get their way.
Which brings us back to the Heartland Institute. Desmog blog readers might recall that it was also the Heartland Institute who bragged that they had a list of 500 scientists whose work contradicted that human-caused climate change was real.
We at DesmogBlog took the trouble of contacting many of these scientists who were surprised and appalled their research and reputations were being misrepresented by the likes of the climate deniers at Heartland. For my own enjoyment, I offer some of the more colorful quotes from the offended scientists:
I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.โ
– Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University ofย Edinburgh
โI have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put itย there.โ
– Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominionย University
โI donโt believe any of my work can be used to support any of the statements listed in theย article.โ
– Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University ofย Oxford
โPlease remove my name. What you have done is totallyย unethical!!โ
– Dr. Svante Bjorck, Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lundย University
โIโm outraged that theyโve included me as an โauthorโ of this report. I do not share the views expressed in theย summary.โ
– Dr. John Clague, Shrum Research Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraserย University
โThey have taken our ice core research in Wyoming and twisted it to meet their own agenda. This is notย science.โ
– Dr. Paul F. Schuster, Hydrologist, US Geologicalย Survey
โPlease remove my name IMMEDIATELY from the following article and from the list which misrepresents my research.โ
– Dr. Mary Alice Coffroth, Department of Geology, State University of New York atย Buffalo
So when the Heartland folks again trot out another list of โclimate expertsโ to back up Big Oilโs position on global warming, take it with a very large grain of salt.
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