Down The Rabbit Hole … part 4 - Inconvenient Truths and Beautiful Lies
Climate change is real and humans are the cause.
Why do so many people doubt this?
Because of a VERY SUCCESFUL marketing campaign by the big oil companies!
The Earth is getting warmer and this is damaging the environment. It started in the 19th century with increased burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) and deforestation, increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses – principally carbon dioxide (CO2) – into the atmosphere, trapping in heat from the Sun. In the last few decades the problem has accelerated.
Measurements taken from many different weather stations and satellites show that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, and analysis shows that it is produced by coal, gas and oil. We know this by looking at the isotope of carbon; fossil fuels contain virtually no carbon-14, and neither do the emissions produced when they are burned, whereas CO2 from vegetation contains predictably consistent amounts.
The effects of global warming include expanding deserts, melting of glaciers (leading to rising sea levels), increasing heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, more intense storms, acidification of the ocean (causing erosion of coral reefs) and extinctions of many species. These disruptions in turn affect food production, access to clean drinking water, increased disease and forced human migration, which leads to conflicts.
Poorer countries – despite producing a much smaller fraction of greenhouse gasses – take the brunt of these disasters.
The consensus among climate scientists that global warming is the result of human activity was found to be around 97% by researchers. (Expert credibility in climate change, 2021)
In response to this there have been many international efforts to try to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses by switching from fossil fuels to cleaner/’greener’ alternatives: wind, solar and nuclear power, among others.
These changes would be good for the planet… but not so good for the extremely rich fossil fuel industries.
In 1989 the lobbyist group Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was founded, representing industries including oil and coal, with the express intention of opposing any actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More people were starting to become concerned about global warming and governments were starting to listen. Fossil fuel companies knew that restrictions would be coming and that it would hurt their billion-dollar profit margins.
In order to fight against this, the GCC planned media campaigns that would counter the scientific consensus that climate change was caused by industry. The plan was to deliberately disseminate false information in order to create doubt among the general public. Touted as “providing balance in the global climate change debate”, this policy was in fact something much simpler.
Lying.
They entered into a contract – worth half a million dollars per year – with the PR firm E Bruce Harrison in order to organise their campaigns. One of their strategies was to find the minority (<3%) of climate scientists who were sceptical about the conclusion that climate change was the result of human action, and who did not see any cause for alarm, and to promote these individuals and their views as widely as possible; in newspapers, magazines, on TV, etc. It was a type of manipulation that played upon a reasonable premise – Let’s hear what the other side has to say – but with the covert goal of diluting the public perception of reality.
It had the desired effect. Most people do not have a detailed knowledge of science, and when they see scientists disagreeing with each other in public debates they get the impression that science is something nebulous and subjective. In 1993 Harrison told the GCC:
"The rising awareness of the scientific uncertainty has caused some in Congress to pause on advocating new initiatives."
In 1997 a Gallup poll showed that 44% of the US public believed that scientists were divided on the issue of climate change, and this had political ramifications. The US did not implement the agreement reached in the Kyoto Protocol treaty on greenhouse gas emissions. Three decades later, this state of confusion still exists.
Former US Vice-President Al Gore describes this action by the fossil fuel industry in the strongest terms: "I think it's the moral equivalent of a war crime … I think it is, in many ways, the most serious crime of the post-World War Two era, anywhere in the world. The consequences of what they've done are just almost unimaginable."
The strategy of mega-rich corporations paying fringe scientists to deliberately create confusion and doubt among the general public in regard to issues with serious consequences is nothing new. The exact same methods were used in the 1950s and 1980s by the tobacco industry, with the same degree of success.
At least one of these paid “experts” was active in both campaigns: Fred Seitz, a nuclear physicist and former president of the US National Academy of Sciences. He also worked as a permanent consultant for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, publicly refuting the evidence that smoking causes cancer. He also published a paper casting doubt on CFCs (chemicals once commonly used in refrigerators and aerosol cans) causing damage to the ozone layer.
In 2007 he was a principal organiser of the Oregon Petition, claiming that there was no evidence for man-made climate change and urging the US government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. This petition was presented as having 31,000 signatories, including 9000 with PhDs, but investigations have shown that none of them were experts in the field of climate science, and indeed, the identities of the vast majority of them could not be verified at all. The National Academy of Sciences held a press conference specifically to refute this blatant deception by one of their former presidents.
Why was Seitz such an enthusiastic campaigner for the promotion of false scientific information? The answer is his political leanings; he was strongly anti-communist and saw any government restriction on business as a form of socialism. To this end – and, also, in return for funding - he was prepared to spread lies about the science of important issues that affect everyone.
Here we have examples of real conspiracies; organised efforts to deceive people by undermining scientific knowledge in order to protect the financial interests of fat cats. We know who did it, we know what they did and we know why they did it. We know that they are telling lies because we have conclusive evidence regarding the causes of global warming from a very wide variety of sources.
And yet, in the minds of certain individuals, all of the above never happened. On the contrary, conspiracy theories exist in which all of the evidence for these *actual conspiracies is part of a conspiracy by climatologists for their own interests, and/or by communists who want to tear down capitalism.
Some accept the reality of global warming but believe that it is not caused by industry or by greenhouse gases, preferring alternative hypotheses that have little or no supporting evidence. Many will say that variations in global temperature are natural, which is true but is the result of known factors such as changes in solar radiation, variations in the Earth’s orbit and changes in Earth’s reflectivity (caused by geological changes, volcanos, etc.), and can be discounted as causes for the current situation.
The huge irony here is that the individual who is prone to see a conspiracy where there is none, then resists the evidence of an actual conspiracy that not only has a tremendous wealth of evidence (which is not hidden away but can easily found by anyone with an internet connection and the desire to “do their own research”), but is also founded upon the exact motivations that he ascribes to his imaginary conspirators: financial gain (“Follow the money”) and ideological justifications.
In the US there is an extremely clear demarcation in terms of political affiliation when it comes to climate change denial. According to the Pew Research Centre, 57% of Democrats say climate scientists understand “very well” whether climate change is occurring, compared with just 14% of Republicans.
Every Republican U.S. presidential candidate in 2016 questioned or denied the science of climate change.
Conservatives often mock green energy, highlighting any real or imagined weaknesses or disadvantages, regardless of the fact that they are often essentially attacking fellow capitalists.
A considerable element in the anti-vaccine movement is the idea that vaccines cause autism.
This originated in 1998 when Dr Andrew Wakefield of the Royal Free Hospital in London conducted a study of twelve autistic children and claimed to find evidence of a link with the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. He published his findings and gave a press conference to further publicise them.
It soon turned out that his study was flawed and his conclusions were false. There was also a serious case of a conflict of interest: some of the parents of the twelve children in the study were recruited via a UK lawyer preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers. Also, Wakefield had applied for the patent of an alternative vaccine to the MMR jab, and would benefit financially if people chose his product instead of the existing option. As a result of this scandal he was struck off the Medical Register.
Despite this scam being exposed very publically, and many subsequent studies showing absolutely no connection between autism and vaccines, the myth persists more than two decades later. It also acted as an inspiration for a wide variety of imagined horrors resulting from the coronavirus vaccine, leading to widespread and very damaging campaigns against vaccination during the pandemic.
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