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Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change. See Details |
Global Warming Denial Machine
Rockefellers call for change in ExxonMobil leadership
Posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The UK Guardian reported on April 30: “The founding family behind ExxonMobil has embarrassed the board by joining critics of the world’s largest publicly-quoted oil company and called for a management shake-up which could change its attitude towards climate change. The Rockefeller family—which started Exxon’s predecessor, Standard Oil—are taking the unprecedented step of holding a press conference today at a hotel in New York where they will call for Rex Tillerson to hand over part of his responsibilities as both chairman and chief executive.” See Details for more on ExxonMobil and the global warming disinformation campaign.
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“Hot Politics” re-aired—PBS FRONTLINE program on global warming politics and online interviews
Posted on Sunday, April 27, 2008
The full PBS FRONTLINE hour-long program on global warming, “Hot Politics,” which first aired on April 24, 2007, and re-aired on April 22, 2008, can be viewed in its entirety online. We are in segment #6—Censorship, discussing the Bush administration’s treatment of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts. Extended text from a number of the interviews is also posted, including interviews with Jim Hansen of NASA and CSW Director Rick Piltz. FRONTLINE and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) “go behind the scenes to explore how bi-partisan political and economic forces prevented the U.S. government from confronting what may be one of the most serious problems facing humanity today.”
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Bush climate speech aligns with disinformation campaign on stonewalling courts and environmental law
Posted on Monday, April 21, 2008
Buried in President Bush’s mostly empty speech on climate change April 16 was a signal that the White House is likely to continue to stonewall on compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling on greenhouse gas regulation and clear requirements of the nation’s environmental laws. With this above-the-law posture he is adopting a position urged on him by the global warming disinformation campaign and its political allies.
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Major corporations seek green image on climate policy but fund coal lobby front group
Posted on Friday, February 22, 2008
Major U.S. corporations that are part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which has called for strong legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, also have funded a coal-industry front organization that is waging a $35 million campaign in primary and caucus states to undermine support for such legislation. The front group, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, has sponsored CNN presidential candidate debates at which no questions were asked about global warming. Corporate greenwashing? Media sellout?
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“The American Denial of Global Warming”
Posted on Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Prof. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California-San Diego Science Studies Program, lectures on the history of the global warming disinformation campaign, led by corporate-funded policy operatives and ideologically-driven scientists, who employed the “tobacco strategy” to manipulate public opinion to create an exaggerated sense of uncertainty about scientific evidence on global warming and climatic disruption. (See especially from 26:00 forward in this 58-minute video.)
Review of “Everything’s Cool” in the New York Times
Posted on Saturday, November 24, 2007
Stephen Holden of the New York Times reviewed the new global warming documentary, “Everything’s Cool,” which opened in New York and Los Angeles on November 23.
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Accounting for an evolutionary shift in U.S. newspaper coverage of anthropogenic climate change
Posted on Saturday, November 10, 2007
An analysis by a scholar at Oxford University of coverage of climate change in leading U.S. newspapers during the period 2003-2006 reveals an evolutionary shift in 2005 to reporting that more closely reflected the scientific consensus on attribution of climate change. Leading U.S. newspapers shifted almost completely away from misleading reporting that “balanced” the scientific view that human activity is a significant cause of climate change with the view that human influence is negligible (from 61% anthropogenic and 37% “balanced” in 2003 to 97% anthropogenic and 3%"balanced" in 2006). The article posits several factors that may account for why this shift in U.S. reporting took place.
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Chris Mooney on the National Assessment scandal in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Posted on Thursday, November 08, 2007
The November-December issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists features an excellent article by journalist Chris Mooney—“An Inconvenient Assessment”—on the scandalous treatment of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts by the Bush administration, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, and the global warming denial machine. ("Seven years ago, scientists published a pioneering study to help Americans understand the implications of climate change. Here’s why you’ve never heard of it.") Highly recommended, and not just because we are quoted and cited in it.
“Out of Balance” awarded best environmental feature film at Artivist Film Festival in Hollywood
Posted on Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Out of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change will be awarded Best Feature Film in the Environmental Preservation category at the 4th annual Artivist Film Festival on November 11 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, CA. This hour-long movie focuses primarily on ExxonMobil’s support of the global warming disinformation campaign and its influence on the Bush administration. It includes interviews with scientists including R.K. Pachauri (IPCC chair), Robert Watson (former IPCC chair), and Michael Oppenheimer (Princeton); authors including Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Ross Gelbspan; environmental advocates from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Exxpose Exxon, Greenpeace, and other organizations; and Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz.
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Setting the record straight on purported “errors” in “An Inconvenient Truth”
Posted on Wednesday, October 17, 2007
On the RealClimate web site, scientists Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann set the record straight on what a UK judge recently termed “errors” in the film “An Inconvenient Truth” (while approving its continued use in classrooms). “It is clear that the purported ‘errors’ are nothing of the sort,” Schmidt and Mann say, in a point-by-point discussion. A useful corrective, because of course global warming denial machine fossil-fool politicos and junk lawsuit filers used the UK judge’s remarks to support their usual wrong-headed hype (here and here, for example) and outright demagoguery (here, for example).
Washington Post feeds global warming disinformation campaign with Bjorn Lomborg feature
Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007
On October 7, the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section featured a 1,900-word page one article by the notorious Danish statistician, adjunct business school professor, and “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. The article exemplifies how the global warming disinformation campaign is shifting its focus from outright denialism to a more complex and misleading downplaying of harmful climate change impacts and positing of misleading arguments about mitigation. And its publication, with no alternative perspective from someone with scientific credentials, or at least a stronger reputation for accuracy and intellectual honesty than Lomborg has, shows a lack of good professional judgment by the Post’s Outlook editors, in their shaping of public discussion of the climate change problem.
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RealClimate scientists take on latest manifestation of global warming disinformation campaign
Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007
RealClimate, an indispensable web site devoted to setting the record straight on climate science issues, reported on October 10 on a new attempt to reinvigorate the notorious 1999 “Oregon Petition.” The RealClimate site has an associated Wiki that provides a wealth of information debunking what they call “climate contrarian pseudo-science.”
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Climate contrarian Pat Michaels refused to disclose funding in Vermont court case
Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Patrick J. Michaels, one of the global warming skeptics most often interviewed by news media, withdrew as an expert witness in a high-profile Vermont court case rather than disclose his funding sources, court documents show. Moreover, Michaels told the court in July 2007, some funders gave him money on the condition that their identities remain secret -- and he is largely dependent for his livelihood on the money they give him.
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Newsweek cover story focuses on the global warming denial machine
Posted on Sunday, August 05, 2007
”Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine,” a 4,700-word cover story in the August 13 issue of Newsweek (now available online), explores the history and current situation with what the article terms the global warming denial machine. “Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine’s campaign,” the article says at one point. “It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. ‘If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action,’ says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995...Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, [administration] officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial -- and therefore no basis for making policy.
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Rolling Stone article on White House global warming denial links Cooney to V-P’s office and Rove
Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007
A very good article in the June 28 issue of Rolling Stone, on the Bush administration global warming disinformation campaign, shows direct connections between former White House CEQ chief of staff Phil Cooney and both Vice President Cheney’s office and Karl Rove. From Cheney’s continuing statements that deny and misrepresent the scientific intelligence on human-induced global warming, to Cooney’s manipulative policing of federal climate change science communications on topics deemed politically sensitive, a lack of integrity in dealing with climate science started at the highest level of the administration and fed down directly into the working level of the federal climate research program. Federal science program officials, in requiring clearances from Cooney to publish reports, had been drawn into Cheney’s sphere of influence. “They’ve got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated,” Rolling Stone quotes Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz as saying. “Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They’re not stupid.” Also from our conversation with reporter Tim Dickinson: “‘They decided they didn’t need to win the debate on climate,’ says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney’s tactics. ‘They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about it and dissipate the will for political action.’” This article—“Six Years of Deceit: Inside the Bush Administration’s Secret Campaign to Deny Global Warming and Let Polluters Shape America’s Climate Policy”—is a must-read for anyone concerned with this problem.
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