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Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government |
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
“Bring on the Reality-Based Community”
Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008
“The truly poisonous legacy of the past eight years is one that spread to much of society and will therefore be much harder to undo: the utter contempt with which those in power viewed inconvenient facts, empiricism and science in general,” writes Sharon Begley in the November 17 Newsweek. “Look at how Bush justified inaction on greenhouse gases.” We talked about this problem with Newsweek for Begley’s August 2007 cover story, “Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine.”
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Michael MacCracken’s analysis of errors in Robinson, Robinson, and Soon 2007 contrarian article
Posted on Thursday, July 24, 2008
Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute, in an analysis posted here for the first time, identifies dozens of scientific errors and misleading statements in a 2007 paper by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon entitled “Environmental Effects of Increased Carbon Dioxide” – a contrarian effort that exemplifies the sort of work that provides fodder for the global warming disinformation campaign.
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Combatting an attempt by the disinformation campaign to hijack an American Physical Society forum
Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008
Thanks to Joe Romm and his excellent Climate Progress blog for exposing (also see follow-ups here and here) how the editor of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society newsletter is acting essentially as an agent of the global warming disinformation campaign and in direct contradiction to the statement on anthropogenic climate change of the 46,000 member physicist’s organization—not to mention the formidable body of scientific evidence and analysis developed by the mainstream climate science community in the IPCC and other climate change assessments. Romm points out how the denial machine jumps into action (here and here) to seek to amplify the APS newsletter editor’s abuse of science. We hope the leadership of the APS will take appropriate action within its Forum on Physics and Society to protect the organization’s intellectual credibility.
“Beyond the Phony ‘Debate’: Government Science and the Climate Crisis”
Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008
“Since the beginning of President Bush’s second term, we have made great progress against the global warming denial machine. Clearly, the position that humans are not changing the climate no longer has any political traction,” said CSW director Rick Piltz at the Center for Science and the Public Interest’s national conference on Rejuvenating Public Sector Science on July 11. But looking forward, the federal government is far from where we need it to be in dealing with the threat of global climatic disruption. See Details for full text.
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Scott McClellan and White House global warming spin
Posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Scott McClellan didn’t talk about climate change in his book, What Happened – but we recall the press briefing on June 8, 2005, when he had to fend off a barrage of questions about climate science and the oil industry lobbyist in the White House who had been exposed as an agent of the global warming disinformation campaign.
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Organizing denial: Conservative “think tanks” and the political tactic of environmental “skepticism”
Posted on Tuesday, June 10, 2008
A study published in the journal Environmental Politics finds that 92 per cent of 141 English-language environmentally “skeptical” books, most published since 1992, are linked to conservative “think tanks.” The authors conclude that the environmental skepticism of such organizations “is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.”
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“Conspiracy Theory”—Will the legal strategy that brought down Big Tobacco work against Big Oil?
Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008
In an article about climate litigation filed against major energy companies on behalf of a village on the coast of Alaska, Stephan Faris writes in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly: “Proving that energy companies tried to slow government action on global warming won’t be hard. The challenge in the Kivalina case, as it was in the breakthrough tobacco cases, will be to prove that these companies lied in the course of their business, and were aware that the consequences could be dangerous.” We add a quote about the fossil fuel lobby’s presence at the table of the federal climate science program.
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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.