Climate Change Book Reviews - Index

Hoggan with Littlemore, Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, (Greystone Books, Canada, 2009), pages 250

If humans are to respond to the conclusions of climate science that humans must significantly reduce, if not stop, activities that contribute to global warming, then significant economic interests will be adversely affected (although new economic interests will emerge to fill any voids).

One would expect the adversely affected economic interests - the coal and natural gas power utilizes, the gasoline car and truck manufacturers, the oil and gas and coal mining companies, the airlines and others - to fight for public policies that protect their interests. One would anticipate their active involvement in debates over emission taxes, cap and trade programs, regulations related to emissions, emission controls, and the like. One would also expect them to develop strategies for corporate survival in a changing economic environment. One would expect them to seek confirmation that the science was legitimate.

What one would not expect is for the adversely affected economic interests, aided by a number of other organizations and individuals, to launch a public relations campaign to purposely spin a variety of messages to discredit climate science, when they know these messages are wrong. This is what is occurring, to Hoggan's dismay. In this book, he documents these efforts to confuse the public.

Hoggan's book notes early on that the "Global Climate Coalition" - an organization supported by powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, General Motors, Ford, the American Petroleum Institute, and others - received expert scientific advice in 1995 stating: "The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions on greenhouse gases such as CO₂ on climate is well established and cannot be denied." The organization deleted the references in the report, failed to circulate the report, and spent a fortune sowing confusion and lobbying against climate change.

In the book, Hoggan maps out exactly how a variety of economic interests carry out their crusade against global warming. Elements in the crusade include:

1. Following the tactics and strategies used by the tobacco companies to prevent government regulation of smoking, even though the companies knew at the time that smoking was harmful to health.
2. Setting out to deliver the message that climate science was awash in uncertainty (as opposed to, say, creating a better understanding of climate science, and what was more and less certain within it).
3. Funding studies and reports through think tanks point that support corporate objectives, to give legitimacy to views critical of climate science.
4. Delivering key messages intended to undermine climate science through print, radio and television advertising; videos; letter campaigns; public speakers; websites; etc.
5. Ensuring that the messages of knowledgeable scientific experts would be undermined by contrary messages, regardless of their validity or relevance.

One of Hoggan's more amusing stories goes as follows. The story begins with an article by David Bellamy (a respected environmentalist in the United Kingdom) in the New Scientist that 555 of 625 of the world's glaciers under observation of by World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich had been growing since 1980. George Monbiot, a journalist with the Guardian, contacted the World Glacier Monitoring Service. It indicated the numbers were "bulls---". Intrigued where Bellamy's numbers had come from, Monbiot found a number of websites giving similar misinformation. Hoggan describes these sites as the internet's "echo chamber". The oldest website providing the misinformation, and presumably the source of the original number, was the Science and Environmental Policy Website operated by Fred Singer, considered by many as an expert critic of the theory of global warming. The cited source on this site was an article in the journal Science in 1989. Monbiot found no reference in the cited journal, nor for that matter, in any issue of Science for 1989. When asked, Singer acknowledged that the information had been placed on his website by a former associate Candace Crandall. Candace Crandall was one of the authors of the document "Global Climate Science Communication" of the American Petroleum Institute. Hoggan notes sarcastically that Singer should be familiar with Candace Crandall, as she is his wife. The bottom line is that a made-up number by a communications type working for the American Petroleum Institute gets wrongly (and perhaps deceitfully) sourced by a so-called expert Fred Singer to a reputable journal Science. The misinformation gets repeated through the internet's "echo chamber", and ultimately picked and a mispresented by a leading environmentalist and presumed expert.

This is a good, well-documented book, well worth the read. Hoggan's point, which he makes forcefully, is that there is a concerted, and from all appearances, successful campaign to confuse the public about global warming by lobby groups, public relations types and economic interests that will be adversely affected by efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The message for each of us is when we read something on the internet, or hear or read something in the media, we need to pay attention to who is saying what, and ultimately, whether what they are saying makes sense.

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