Blocking Others’ Facts From Traveling

Most of the work of The Greening Earth Society in the early to mid-1990s focused on promoting knowledge of the CO2 fertilization effect – in essence, making their preferred facts travel. The documentary records show, how-ever, that the Society’s goal was not to advance a research program on CO2

fertilization, but to change public opinion and decrease political support for legislation to control greenhouse gas emissions. Although this was rarely stated in public, it was implicit in the ICE campaign, with its efforts to change public opinion and “soften support for federal legislation.” It was made explicit in a memorandum from Richard L. Lawson, president of the National Coal Association, asking members to contribute to the ICE cam-paign because of the political stakes: “[M]any policymakers are prepared to act [on global warming]. Public opinion polls reveal that 60% of the American people already believe global warming is a serious environmen-tal problem. Our industry cannot sit on the sidelines in this debate.”⁵⁸

It didn’t.

By the late 1990s, the coal industry became more open and vocal in trying to counter the facts emerging from mainstream climate science, an effort that was linked to stopping the United States from ratifying the

56 Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009.

57 Idso 1997. The paper is self-described as “Climatological Publications Scientific Paper #25 of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University,” and stamped, “Reproduced at Government Expense.” AMS Archives.

58 Greenwire 1991.

Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

(The Protocol placed numerical targets on the general principles of the Framework Convention, in effect putting teeth into a declaration of intent.) An additional part of this tactic was to shift attention to suggest that regu-lating CO2 would lead to government control of everything.

In a speech to a Coal Industry Conference in Madrid in 1996, enti-tled “Fossil Fuels or the Rio Treaty – Competing Visions for the Future,”

Fred Palmer struck a theme that would later become familiar in the com-munity of those resisting governmental action on global warming: that environmental regulation was the first step on the slippery slope to social-ism.⁵⁹ Regulating fossil fuel use “represents an initial step by government to massively regulate almost all human activity everywhere all of the time.” Rio was just the first step down the “path of pervasive government control….”⁶⁰

Palmer linked his position to Christian values, insisting that fossil fuels were God’s gift to humanity, indeed, “among God’s greatest gifts to the human community.”⁶¹ To stop using them, or to use them less, would be to look God’s gift horse in the mouth. CO2 fertilization was the clear proof of this. Palmer explained:

As the [“Greening Earth”] video makes clear, rather than fearing increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions, we should welcome [them], since, in the words of U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dr. Herman Mayeux, a CO2 enriched atmosphere will bring… “A better world, a more productive world. Plants are the basis for all productivity on Earth. They are the only organisms that can utilize the Sun’s energy and create matter, food, and they’re going to do that much more effectively, much more efficiently.”⁶²

In a presentation to the Australian Coal Conference and Trade Exhibition two years later, “We Are One: Kyoto and Our Collective Economic Future,”

Palmer returned to this theme. CO2 was an “elixir” whose increased con-centrations were producing a “rebirth of the biosphere.” “The scientists we work with,” he continued, “maintain that it is well-established that some 10% to 15% of the increase in global crop yields that we enjoy around the globe are caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration.”⁶³

59 Oreskes and Conway, 2010.

60 Palmer 1996, p. 2. AMS Archives.

61 Palmer 1996, (emphasis added), p. 3. AMS Archives. Of course, there is a long history of linking geological science with understanding God’s will (see Rupke 1983; Rudwick 2005 and 2008) and even more specifically of seeing evidence of God’s beneficence in providing us with natural resources.

62 Palmer 1996, p. 15.

63 Palmer 1998, p. 27.

Palmer’s speeches consistently told a good-news story – that fossil fuels were a gift from God, that CO2 is beneficial – and in the late 1990s, it became the official policy of the Greening Earth Society to focus on this “good-news” slant. The Society had been around since 1992, but in April 1998 they relaunched with a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing themselves as an organization dedicated to promoting “positive environ-mental thinking.”

What if our planet were getting greener? What if humanity and nature were growing together? It is. We are. The Greening Earth Society is an organization dedicated to promoting this good news…. about our changing climate. Call it the power of environmental positive thinking, says the GES mission statement.

Greening Earth Society stands for the proposition that humankind’s industrial evolution is good, and not bad, and that humans utilizing fossil fuels to enable our economic activity is as natural as breathing. The truth is out there. …And it’s good, not bad.⁶⁴

The press release also insisted that others were spreading misinformation.

In contrast, they, the Greening Earth Society, would stress the facts. “I believe in giving the American people facts, not hype,” Palmer insisted.⁶⁵ But while he promoted this good-news message in public, in private, Palmer summa-rized the society’s strategy somewhat differently. In an e-mail message to a congressional staffer in 1999, he wrote: “We will bury you in studies.”⁶⁶

In the end, it was not so much studies as press releases challenging main-stream scientific studies. In 1999, the Greening Earth Society issued at least thirteen, with titles like “No warming in New Hampshire ground tempera-ture data,” “Bristlecone pine data: 20th century warming normal,” “Finnish summer saw no warming or cooling over 595 years,” “90 years of cooling at Mt. Wilson,” “Kitt Peak, Arizona, records reveal short-term warming, longer-term cooling,” “Lenin Sea-ice stations show no global warming,”

“Cooling at China’s Three Gorges dam site,” and “No warming in Panama.”⁶⁷ Most of these raised questions about existing scientific data (rather than reporting original data of their own); most quoted men already associated with the society, such as Idso, Palmer, and Michael; and several reported reanalyzes of existing scientific work by the “climate data task force” at Arizona State University – Sherwood Idso’s research group.

64 Greening Earth Society Press Release, “New Group Promotes ‘Positive Environmental Thinking,’ ” 1998.

65 Greening Earth Society Press Release, “New Group Promotes ‘Positive Environmental Thinking,’ ” 1998.

66 Palmer 1999b. AMS Archives.

67 Greening Earth Society Press Releases Jan–Dec 1999. AMS Archives.

The contact name on many of the press releases was a man named Ned Leonard, who later became a vice-president at the Center for Energy and Economic Development – another group dedicated to promoting coal use.

In 2000, Leonard wrote a piece critiquing climate models that suggested that modelers were deliberately fudging their results.⁶⁸ Entitled, “The Greening of Planet Earth,” its subtitle ran: “A scientist said, ‘Climate modelers have been cheating for so long it almost become respectable.’” The thrust of the piece was that climate modelers had deliberately exaggerated the threat of warming by falsifying their models. Leonard drew on an article by the highly respected science writer, Richard Kerr, discussing constraints in cli-mate modeling. “All the clicli-mate disaster scenarios that dominate popular understanding of the threat CO2 poses to the world’s climate are products of computer-based models of atmospheric chemical and physical processes that, in fact, are not well understood,” Leonard wrote. “In order to resem-ble today’s climate, the models need to be fudged. ‘Climate modellers have been cheating for so long it’s almost become respectable,’ explains Richard Kerr in a May 1997 Science magazine.”

Did Richard Kerr say this? Yes, but in an article about a breakthrough in climate modeling, entitled “Climate Change: Model Gets It Right – Without Fudge Factors.” The full quote was

Climate modellers have been “cheating” for so long it’s almost become respectable.

The problem has been that no computer model could reliably simulate the present climate. Even the best simulations of the behaviour of the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land surface drift off into a climate quite unlike today’s as they run for centuries. So climate modellers have gotten in the habit of fiddling with fudge factors, so called “flux adjustments,” until the model gets it right. No one liked this practice.… But now there’s a promising alternative. Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, have developed the first complete model that can simulate the present climate as well as other models do, but without flux adjustments. The new NCAR model, says [modeller David] Randall, “is an important step toward removing some of the uneasiness people have about trusting these models to make predictions of future climate.”⁶⁹