Conclusion: People Prefer Good News

In focusing on the good news about global warming, Western Fuels recog-nized a well-known axiom of marketing and public relations – and indeed, of conventional wisdom – that people would rather hear good news than bad.⁷⁷ (Of course, bad news can have currency – think gossip – but ceteris

73 Comments and Prepared Testimony of Western Fuels Association, Balling testimony, 1992, p. 9. AMS Archives. Maria et al. 2004, and Ramanathan and Carmichael 2008.

74 Comments and Prepared Testimony of Western Fuels Association, Michaels rebuttal testimony, 1995, p. 15. AMS Archives.

75 Palmer 1999a. AMS Archives.

76 Palmer 1999a. AMS Archives.

77 Greening Earth Society Press Release, “New Group Promotes ‘Positive Environmental Thinking’”, 1998. AMS Archives. In fact, GES was not new in 1998, but they evidently pushed that idea to promote their Earth Day initiatives that year.

paribus, most of us prefer good news to bad.) By using market research and polling, they were able to determine effective ways to package this good news to reach particular audiences. Omitted from their advertisements, speeches, and testimonies, however, was the acknowledgement that most mainstream scientists rejected this good-news story and did not consider it factual at all. At best, the scientists involved in evaluating global warming and its impacts saw carbon fertilization as a modest positive benefit to be viewed against a much larger landscape of severe detrimental impacts.⁷⁸

But the message of what mainstream scientists believed – the bad news about global warming – did not travel very well at all. Public opinion polls during the 1990s repeatedly showed that a significant portion of the American population did not believe that anthropogenic global warm-ing had been demonstrated, a position at odds with the conclusions of the expert scientific community.⁷⁹ Indeed, after President Bush signed the U.N.

Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United States government did a volte face and refused to participate in the Kyoto Protocol – a position that remains in place as of this writing.

Today, many people expect a change in U.S. policy. Whether this occurs remains to be seen. Historically, however, it will remain the case that, after Rio, the United States stood nearly alone among the world’s industrialized nations in rejecting binding limits to carbon dioxide emissions, rejecting government-based incentives to reduce emissions. Many American citizens continue to doubt that global warming is occurring, while others accept its reality but doubt that it is caused by human activities.⁸⁰ Of course, these developments might have nothing to do with the story told here; elsewhere, we consider the complex history of resistance to the scientific evidence of global warming and other environmental problems.⁸¹ But at least some evidence suggests that the events described here contributed in some part to the larger history of the resistance by the American people to the conclusions drawn by expert climate scientists about the reality of anthropogenic climate science.

In the summer of 2007, a major opinion poll showed that although a large majority of Americans accepted the reality of anthropogenic climate change, nearly half still believed that the scientific jury was out.⁸² Nearly thirty years after the National Academy declared that a “plethora of diverse studies …

78 IPCC 1995.

79 Nisbet and Myers 2007.

80 ABC News 2007.

81 Oreskes and Conway, 2008; Oreskes, Conway, and Shindell 2008; and Oreskes and Conway, 2010. See also McCright and Dunlap, 2010 - the online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/2–3/100.

82 Leiserowitz 2007.

indicates a consensus” that global warming would result from human activ-ities, and more than a decade after the scientific community declared that warming “discernible,” a sizable fraction of the American people thought that scientists were still debating the point.⁸³ This suggests that the various campaigns of resistance – and the one described here was but one of sev-eral – were effective in blocking the facts of climate science from travelling to the American lay public.⁸⁴ At minimum, the American people came to believe that scientists were still arguing long after they actually were.

One could draw many conclusions from the events described, but one that seems most pertinent here is how Western Fuels studied the question of how facts travel – in fact, paid a good deal of money to ask and answer that question. This contrasts with the behavior of most scientists, who do not generally retain marketing firms or buy advertising space for their views.⁸⁵ Indeed, most scientists, fearing the appearance of advocacy and the potential for their objectivity to be compromised, would consider it inap-propriate to do so.⁸⁶

Moreover, scientists typically follow a supply-side model, assuming that the information they gather – whether good news or bad – will naturally reach the people who need it. But, as the various studies in this volume show, facts do not travel “naturally”– they have to be made to travel. Facts may not travel if they encounter active, organized, positive resistance, par-ticularly if that resistance emanates from people who have studied – and understand – how facts travel.⁸⁷ The Western Fuels Association studied how facts travel; then they used this information both to create a supply of their own facts – through pamphlets, press releases, advertising campaigns, and the “Greening Earth” video – and to create demand for them through their meetings with editors, their toll-free number, and their creation of mem-berships in ICE and the Greening Earth Society.

83 National Academy of Sciences 1979; IPCC 1995.

84 On other resistance campaigns, see Gelbspan 1997; Mooney 2005; Oreskes and Conway, 2008.

85 On the other hand, it parallels the work of the tobacco industry, see Brandt, 2007. One tobacco industry document from the mid-1990s, entitled “Communication Principles,”

states, “Be positive, friendly and firm. …And don’t lie. You don’t need to.” http://legacy.

library.ucsf.edu/tid/gwq45c00/pdf?search=%22communications%20principles%22

86 On scientists’ concern that communicating directly to the public may compromise – or be seen as compromising – their objectivity, see Oreskes 2007; see also Mooney and Kirshenbaum, 2009; Schneider 2009.

87 For more on this, see Oreskes and Conway, 2010. There, we trace the various campaigns to challenge scientific evidence on global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, secondhand smoke, and the harms of DDT to the tobacco industry in the 1950s, where the idea appears to have first been implemented. See also Brandt 2007 and Proctor 1995.

As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, Americans received the message that global warming was real, its consequences not so good.⁸⁸ How exactly they received this message is another question. Perhaps it was because climate records continued to be broken around the world; per-haps because hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought home the vulnerability of even wealthy, highly industrialized nations to the kinds of dislocations that climate change can bring; or perhaps because the widely viewed film, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award and was shown in cin-emas and discussed in homes across the nation. Or perhaps because the American mass media mostly stopped presenting the issue as one with two opposite and more or less equal scientific sides.⁸⁹ Yet the public view may prove unstable, for such experiences and events (e.g., a few long, cold winters), may alter lay beliefs regardless of the science base of knowledge.

But, however well the scientific facts travelled or not, one thing is clear: The scientific message of global warming was separated from its scientific roots.

For polls showed that even among those who accepted the scientific message that global warming was happening, many did not know that scientific experts had a consensus on the matter.⁹⁰ In the summer of 2007, a Yale University-Gallup poll found that 72 percent of Americans were completely or mostly convinced that global warming was happening, but 40 percent thought that there remained “a lot of disagreement” among scientists on the issue.⁹¹ This, of course, was precisely the message that the Western Fuels campaigns had tried to convey. The expert consensus on global warming did reach the American people, but without those people understanding that this was the expert con-sensus. Put another way, the facts – as defined by the scientific community – traveled, but were separated from their origins in scientific research.

By definition, traveling involves separation from roots to some degree, so we might not expect the public to fully understand the scientific roots of scientific facts. Still, generally, when people travel, they retain their national and cultural identity; when books travel, they retain their copyright and publisher; when objects travel, information about their origins is embedded in them. So when scientific facts travel, we might expect their recipients to understand – at least in an approximate way – their origins in scientific research. This has turned out not to be the case for global warming, perhaps in part because of the events described here.

88 Leiserowitz, http://www.climate.yale.edu/People/Anthony-Leiserowitz/; see esp. http://

environment.yale.edu/news/5305/american-opinions-on-global-warming/

89 On the practice of “equal and opposite,” see Boykoff and Boykoff 2004.

90 On this consensus, see Oreskes, 2004, and Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009.

91 Leiserowitz 2007.

Moreover, studies suggest that the American people remained divided over how serious the problem of global warming is, even as the scientific community increasingly argued that it was already having serious nega-tive consequences around the globe.⁹² The scientific “bad news” did not tri-umph over the alternative possibilities that global warming was either good or at least not entirely bad, as Western Fuels had argued. This suggests that resistance campaigns were effective in creating a lasting impression of sci-entific debate and discord, and sowing doubt among the American people about the consequences of anthropogenic warming. Most American citi-zens believe – for whatever reasons – that global warming is real, but many doubt its human causes and still believe that scientists have not settled the matter. In essence, the facts traveled, but their lineage did not. If we think of scientific facts as the progeny of the scientists who produce them, we can say that when the facts finally traveled, they left their parents behind.

The story told here is consistent with the arguments of barrister Sir Neil MacCormick, who has argued that good stories push out bad ones – even if the bad ones are true.⁹³ This is an observation, Sir Neil notes, that law-yers and prosecutors ignore at their peril. Our story suggests that scientists ignore it at their peril, too.⁹⁴

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to all the members of the “Facts” project, who commented on earlier versions of this work. I wish to thank particularly Mary Morgan for her consistent enthusiasm for this project and Erik Conway, Harro Maas, Richard Somerville, Ken Davis, and an anonymous reader for helpful comments on the manuscript. Thanks also to my remarkable assistants, Charlotte Goor and Afsoon Foorohar, to Anthony Socci for bringing the Greening Earth Society documents to my attention, and to Christopher Patti for sage legal advice.

A Note on Sources

Many of the materials on the Greening Earth Society were found in the archives of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) headquarters in Washington, D.C. These archives consist simply of a set of filing cabi-nets, thus explaining the absence of the normally expected box-and-folder

92 IPCC “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”.

93 The role of good news stories in helping false facts to travel is paralleled in Haycock (this volume), and contrasted by a bad-news story that gets well attested facts to travel in Ramsden (also this volume).

94 MacCormick 2007.

numbers for citations to these materials. Scholars wishing to consult these materials should contact the AMS.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used

ICE Informed Citizens for the Environment IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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