Big Tobacco Funded Anti-Global Warming Messages

An anonymous reader writes, "The UK Guardian is running an excerpt from the new book "Heat" by George Monbiot (to be published later this month) spelling out the network of funding opposing global action against global warming — specifically, limits on human carbon dioxide generation. The excerpt outlines a web of fake citizens' groups and bogus (but authoritative sounding) research institutes designed to convince laypeople that human causation of global warming is scientifically controversial. Not surprisingly, the article notes funding by ExxonMobil. More interesting is the role played big tobacco, tying their attack on the health risks of second-hand smoke to global warming skepticism." From the article: "What I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that man-made climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris."

Comments

Re:Global Warming Fanatics Do the Same

[bad_fx]

Arr! Ye landlubber, yer clearly funded by one of them anti global warning groups! Don't believe him, me 'earties! Let's keel haul the bastid, Yaarrr! Who be wit' me??

Another Doom Monger Heard From

[PHAEDRU5]

George Monbiot once wrote that

It is impossible not to notice that, in some of the poorest parts of the world, most people, most of the time, appear to be happier than we are. In southern Ethiopia, for example, the poorest half of the poorest nation on Earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls.

In Ethiopia, male life expectancy is 42.88 years. George was born in 1963. Maybe that's why the cheery peasants in the fields are cracking up with laughter: they know that even if he moves in tomorrow, they'll only have to endure his column in The Gamo Gofa Times-Herald for another year or two.

Mothballed satellite - more inconvenient truths?

[toby]

The DSCOVR satellite, an initiative supported by Al Gore, is apparently the victim of more Republican antipathy to real science. "Did spiking the mission have anything to do with the politics of global warming? Climate scientists think so.":

From the SEPTEMBER 2006 issue of Seed:

At a time when the Earth's climate is at the top of practically every nation's agenda, it might seem perplexing that there's a $100 million, fully completed climate-sensing satellite stored in a warehouse in Maryland.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was supposed to be delivered five years ago to the L1 Lagrangian point—a gravity-neutral parking spot between the Earth and the sun that affords a continuous, sunlit view of the planet. From here, DSCOVR would measure the planet's energy balance and reflectivity, known as albedo, which is critical data for calibrating climate change models and monitoring the ozone layer. Yet the mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite is sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Could the decision to kill DSCOVR have anything to do with the politics of climate science? For years, Republicans have claimed the need for more data before acting to curb global warming. A letter President Bush wrote to four Republican senators in March 2001 (after DSCOVR's endorsement by a National Academy of Sciences review panel) referred to "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." More recently, in a 2005 briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asserted that "there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the science of climate change." Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, "It is as if the administration prefers to continue to hide behind lack of definitive data as an excuse for lack of action and leadership."

According to Dr. Jonah Colman, who does climate modeling at Los Alamos National Laboratory, "the availability of DSCOVR for inter-comparison between other measurements" would reconcile discrepancies in data from low-Earth orbit satellites. "Albedo is incredibly important," he added. "It can change quickly, and we currently do not have a direct method for measuring it. DSCOVR would have given us that." Project leader Dr. Francisco P.J. Valero, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, describes the mission as "an urgent necessity." Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is even more blunt about the importance of DSCOVR's data: "Not knowing may kill us."

If we're interested in understanding how climate changes and how to predict what's going to happen next, DSCOVR would appear to be a crucial undertaking. So what happened? The loss of the Columbia shuttle certainly didn't help, but the real coffin nail seems to have been partisan politics.

Back in 1998, Al Gore championed a probe that would broadcast real-time images of Earth to the Internet at the relatively cheap cost of $20 million. Dubbed Triana (after the sailor on Columbus' voyage who first spotted the New World), Gore hoped the probe would foster greater awareness of the fragility of the planet; the idea, he admitted publicly, had come to him in a dream.

After a peer review process, the mission was upgraded to allow the spacecraft to continuously monitor the energy budget of the entire planet—the first one ever with this capability—making it a much more credible mission. The name was later changed from Triana to DSCOVR, likely in the hope of jettisoning the Gore-dream baggage.

Republicans didn't buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, calling it the "Goresat," a "multimillion-dollar screen saver." Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader, quipped, "This idea supposedly came from a dream.

Re:ummm

[Overly Critical Guy]

I guess this is technically off-topic, but I hate, HATE those Truth.com commercials and their idiotic tirades against "big tobacco" (and what a goofy phrase that is).

People have the right to smoke if they want to. To see a bunch of snotty college kids in commercials going around telling everyone how evil cigarettes are, when you know these same kids get drunk and smoke weed on the weekends without saying a word about it (particularly alcohol, which is far more damaging statistically than cigarette smoking), just annoys me to no end. These whiny irritants love imposing their feelings about smoking on business owners and everyone else. Sometimes, they even dupe local governments into complying and forming a nice little pseudo-fascist state where you can be arrested for daring let a smoker into your club or restaurant (but remember, drunks and stoners are a-okay!).

Sorry...it's Tuesday and I didn't get enough sleep.