Resources for a sustainable future

21/2/2012 Guardian Heartland Institute leak exposes strategies of climate attack machine.The documents show how groups play up controversy to undermine confidence in well-established scientific findings. – by Bob Ward.

While acts of deception cannot be condoned, the leaked documents provide an
insight into the climate attack machine. Photograph: Ann Pickford/Rex Features

After the leak from the Chicago-based thinkthank the Heartland Institute, much
attention is now being focused on the alleged deception used by the water
scientist Peter Gleick to obtain the sensitive internal documents.

And while acts of deception cannot be condoned, it is also important to note
that the documents obtained by Gleick provide an insight into how some of those
groups that are fundamentally opposed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases
attempt to convey the impression that their arguments are founded on science
rather than on ideology.

The Heartland Institute states on its website that its mission is “to discover,
develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems”, and
that the aim of its work on climate change is to promote “market-based, rather
than government-based, solutions to environmental problems”. The Institute has
been one of the most active lobbyists against policies in the United States to
curb emissions, primarily by attempting to undermine confidence in the findings
of scientific research that climate change is driven mainly by human activities.

One of the newly released documents shows very clearly how the institute intends
to target teachers and schoolchildren with this strategy. It begins by claiming:

 

“Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12
[kindergarten to 12th grade] students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or
overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers,
but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased
toward the alarmist perspective.”

 

The document then suggests that it will pay Dr David Wojick, described as “a
consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the US
Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science”, to
produce teaching materials which emphasise controversy and uncertainty:

 

“Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact
(“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a
major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for
Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.”

This, of course, is a biased and distorted representation of current scientific
knowledge, and conflicts with the approach to school lessons outlined by a
recent workshop on climate change education, hosted by the United States
National Academy of Sciences, which begins with the statement: “The global
scientific and policy community now unequivocally accepts that human activities
cause global climate change”.

However, the emphasis on uncertainty and controversy is very much in line with
another famous leaked document, the so-called Luntz memo, which came to light in
2003. It was prepared by Frank Luntz, the favourite opinion pollster of
President George W Bush, and contained advice for Republican activists on how to
talk to potential voters about environment issues. On climate change, the memo
offers the following recommendation:

 

“The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus
about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to
believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming
will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of
scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and
other experts in the field.”

 

The strategy of playing up controversy and uncertainty to undermine confidence
in well-established scientific findings was pioneered by the tobacco industry to
avoid and delay regulation of its products. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
point out in their book Merchants of Doubt:

 

“Doubt is crucial to science – in the version we call curiosity or healthy
scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to
misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and
create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco
industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to
undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.”

 

The Heartland Institute documents also contain details of another activity
designed to give its ideological campaign against emissions regulations a veneer
of scientific credibility. It notes that the Heartland Institute sponsors the
“Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international
network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change”.

Again this echoes an approach outlined in the Luntz memo:

 

“You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to
your view, and much more active in making them part of your message. People are
much more willing to trust scientists, engineers, and other leading research
professionals, and less willing to trust politicians. If you wish to challenge
the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have
professionals making the case than politicians.”

 

And it also copies the tactics of cigarette companies which, according to
Oreskes and Conway, hired a renowned geneticist in the 1950s to “head the
Tobacco Industry Research Committee and spearhead the effort to foster the
impression of debate, primarily by promoting the work of scientists whose views
might be useful to the industry”.

The Heartland Institute documents demonstrate once again how those driven by
ideological dogma or vested commercial interests attempt to hide their true
motives behind a facade of false controversy and uncertainty in science.

• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics
and Political Science
Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/heartland-institute-leak-climate-attack/print