Climate Change Denial - History

History

In Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (2010), Clive Hamilton describes a campaign to attack the science relating to climate change, originating with the astroturfing campaigns initiated by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. He documents the establishment of the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) as a 'fake front group' set up 'to link concerns about passive smoking with a range of other popular anxieties, including global warming'. The public relations strategy was to cast doubt on the science, characterizing it as junk science, and therefore to turn public opinion against any calls for government intervention based on the science.

As one tobacco company memo noted: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." As the 1990s progressed ... TASSC began receiving donations from Exxon (among other oil companies) and its "junk science" website began to carry material attacking climate change science. —Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, describes how a small group of retired cold-war nuclear physicists, who through their weapons work had become well-connected, well-known and influential people, promoted the idea of 'doubt' in several areas of US public debate. According to Oreskes, they did this, "not for money, but in defense of an ideology of laissez-faire governance and opposition to government regulation". In 1984, Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and William Nierenberg were instrumental in founding the George C. Marshall Institute, initially to defend Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) against other scientists' boycott of it. Oreskes said that this first campaign of the Institute's, from 1984 to 1989, involved demanding equal air-time in the media when mainstream physicists and engineers were critical of the SDI, and producing militarily alarmist material such as the article America has five years left, published in 1987 by Jastrow in the National Review. At the same time, Seitz was employed as a consultant to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. His principal strategy on their behalf, said Oreskes, was to defend their products by doubt-mongering, by insisting that the science was unsettled and therefore that it was always premature for the US government to act to control tobacco use.

After the Cold War ended, they continued through the Marshall Institute to campaign against environmental issues from acid rain, the ozone hole, second-hand smoke and the dangers of DDT on to a campaign against global warming. In each case their argument was the same: simply that the science was too uncertain to justify any government intervention in the market place. It is only recently, Oreskes said, that historians such as her have been able to 'join the dots': Individual environmental scientists, finding opposition to their warnings about ozone layer depletion or DDT residues, were at the time unaware that the same institute was using the same arguments at the same time against other scientists who were warning about the dangers of smoking, of second-hand smoke, and about climate change itself.