Global Warming Conspiracy Theory - Counterclaims of A Conspiracy To Undercut Climate Science

Counterclaims of A Conspiracy To Undercut Climate Science

Some investigators say there is evidence those alleging a conspiracy are themselves part of well-funded misinformation campaigns designed to 'manufacture controversy', undercut the scientific consensus on climate change and downplay the projected effects of global warming.

In general, critics say that individuals and organisations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists had reached their conclusions, that these doubts have influenced policymakers in both Canada and the US, and that they have helped to form government policies.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress." — The truth about denial, S Begley, Newsweek

Greenpeace presents evidence of the energy industry funding climate change denial with their Exxon Secrets project. A further Greenpeace study from 2011 claims that 9 out of 10 climate scientist who claim that climate change is not happening, have ties to ExxonMobil and that Koch industries in the past 50 years have invested more than US$50 million dollars in spreading doubts about climate change. ExxonMobil announced in 2008 that it would cut its funding to many of the groups that "divert attention" from the need to find new sources of clean energy, although it continues to fund over "two dozen other organisations who question the science of global warming or attack policies to solve the crisis." A survey carried out by the UK Royal Society found that in 2005 ExxonMobil distributed US$2.9 million to American groups that "misinformed the public about climate change," 39 of which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

Former United States Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt stated on the Diane Rehm Show (WAMU-FM, July 21, 1997):

It's an unhappy fact that the oil companies and the coal companies in the United States have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts... the energy companies need to be called to account because what they are doing is un-American in the most basic sense. They are compromising our future by misrepresenting the facts by suborning scientists onto their payrolls and attempting to mislead the American people. — Diane Rehm Show, Bruce Babbitt, WAMU-FM