Overview - Neoconservative Astroturfing

Of these, only the last three have made important contributions to climate science, and only Christy and Spencer have not accepted cash for their contributions (Lindzen, who authored a widely cited 1992 commentary accusing mainstream scientists and environmentalists of being influenced by cash, acknowledged in 1995 that he receives $2500 a day plus expenses from industry for his consulting time). For over a decade Christy and Spencer’s work on lower troposphere temperatures, which documented much lower trends than those predicted by state-of-the-art climate models, provided the only truly serious challenge to the mainstream consensus on global warming—and the most frequently cited argument, even though other researchers did not confirm their findings. All of this changed in 2005 when it was discovered that the UAH trends had resulted from a math error, which when corrected eliminated the conflict with climate models and other upper-air research, and the only viable weapon in the skeptic arsenal. Since then the skeptic community has all but abandoned the argument.

Of the remaining names, none has published any viable climate science, and to the best of my knowledge neither has any other industry consultant. Baliunas has published in her own field, including some work on sunspots (vis a’ vis her claim of solar activity and climate) and Soon has on historical solar trends affecting climate. However, none of this work has had any real impact on current knowledge of global warming. Apart from Spencer and Christy’s troposphere temperature work, no skeptic research has ever demonstrated any problems with the mainstream global warming consensus as represented by the 2000+ published body of the IPCC, and when that argument dissolved so did the only promising criticism the skeptic community ever possessed.

Astroturfing has also proven valuable to the Religious Right, who has been able to sweeten antienvironmental agendas with the appearance of divine sanction. As usual, much of the funding base for their efforts originates with polluting industries and Far-Right foundations. While many of these are decidedly secular they recognize the practical value in aligning themselves with fundamentalists—even if in appearance only. The best example of “faith-based” antienvironmental astroturf in recent history is the Michigan based Acton Institute and its spin-off, the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES). Acton and ICES are best known for the year 2000 Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship which was created largely as a response to the more Biblically based and broadly recognized Evangelical Declaration for the Care of Creation.

Acton, whose stated mission is “to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles” produces literature, lecture series’ and community outreach in a number of public policy areas. Their stated environmental policy is to promote “an approach to the earth and its resources that attends both to the demands of human freedom and flourishing and to the Biblical call for human beings to exercise caring ‘dominion’ over creation”. Likewise, ICES describes its mission as “serving humanity and ecology through faith and reason” by affirming that “The 20th Century brought unprecedented improvement in human health, nutrition, life expectancy, and environmental quality… None of this would be possible, were it not for the religious, economic, and scientific traditions which are now under assault.”

The key to all this lies in the terms “freedom and flourishing”, “dominion”, and “traditions which are now under assault”, all of which have been carefully repositioned via some very creative Biblical exegesis to mean unrestrained profiteering and consumption. Acton and ICES go to great pains to present an image of being ecumenical and committed to “caring” for creation, but their list of advisors and benefactors reads like a war roster for the Religious Right, and their published books and monographs are little more than a warmed-over rehash of standard Far-Right pseudoscience and pitches for the blessings of unrestrained capitalism. As of this writing, the Q&A section of the ICES web site (www.stewards.net) even cites the OISM Petition and the Leipzig Declarations as proof that there is no scientific consensus on global warming—nearly a decade after both were scientifically and professionally discredited! In the end, Acton, ICES, and the Cornwall Declaration are simply an attempt by the Far-Right to impose Biblical sanction on profiteering and consumption.

With the evidence for global warming growing stronger, almost on a daily basis, and the steady erosion of skeptic arguments, climate change astroturfing is becoming an increasingly difficult sell and what programs are still under way are becoming more desperate, and shrill.

A textbook example of the underhanded and ill-informed tactics skeptic front groups often resort to received national attention in 1998 when a tiny Oregon based ultra-conservative advocacy group claimed to have proof of a scientific “consensus” that global warming was a “liberal myth.” In April of that year a Right-Wing front called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine joined forces with the Marshall Institute and Frederick Seitz (a past president of the National Academy of Sciences) and circulated a petition to thousands of scientists, engineers, and weather forecasting professionals nationwide. The original mailing contained an unpublished scientific paper by Arthur Robinson and his son Zachary of the OISM and William Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Marshall Institute (hereafter referred to as RRSB), a copy of a December 1997 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "Science Has Spoken - Global Warming is a Myth", and a petition the reader was to sign which called for the elimination of the Kyoto Protocol for international greenhouse gas reductions and opposition to all global warming mitigation efforts.

The mailing attracted attention in the scientific community because the accompanying paper had been deliberately printed with a letterhead and page format with a striking resemblance to that of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a highly respected peer-reviewed scientific journal which had in fact never published it. The paper contained numerous errors, including references to obsolete climate models, long outdated studies and calculations, and inappropriate data comparisons. Among other things, a large portion of its conclusions were based on an analysis of satellite based tropospheric temperature measurements that were obsolete. Nearly all of the issues that lead to later revisions were known at the time the petition was released and had been published elsewhere. Even a few minutes worth of literature search should have turned them up. In fact, the original publication of the analysis used even made specific reference to at least one of the known sources of error and clearly stated that it had not been taken into account in the analysis they used (RRSB's citation was to a 1997 correspondence in the journal Nature - not to the original publication of the analysis). The paper even contained misquoted numbers and clerical errors that should have been caught by a simple proofreading. Many of its claims were openly contradicted by the references cited, indicating that they had not been read closely (or worse, had been deliberately misrepresented).

Shortly after the original mailing, the National Academy of Sciences issued a press release disavowing themselves from the petition and its paper. They strongly criticized the conclusions presented and the plagiarism of their journal's publishing format. As of this writing, the paper is still posted at the OISM web site and is still being widely cited by global warming skeptics. No attempt has been made to correct any of the errors or to update it in any way, and that despite the fact that the satellite based troposphere temperature analysis that comprised a cornerstone of its conclusions has now been shown to be the result of a math error!

From its inception the OISM and the Marshall Institute have boasted that their petition project represents the majority consensus of the scientific community. At one time or another, the Petition has claimed as many as 25,000 signatories, though to this day the most commonly cited figure is 17,000. Many of its original recipients had backgrounds in meteorology but were not involved in any climate change related fields (it is a common misconception that weather forecasting and climate change are closely related; they aren’t). Soon after the mailing it was posted on the internet where virtually anyone could sign it claiming whatever "credentials" they wished.