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Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Lies
Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Lies
Over the last few years, a growing number of people have been taking a hard look at what is happening to our planet – historic droughts, rising sea levels, massive floods – and acknowledging, finally, that human activity is propelling rapid climate change. But guess what? Exxon (now ExxonMobil) had an inkling of this as early as 1978.
By the early 1980s, Exxon scientists had much more than an inkling. They not only understood the science behind climate change, but also recognized the company’s own outsize role in driving the phenomenon. Recognizing the potential effects as “catastrophic” for a significant portion of the population, they urged Exxon’s top executives to take action. Instead, the executives buried the truth.
There may be a silver lining to this infuriating story: the recent investigation that exposed Exxon’s deceit could end up catalyzing the action needed to address the looming climate crisis. After all, similar revelations about the tobacco industry – what the major cigarette companies knew and when they knew it – transformed the public-health landscape.
In 1996, a series of lawsuits forced tobacco companies to release millions of internal documents, which confirmed what public-health advocates and policymakers had long suspected: as early as the 1950s, the industry knew that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes caused cancer. But, to protect its own interests, Big Tobacco deliberately misled the public, doing everything possible to cast doubt on scientific findings that it knew to be accurate. Such tactics enabled the industry to delay, for more than 50 years, regulation that could have saved millions of lives annually.
After the revelations, however, it was clear that the tobacco industry was a malevolent force that did not belong in the policymaking process. With Big Tobacco out of the picture, and armed with evidence of the real effects of tobacco consumption, health advocates were finally able to compel their governments to act.
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/exxonmobil-scandal-climate-policy-by-kelle-louaillier-and-bill-mckibben-2015-10#TXsGAuoOQLybvj6Q.99
Fred Singer Recalls Silly Attack On Consensus And Naomi Oreskes By Klaus-Martin Schulte, Lord Monckton’s Endocrinologist Front Man
Fred Singer Recalls Silly Attack On Consensus And Naomi Oreskes By Klaus-Martin Schulte, Lord Monckton’s Endocrinologist Front Man
By the 1950s, smoking’s cause of disease had risen to strong scientific consensus, but Big Tobacco needed an illusion of scientific controversy to keep the public in doubt. As seen in the new film Merchants of Doubt, they developed superb marketing tactics copied by others, including the fossil fuel industry and allies.
The scientific consensus on human causation of climate change is just as strong as that on smoking, so the same tactics are used against it, plus Internet-amplified harassment of scientists. Fred Singer recently tried to revive a nearly-forgotten 2007 attack on climate consensus, one of the silliest and least competent, entangled with plagiarism and falsification. A revisit of this episode may be instructive, as consensus (not unanimity) is important enough that people keep challenging it.
UC San Diego geoscientist and science historian Naomi Oreskes’ 2004 Scienceessay had examined 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed science papers and happened to find none that clearly rejected the consensus. She stated the well-known fact that real rejections would say so, whereas people rarely bother to reaffirm mainstream science in the limited text of abstracts.
The result had been ineptly attacked in 2005 by Benny Peiser. His claims of 34 contradictions were demolished by Tim Lambert and others in Peiser’s 34 abstracts, Peiser watch, Peiser admits to making a mistake and Peiser admits he was 97% wrong. Peiser used a slightly different database query, changed criteria and then misclassified many climate abstracts as rejects. It is easy for non-experts to misinterpret abstracts and assessing climate abstracts is a skill for which social (sports) anthropologists are rarely known. By March 2006 he entirely withdrew his complaint. Peiser’s attack was demonstrated inept at best, but not a barrier to his later job prospects at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He never apologized, but his “work” resurfaced in 2007, the main topic here.
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