Next month the world awaits the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Many in the business community and in our federal cabinet are eager to doubt not just on the human impact on global warming, but whether it makes economic sense to fight it, or whether we should “wait and see” and maybe focus on mitigating possible effects.
Hey, we’ll get warmer wheatfields and more agricultural produce, goes the thinking, so what’s the problem? The Club of Rome was wrong in the 1970s—why should I listen to all this doom and gloom now?
The key to a lot of this thinking is the cost of the economic backlash against carbon emitters—the loss of jobs, business and tax income. A lot of us benefit directly or indirectly from the extracting and selling tar sands oil, from mining coal or from driving and selling cars with big engines and can’t see anything comparable in immediate economic impact from the green side of the ledger.
As Armstrong, B.C. resident Bill Rahn wrote in a letter to National Geographic after its article on the tar/oil sands, “I worked in the oil sands…for the past eight years. I do have concerns with the way the environment is raped and pillaged up here. I also have concerns as to how I will feed my family.”
With the weight of those economic concerns on our shoulders, anyone who can challenge the prevailing thinking on climate change is embraced in certain circles as a saviour.
Unfortunately for the long-term economic stability for humans on our planet, the vast majority of climate change deniers are misinformed, misleading, and financed by those who will do anything to stir up uncertainty and stop real action to slow down carbon emissions.
“The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” has now been meticulously exposed in Hoggan and Associates president Jim Hoggan’s new book, Climate Cover-Up.
Based on journalist Richard Littlemore’s sleuthing on DeSmogBlog.com, the book explains that most of the faux scientists purporting to know better than the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are financed by oil companies like ExxonMobil for the express purpose of sowing doubt about real scientists’ claims. This is the same tactic that was used to delay action on curbing tobacco use.
Take for example, the recent visit to Vancouver by Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, sponsored by the Fraser Institute. (Nowhere on its website does the Fraser Institute name the “thousands of individuals, organizations, and foundations” that fund it, but www.exxonsecrets.com, a website described in Hoggan’s book, claims it has received $120,000 from ExxonMobil). Brenchley has a background in classics and journalism and can in no way be described as a scientist, yet he gets paraded around Vancouver as some kind of expert.
To combat the plethora of truth-twisting campaigns and phony petitions served up as legitimate debate, Hoggan challenges us to ask three questions of anyone denying the human impact on climate change:
1. Does this “expert” have scientific training connected to climatology or atmospheric physics?
2. Is this “expert” a practicing scientist publishing in peer-reviewed journals?
3. Is this “expert” taking money from vested interests, including think tanks beholden to their major funders?
According to a study cited by Hoggan and published in the journal Science, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes analyzed every refereed scientific journal article on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that all 928 articles agreed with the consensus that human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change.
If I had to go with non-scientists, I’d be listening to the Institute for Environmental Security, made up of 10 high-ranking military officials from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US.
They’re calling on governments to produce an “ambitious and equitable” international agreement at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Without such an agreement, they say that “preserving security and stability even at current levels will become increasingly difficult”.
Canadians should be ashamed of our federal government’s foot-dragging on this issue. Hoggan’s book is yet another reason to get moving on real change and shake off the misinformation that stubbornly feeds our short-term, self-destructive self interests.