Excellent CBC-TV documentary exposes scientists paid by Petroleum industry interests to deny Global Warming catastrophe

Edited by Paul Chen

	CBC-TV's veteran interviewer and investigative journalist Bob McKeown.

In the past few years, CBC-TV programme the Fifth Estate documents the firestorm that has engulfed the debate about Global Warming. This issue has pitted science against spin, with inflammatory words from both sides. Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore’s recent Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his work on Global Warming, only served to heighten the rhetoric on both sides of the debate.

There is also a group of scientists have alleged that Global Warming will not be devastating to the planet. But, how could scientific fact, which many believe could determine the very future of the planet, become a political battleground, left versus right, environmentalist versus climate change sceptic?

Global warming: potential costs?

A 2006 British report estimated that the projected costs of Global Warming to be as costly as both world wars and the Great Depression added together. Yet, with such consequences, some scientists still insist that climate change, if it is happening at all, could be a good thing.

The Fifth Estate documentary The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of Global Warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies.

Who is keeping the debate on whether, or not, global warming is a serious problem for our planet Earth alive?

The very well produced documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

Dr. Patrick Michaels, for example, is a Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia that is featured on The Denial Machine. He has been the State Climatologist for Virginia since 1980, and has been at the forefront of the global warming denial movement.

He is also associated with two think tanks: a Visiting Scientist with the George C. Marshall Institute and a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies with the Cato Institute.

Writing in Harpers Magazine in 1995, author Ross Gelbspan noted that "Michaels has received more than $115,000 over the last four years from coal and energy interests. World Climate Review, a quarterly he founded that routinely debunks climate concerns, was funded by Western Fuels."

His most recent book is called Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Rick Piltz, Founder and Director of Climate Science Watch. Piltz, is a former senior associate in the Climate Change Science Program.

He worked for a decade for the U.S. federal government’s climate research program. He has been described the American Prospect as "an insider who coordinated the editing of many [climate change] program documents".

Piltz resigned in March, charging that White House politics has undermined the credibility and integrity of the program.

Rick Piltz talks about where the strategy of creating uncertainty as to the science on global warming originated.

Herein's an excerpt of that interview on the Fifth Estate:

Rick Piltz: I think this is a strategy that dates back. Actually it dates back to the tobacco industry and the smoking health effects, but, if you bring it forward into the nineteen nineties, there's a strategy that was developed by a range of political operatives in the industry and in these advocacy groups to hold off regulation, to hold off pressure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, by pursuing a strategy of manufacturing an enhanced sense of uncertainty about global warming, and that's what they've done.

And, even though they've ended up promoting a position that's far outside the mainstream of the science community, they've kind of, so far, won politically in that they have completely tied the hands of getting anything done about the global warming problem.

Bob McKeown (Fifth Estate Interviewer): IN THE SAME WAY, AS YOU POINT OUT, IN THE SAME WAY THAT THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY CAST DOUBT ON, ON MEDICAL RESEARCH -

Rick Piltz: For decades...

Bob McKeown: ABOUT THE LINK BETWEEN SECOND HAND SMOKE AND CIGARETTES FOR NOW -

Rick Piltz: For decades. Yeah, for decades, and um -

Bob McKeown: AND PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF IT?

Rick Piltz: In the case of smoking? Certainly, of course, in very large numbers.

Bob McKeown: JUST GOING ALONG THAT LINE OF ARGUMENT, DOES, NOT TO BE CAVALIER ABOUT IT, BUT DOES IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT JUST AS PEOPLE DIED, ARGUABLY BECAUSE THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY CAST DOUBT ON THE MEDICAL LINK BETWEEN CIGARETTES AND CANCER, FOR SO LONG, WHEN YOU LOOK FIFTY YEARS IN THE FUTURE, ARE WE TALKING ABOUT GREATER STAKES THAN THAT?

Rick Piltz: Well, I mean as a number of the leading scientists, Jim Hanson, announced, and others will tell you, people who know climate science much better than I, if we go along for another fifty years, and actually less than fifty years, and do absolutely nothing to alter the trajectory we're on with global, economic development and the way it uses energy, we are very likely to be facing consequences for a sea level rise, extreme weather events, shifting of agriculture, shifting of water resources that are going to be very disruptive to civilization, the public health impacts…

The Denial Machine also explores how the arguments supported by oil companies were adopted by policymakers in both Canada under the Harper government and the U.S. and helped form government policy.

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