The oil, coal, gas, and mining industries stand to lose tremendously if the truth about global warming becomes accepted by American society. As the tobacco industry invested millions in keeping its deadly secret, so also have the oil, coal, gas, and mining industries attempted to hide and discredit the link between CO2 emissions and a warming earth. They have funded, promoted, and used as witnesses a handful of greenhouse skeptics, who have widely and loudly proclaimed that global warming is a myth.
There is, for the most part, a scientific consensus that human action is causing a warming of the earth. Scientists who subcribe to this view recognize, nonetheless, that there is uncertainty as to the specific outcome of the warming. The oil and mining industries have chosen to focus on the word "uncertainty" in their sound bites and media campaigns.
Regrettably, they have disingenuously sought to extend the notion of uncertainty from the "outcome" of global warming to the global warming phenomenon itself - a flagrant and unjustifiable attempt to discredit what we already understand.
The greenhouse skeptics, for the most part, fail to submit their work to the process of peer-review. Peer-review is the process by which others in the scientific community doing similar work are asked to comment on, criticize, and replicate a scientist's findings before they are published. Peer-review is an integral and established part of sound science. If a paper is not peer-reviewed, there is no verification of the credibility or validity of the science being undertaken. Several members of the U.S. Congress have overlooked the importance of this process, and many have given equal, if not more, credit to the statements of non-peer-reviewed reports. The degree to which the greenhouse skeptics and their organizations have succeeded in blurring and undermining the facts about global warming is evident when examining the statements of several congressmen in regard to the issue.
For example, in response to a statement made by David Gardener from the EPA regarding the potentially catastrophic and irreversible effects of sea-level rise, Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, surfer, and member of the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, flippantly remarked "I am tempted to ask what this will do to the shape of the waves and the rideability of the surf. But I will not do that. I'll wait until later when we get off the record." (Gelbspan 1997). Widespread efforts are being made to discount the scientific evidence, as illustrated by the following example.
In early 1998, a senior scientist at The Woods Hole Research Center received a letter sent by an organization identified only as GWPP. Enclosed were several documents: a short note signed by Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences; a photocopied article that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 4, 1997 entitled "Science has Spoken: Global Warming is a Myth;" a scientific paper entitled "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide;" and a petition to be signed and returned. The note, which was conspicuously lacking any sort of header or organizational letterhead, urged the reader to sign the enclosed petition and proclaimed that: "Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful."
The petition went on to state:
"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December of 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind." "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth." The "scientific" paper looks like any other reprint from a scientific journal.
However, what the authors fail to mention is that this article was neither peer-reviewed nor previously published in any shape or form. To anyone not intimately familiar with scientific papers, this article would probably help to perpetuate the myth that there is still uncertainty about the warming of the earth.
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This paper, was in part, produced by employees of the George C. Marshall Institute. This organization, founded in 1980 to issue reports promoting President Reagan's "star wars" defense program, conducts no original research. Most recently, it has focused on issuing reports dismissing climate change (Gelbspan, 1997). Source: http://www.whrc.org |
