James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
Climate Cover-Up
The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
Greystone Books, 250 pages
Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott this week.
That might sound like a dismissive review, but it I don't mean it to be taken that way.
The fact is, the long list of outright lies being promulgated and propagated by right-wing PR shops that revel in the irony of calling themselves "think" tanks and get away with it on the mainstream airwaves and newspapers is already well known and documented. Hoggan and his co-author Richard Littlemore have been posting that kind of stuff on their blog for a few years now, along with Ross "The Heat is On" Gelbspan and George "Heat" Monbiot. Yet hardly anyone seems to care.
Fox News and the National Post continue to offer airtime and print space to Steve Milloy without pointing out that he's on the payroll of the companies his "junk science" analyses inevitably cheer. Canada's CBC Radio Ideas series just gave an hour to Larry Solomon to extoll the virtues of the very same discredited arguments the corporate denial machine has been making since global warming first ventured into the public noosphere. Hoggan could have titled his book "Lies and the lying liars who tell them" but Al Franken already took that one.
This despite an ever-growing Alexandrian library of peer-reviewed science warning of us the dangers of fossil-fueled business as usual. As my three-year-old would say, "It's not fair!"
No, it's not. And Hoggan wants us all to start doing something about it. But other than staying informed and learning to trust real experts rather than members of Hoggan's own profession, Climate Cover-Up doesn't really offer any solutions to the problem of how to combat dishonest multimillion-dollar messaging from the largest companies on the planet. That's because there probably aren't any. We just have to keep banging our heads against the wall and hope that the wall will fall before our skulls crack.
Climate Cover-Up is worthy contribution to anyone's politics of climate change library. I came across only a couple of insignificant mistakes (like the year of publication of a couple of cited books), and my only real complaint is the scant use of endnotes (I prefer everything to be sourced.) And yet, all I did for me was make me angry and suggest a certain degree of futility. Is there any point in drawing our attention yet again to the sad case of former White House adviser Philip Cooney and the revolving door that allows corporate lobbyists to edit federal government climate science reports?
Of course there is. The only alternative is to give up. I just wish there was a scintilla of evidence that Hoggan's valiant efforts to keep such malfeasance out in the open are doing any good. Hoggan writes at the end that there are more and larger groups of citizens who do care about the fate of civilization making noises and demanding action. But so far, it seems only reasonable to the conclude the agents of denial are winning. Even after their cover-up has been uncovered.
Environment
Comments
No dissent!
Climate change is real. The explanation of how it is happening is so overly simplified that it only good for an advertising meme. The complete lack of critical review or presentation of theory shortfalls leads me to conclude that CO2 reduction is a political and business tool to gain power and money, not what is best for the environment and the economy.
CO2 has been made the super villain not because of comprehensive evidence that it alone is causing climate change, but because of the probable many factors warming the planet like deforestation, paving of land, injection of water vapor at high and dry altitudes, changes in sun activity, reduction of particulate (sun blocking) pollution, ect... CO2 was the best factor to MONETIZE.
Posted by: Sane | November 10, 2009 3:51 AM
Scientific evidence points to CO2 as the MAIN driver for climate change in the last 50 years. Not the sun, not particulate, not deforestation, not paving of land, not injection of water vapor. And since humans are the MAIN source for the increase in CO2 concentration, it makes sense we do something about it.
But since you think it is all political and about monetizing:
Please tell us how paleoclimatologists like Michael Mann would benefit from blaming CO2? Please tell us how astrophysicists like Jim Hansen would benefit from blaming CO2? Please tell us how oceanographers like Mojib Latif would benefit from blaming CO2? Please tell us how a hydrometeorologist like Alexander Bedritsky would benefit from blaming CO2?
Posted by: Marco | November 10, 2009 8:03 AM
There are often a lot of people climbing on popular absolutely Certain causes. There are so many people who are absolutely certain about so many different issues. When you close your ears you close your mind.
Posted by: Jose Carpet | November 14, 2009 3:13 PM
I'll probably buy it. In the meantime, if I ever start to doubt that there was a serious effort to attack the legitimacy of climate change science because of economic self-interest, I'll just remember that the American Enterprise Institute offered a large prize to any scientist who would write a paper critical of the 2007 IPCC report.
Posted by: Brett | November 21, 2009 12:02 AM