Sorting out the truth on global warming

Sorting out the truth on global warming

By BILL ADAIR

WASHINGTON - A major international study recently concluded there was overwhelming evidence that humans were causing global warming. But that didn't quiet the skeptics. They continue to raise doubts, suggesting that everything from sunspots to cattle flatulence is causing the earth to warm, and insisting that scientists were stretching the truth.

"Every weather extreme is global warming!" said radio host Rush Limbaugh three days after the release of the report. "These people, they're brilliant little socialists and communists. They know how to propagandize; they know how to keep this alive."

Global warming has been called the most dire issue facing the planet, and yet, if you're not a scientist, it can be difficult to sort out the truth.

Here's what scientists involved in the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say about the skeptics' points. The IPCC involved more than 2,500 scientists from 130 nations reviewing thousands of climate studies.

Cattle flatulence creates more greenhouse gas than cars.

Variations of this point have been made by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who made a crack about it in a recent dissenting opinion and conservative columnist George Will. There is some truth to it, although it is sometimes exaggerated.

Cattle and other ruminant animals are surprisingly large producers of methane, the No. 2 greenhouse gas. When they eat plant material, it combines with bacteria in their stomachs to produce methane. U.S. cows emit about 5.5-million metric tons of methane each year, accounting for 20 percent of the nation's methane emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The skeptics often mention animal flatulence to trivialize the causes of warming, but Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist who was a reviewer on the IPCC study, says more gas comes from the front of the animals than the rear.

"It's not really flatulence," he said. "It's really burps."

The skeptics have sometimes exaggerated its effect as a greenhouse gas. The scientists' best estimate says the impact of all animal-produced methane worldwide is roughly the same as the carbon dioxide produced by cars and trucks in the United States. But some skeptics neglect to include those qualifiers and incorrectly contend that cows alone create more greenhouse gas than all cars, trucks and planes.

Sunspots are a major factor in global warming.

This theory, promoted by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and others, seems to make a lot of sense. We know there are fluctuations in heat from the sun, so it seems logical that they could make the Earth hotter.

But the landmark IPCC report released in February said solar fluctuations were not an important factor in the dramatic warming of the Earth in recent decades. Scientists say the amount of heat from the sun has not increased significantly in the past 30 years, even though global temperatures did.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University who worked on the IPCC report, said solar variations "are not the dominant contributor to warming in the past 50 years. Greenhouse gases are the dominant factor."

Studies show Antarctica is cooling, which contradicts the belief that the Earth is warming.

Like other points from the skeptics, this one - from novelist Michael Crichton, conservative author Ann Coulter and others - has a germ of truth, but has been exaggerated.

Indeed, a 2002 study found that a small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had cooled over a five-year period. It also found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed.

The study, by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Peter Doran and other scientists, drew tremendous news coverage. It ran counter to people's assumption that global warming would occur uniformly throughout the planet, and quickly became a talking point for the skeptics.

Doran says his research was taken out of context and wildly exaggerated. Although it showed one portion of Antarctica was cooling, it was wrongly cited as evidence against global warming, he wrote in the New York Times.

Scientists say his findings reflected Antarctica's unique weather patterns, which keep one portion of the continent cooler while the peninsula, which stretches toward South America, has been warming faster than the global average.

Just 30 years ago, there was talk of an ice age coming.

Limbaugh, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and many others make this point to suggest that scientists are fickle. If the experts were pursuing ice-age theories 30 years ago, the skeptics ask, how can they now believe the Earth is warming?

Indeed, Newsweek published a story in 1975 headlined "The Cooling World."

"There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth," the article warned, citing a "sudden, large increase" in snow cover and a drop in the amount of sunshine reaching the continental United States.

Today, climate scientists say that was unfounded media hype. Although there were a few studies that suggested the possibility of global cooling in the 1970s, they did not represent a consensus of the world's scientists reviewing the thousands of studies, as the IPCC's reports do today.

"With all due respect to your noble profession," Schmidt said in an interview, "I would have to caution people not to believe everything they read in Newsweek or Time."

The "hockey stick" theory has been debunked.

Charts showing the increase in global temperatures resemble a hockey stick. They show temperatures relatively flat for centuries and then increase sharply in the last 100 years, like the blade on the stick. But skeptics such as Inhofe often say that this theory has been proven wrong and that "the hockey stick is broken."

Scientists involved with IPCC study acknowledge there were minor problems with supplementary information in the original 1998 study that became known as the hockey stick report. Those problems were identified and corrections were made.

But the scientists say the problems were insignificant and did not undermine the core finding of that study and many others since: The Earth's average temperature changed relatively little over centuries but then went up dramatically in post-industrial times.

Said Schmidt: "The hockey stick lives."

What's the big deal if average temperatures increase a few degrees?

This point has been raised by Thomas Gale Moore, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry about Global Warming.

"It's absurd to believe that we live in the best of all possible times and that we can't adjust" to a temperature change, he recently told Newsweek. He says more people die from cold than warmth and says an increase of a few degrees could prevent thousands of deaths.

Indeed, scientists acknowledge that there are benefits from global warming. They noted at a news conference last week that some apples taste better because the growing season is longer. And as the Earth warms, frigid locales will be more temperate and presumably more desirable.

But the scientists who wrote the IPCC study say they are concerned because the Earth has been warming so fast.

"With just a small increase in the average temperature, you get a big increase in the extremes," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the IPCC study.

Scientists believe that as the Earth warms, weather patterns will bring more intense droughts to certain areas and more powerful storms in other places. As temperatures warm, the atmosphere holds more water, leading to more intense rain and more frequent flooding.

Said Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor: "The more we learn, the more we find reasons to be concerned."

Researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Washington bureau chief Bill Adair can be reached at adair@sptimes.com or (202) 463-0575.

For more information on the IPCC study, go to http://www.ipcc.ch/

White House Denies Climate Policy U-Turn

White House Denies Climate Policy U-Turn
Administration Denies British Report that Bush Will Announce a Dramatic Change of Policy in His State of the Union Address
By BLAIR SODEN

Jan. 14, 2007 — - The State of our Union … is suffering from global warming?

The White House is flatly denying a British report today in The Observer newspaper in which British officials say they expect President Bush to reverse himself during his annual State of the Union address on Jan. 23 and commit to an agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States.

"[The story] is inaccurate on all fronts," a White House official said, "and especially regarding the State of the Union."

While the Bush administration denies the British report, there are signs at the White House that might fuel such speculation.

Just last month, the Bush administration recognized the effects of global warming by adding polar bears to the list of "threatened" animals under the Endangered Species Act. U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne acknowledged that the polar bears' environment was slowly deteriorating from melting ice sheets caused by global warming.

At the time, it was unclear whether the announcement was part of a larger plan to modify U.S. climate change policy, but British officials say it may have been the beginning of a strategic U-turn.

A source close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair told The Observer, "President Bush is beginning to talk about more radical measures. We could now be seeing the beginning of a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework."

Bush declined to sign the Kyoto protocol first proposed in 1997 and put into effect last year. The agreement among 160 countries, made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), called for "industrialized countries to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent compared to the year 1990."

President Bush agreed with the overall goal of Kyoto, but refused to sign an agreement he said is flawed.

"America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility," Bush said in 2001. "To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change."

While the president has declined to abide by regulations imposed in the Kyoto protocol, the California legislature recently reached an agreement with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

California's Global Warming Solutions Act, passed on Aug. 31, 2006, proposes to reduce the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Since California would rank as the 12th-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, the plan may signify a turn for the U.S. as a whole.

Schwarzenegger isn't the only politician taking climate change policy into his own hands. A bipartisan group of six U.S. senators recently introduced a revised Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act last week, pledging to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

Among the co-sponsors are several potential 2008 presidential candidates, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. Their proposal would put a mandatory cap on industrial emissions, something the president and former Republican Congress have adamantly opposed.

If President Bush does introduce a new climate proposal during his State of the Union speech, despite the White House denial of the British report, Thomas Graedel, a professor of industrial ecology at Yale University, fears it will be ineffective without enforcement.

"The fact that the president may announce a policy change is recognition of something that virtually everyone who's looked at the issue would find perfectly reasonable," Graedel said. "But without a commitment to take strong action through acknowledging the existence of the action really doesn't move us in the direction of doing anything about it."

President Bush addressed the global warming issue last January at his State of the Union address when he acknowledged the U.S. addiction to oil. He proposed the Advanced Energy Initiative as part of the 2007 budget. Congress has yet to vote on it.

According to The Observer, British officials speculate that a meeting in December 2006 between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair was a turning point for U.S. policy on global warming. While the details of the private talks were not released, the president acknowledged that greenhouse-gas emissions were discussed.

"The prime minister has put global climate change on the table," Bush said. "It's an issue that we, where there's been disagreement in the past … there is a consensus that we need to move forward together."

Senior White House officials say they won't discuss the content of the State of the Union address before it's given, but that the British report of a dramatic change simply isn't true.

The officials claim the president has repeatedly acknowledged the earth is warming, and that he's "put good, workable policies and significant scientific research dollars to work to drive technological innovation that will help lift developing nations out of poverty and decrease environmental effects of energy consumption."

Graedel and other supporters of policies to prevent global warming say they hope this year will be different.

"I hope the U.S. will make a major commitment to reducing not only it's rate of increase of greenhouse-gas emissions," Graedel said, "but the absolute amount of emissions."

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass Death and Resource Wars in the 21st Century

The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass
Death and Resource Wars in the 21st Century

by Juan Santos

"We are the watchers. We are the witnesses. We see what has gone before. We see what happens now, at this dangerous moment in human history. We see what's going to happen, what will surely happen unless we come together---we, the Peoples of all Nations---to restore peace, harmony and balance to the Earth, our Mother."

--Chief Arvol Looking Horse, from White Buffalo Teachings

At the Sundance Film Festival Al Gore declared, "We have a category five denial of this issue [global warming]. I believe our political system is broken, however, I have optimism and hope. A rebellion is gathering." But rebellion isn’t what Al Gore is fostering. Speaking at NYU against what one commentator called a “stately backdrop of American flags,” Gore’s comments were focused on “uplift,” and calls to action slathered in a “thick layer of patriotism” and good old capitalist know-how. He seemed oblivious to irony, saying of the US, “Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global warming."

The feel good approach Gore pushes is dead wrong: Economic growth and saving life on Earth are not compatible goals. Industrial civilization isn’t harming the Earth, it’s killing the Earth. The system has long since passed the limits of growth - it can’t be sustained.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute, showed that 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life are "being pushed beyond their sustainable limits," toward a state of collapse that may be "abrupt and potentially irreversible." These ecosystems and the civilization that is killing them are both approaching an endpoint.

People are calling Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the most terrifying movie you will ever see – but really, Gore’s film is a soft sell, one that underestimates the dangers we face and that veils not only the root causes of global warming, but the drastic military responses the US is planning in the event of an abrupt shift in the climate.

Call it Category 4 denial. Gore ignores the real problem. Global heating isn’t “caused” by CO2, it’s caused by industrial production and those that profit from it – capitalists in oil, gas, coal, electricity and automobiles, among others. And the system isn’t “broken,” no matter what Gore claims. The system is producing what it’s supposed to produce; power and profit and the corollaries of power and profit; denial and death.

For those addicted to power and profit, who are “winning” at the expense of all life, global warming is business as usual.

Try telling an abusive alcoholic he’s taken one drink too many, that animals and plants, even other people, are not objects, that he’s beaten his wife one too many times, or that, as Brother Malcolm put it, the chickens are coming home to roost. Unless he’s hit bottom, he’s not listening. Even George Bush has publicly acknowledged the obvious: the system is addicted to oil. But he’s not listening.

The analogy to addiction is not facile and the denial of the crisis we face is no accident; it is both conscious and deliberate. In this system, denial of suffering is the key to success. The ability to distance themselves from the meaning of their actions is what put those who are on top on top in the first place.

Look at Exxon and its global warming disinformation campaign. They’ve spent millions on propaganda to consciously deceive us about the reality of global warming and the impending mass death it implies, much like the Nazis told their victims they were heading for a shower, not a gas chamber, like the cigarette capitalists told us smoking carries no harm. But the genocide the Nazis perpetrated was not this extreme. This is different. This is not ethnocide or genocide. This is omnicide. Life on Earth is in the balance.

The stakes, the costs of this crime and its coverup, could not be higher. World renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey tells us, “Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies."

Within 50 years a million species will be extinct. Within 100 years 50% of all species now living - 5 million forms of living beauty - will be gone forever. Within a mere 30 years, a quarter of all mammal species may be gone.

Today, bears are no longer hibernating in the north of Spain. With the melting of polar ice, the Polar Bear is on its way out. The Orangutan has ten years left.

Fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef – the unthinkable equivalent of primates starving in the jungle. In the meantime, the jungle, the Amazon Rainforest, which provides 20% of the world’s oxygen, will be a savannah, or perhaps a desert, by 2100.

Forty percent of the world’s species will die with the Amazon.

The new Age of Extinctions is being driven by global heating, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals, habitat destruction, and invasive or infectious species. The cause isn’t just CO2, it’s our whole way of life. The Earth is in its most profound crisis since the mass extinctions of the Eocene period, 54 million years ago.

Before that, two hundred and fifty million years ago at the end of the Permian era, 95% of all species perished due to runaway global warming, warming that occurred due to the same kind of positive feedback loops that we see emerging in today’s heating trends. Scientists call it The Great Dying, a period in which life on Earth was all-but wiped out.

The Permian mass extinction was apparently caused by a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. Geologists have said the impact of this "post apocalyptic greenhouse" was so severe that only one large land animal was left alive. 100 million years would pass before species diversity returned to its former levels.

In light of such potentials, how many people are willing to wager that the world scientific community is wrong and that George W. Bush – the idiot savant of the Christian Fascists – is right when he claims the verdict is still out on global warming? How many will be willing to leave the fate of the Earth, of their children and their children’s children, in the hands of propagandists for ExxonMobile? The impact of global heating - on humans alone - would be almost beyond imagining.

James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia Theory – the scientific theorem that Earth acts as a single self-sustaining, self-balancing organic system – tells us that by 2100 there will only be 500 million humans left on Earth. The Earth, he says, will no longer be able to sustain more than that. There are 6.5 billion of us now; by 2050 that number will rocket to 8.9 billion, then drop precipitously. If Lovelock is right, only one out of 18 people will be left alive at the century’s end. 95% will be dead. And Lovelock is only looking at global warming. He isn’t counting the threats posed by Peak Oil or nuclear resource wars over oil, water and arable land that, if current trends continue, will become all but inevitable.

The glaciers of the Himalayas are disappearing. Forty percent of the people in the world draw their water from sources directly fed by the regular summer melting cycles of Himalayan ice and snow. Their sources of food will melt with the glaciers. With mass starvation in Asia, the probabilities of war over water and arable land - and of mass death - grow exponentially.

By the summer of 2040 all of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will be gone. That means that theromohaline circulation in the North Sea – the Gulf Stream, which carries vast amounts of heat from the equator to the North Atlantic - will cease. Even as the planet heats, northern Europe will freeze. In Britain, for example, the Gulf Stream provides 27,000 times more heat than all current power supplies can generate, warming that nation by 5-8C. Warm winds from the Gulf Stream eventually reach the Himalayas, where they play a role in stimulating and regulating the East Asian monsoon system.

With the collapse of the Gulf Stream, temperatures in Europe could fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit, creating an ecological nightmare as farmland turns to frozen tundra, with temperatures dropping to below -20C. Europe is currently self sufficient in agriculture, feeding its 600 million inhabitants, an obvious impossibility under such devastating new conditions.

Would Europe, with its vast armaments and its history of colonization, genocide and global wars aimed at re-dividing world resources and markets, slip quietly into a frozen death - or would it find war, even a Third World War, preferable to collapse and relentless famine at home?

The question is far from academic. Ice sheet melting from the Greenland ice cap into the Greenland Sea and the melting of floating ice during the 1980s caused the Gulf Stream to diminish by 80%. A recent report shows that the Gulf Stream came to a dead halt for ten days in 2004. The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic Sea’s ice all but guarantees the end of the Gulf Stream before mid century.

Which lands a frozen Europe might target in order to feed itself could eventually pose an all-but insoluble problem for the sub-continent’s rulers. A recent study by the British government shows that if current trends continue, a third of the planet will be desert by 2100. According to their calculations, areas susceptible to moderate drought will double to 50% of the Earth’s surface. Areas susceptible to severe drought will more than triple to 30% of the Earth’s surface.

Exxon-Bush Inc. would have us believe these impacts and their causes are debatable. Republican Senator James Inhofe would have us believe that the world scientific community is perpetrating an elaborate anti-capitalist hoax – the biggest hoax in human history, with the highest stakes. Rush Limbaugh says global warming is just another way to make civilized white people and capitalists feel guilty, the moral equivalent of a commie plot. The Right wants to cast doubt on climate science and the impending realities of climate chaos, because by pretending that there is a debate, they can defer action and continue to profit. For these men, the world itself can end, but not profit.

The fossils of our time sit in Washington, apparently inured by the pleasures of power and wealth to the realities before us. But, appearances notwithstanding, the ruling elites understand that we are on an irreversible path to global heating, caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels for the sake of production and profit. The question is what they plan to do about it.

As resources of petroleum peak and begin to expire, the Bush regime offers no alternative other than resource wars – war, not to end the use of the fuels that are destroying the Earth – but to get more of them, the last of them. Their aim is not to save the world, but to ensure their continued ability to dominate it by controlling the rapidly dwindling sources of oil. This, after all, is what the war in Iraq is about, and this is the meta-madness that guides the imperial preparations to attack Iran.

The ruling elites know exactly where we are heading and exactly what they are doing. Quietly, they call global warming a “national security threat.”

A 2004 Pentagon report, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security," cautions US strategic planners that in a scenario of abrupt climate change “Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The report predicts that Third World countries will develop their own nuclear threat to secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. By 2020, the report concludes, “catastrophic” shortages of water, food and energy will plunge the planet toward war. The United Nations identifies some 150 flash points where wars may be fought over water, alone.

The Pentagon report suggests that there could be global economic depression, destruction of technological infrastructure on a global scale, nuclear war, mega-droughts, famine, mass migrations from Third World countries, and widespread rioting around the world.

“Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the Pentagon says. “…warfare would define human life.”

The report calls for the development of what it calls “no-regrets strategies” by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Welcome to the apocalypse. This is the Great Emergency. The future of all Life on Earth is in our hands, in the hands of this generation. We have two choices: stop them, or prepare our children and grandchildren to be among the 5% who might be so fortunate – or unfortunate – as to survive.

From Part 3 of Apocalypse No! The Law of Life and the Law of Death

Read More

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Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/.

Out of Balance - ExxonMobil's Impact on Climate Change

http://www.worldoutofbalance.org/

Union of Concerned Scientists Exposes Exxon Climate Disinformation Campaign

January 3, 2007 Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science Oil Company Spent Nearly $16 Million to Fund Skeptic Groups, Create Confusion

ExxonMobil Report

Read the Report

ExxonMobil Report (PDF)

Appendix C (PDF high resolution)

Appendix C (part 1)

Appendix C (part 2)

Appendix C (part 3)

WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 3–A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years."

Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to "Manufacture Uncertainty" on Climate Change details how the oil company, like the tobacco industry in previous decades, has

• raised doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence
• funded an array of front organizations to create the appearance of a broad platform for a tight-knit group of vocal climate change contrarians who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings
• attempted to portray its opposition to action as a positive quest for "sound science" rather than business self-interest
• used its access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming

ExxonMobil-funded organizations consist of an overlapping collection of individuals serving as staff, board members, and scientific advisors that publish and re-publish the works of a small group of climate change contrarians. The George C. Marshall Institute, for instance, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil, recently touted a book edited by Patrick Michaels, a long-time climate change contrarian who is affiliated with at least 11 organizations funded by ExxonMobil. Similarly, ExxonMobil funds a number of lesser-known groups such as the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Both groups promote the work of several climate change contrarians, including Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist who is affiliated with at least nine ExxonMobil-funded groups.

Baliunas is best known for a 2003 paper alleging the climate had not changed significantly in the past millennia that was rebutted by 13 scientists who stated she had misrepresented their work in her paper. This renunciation did not stop ExxonMobil-funded groups from continuing to promote the paper. Through methods such as these, ExxonMobil has been able to amplify and prop up work that has been discredited by reputable climate scientists.

"When one looks closely, ExxonMobil's underhanded strategy is as clear and indisputable as the scientific research it's meant to discredit," said Seth Shulman, an investigative journalist who wrote the UCS report. "The paper trail shows that, to serve its corporate interests, ExxonMobil has built a vast echo chamber of seemingly independent groups with the express purpose of spreading disinformation about global warming."

ExxonMobil has used the laudable goal of improving scientific understanding of global warming—under the guise of "sound science"—for the pernicious ends of delaying action to reduce heat-trapping emissions indefinitely. ExxonMobil also exerted unprecedented influence over U.S. policy on global warming, from successfully recommending the appointment of key personnel in the Bush administration to funding climate change deniers in Congress.

"As a scientist, I like to think that facts will prevail, and they do eventually," said Dr. James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's working group on climate change impacts. "It's shameful that ExxonMobil has sought to obscure the facts for so long when the future of our planet depends on the steps we take now and in the coming years."

The burning of oil and other fossil fuels results in additional atmospheric carbon dioxide that blankets the Earth and traps heat. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased greatly over the last century and global temperatures are rising as a result. Though solutions are available now that will cut global warming emissions while creating jobs, saving consumers money, and protecting our national security, ExxonMobil has manufactured confusion around climate change science, and these actions have helped to forestall meaningful action that could minimize the impacts of future climate change.

"ExxonMobil needs to be held accountable for its cynical disinformation campaign on global warming," said Meyer. "Consumers, shareholders and Congress should let the company know loud and clear that its behavior on this issue is unacceptable and must change."

The Denial Machine

In the past few years, a hurricane has engulfed the debate about global warming. This scientific issue has become a rhetorical firestorm with science pitted against spin and inflammatory words on both sides.

This 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.