Clearing the haze.

In the winter of 1995, an article appeared in Harper's magazine which thrust into public view a symbiotic relationship between members of the coal and oil industry and a handful of scientists who were vocally disputing the overwhelming consensus of their peer-reviewed contemporaries supporting a human role in ongoing changes in the Earth's climate. The article, entitled "The Heat Is On," revealed that these "skeptics" - Fred Singer, Robert Bailing, Richard Lindzen, and Pat Michaels, among others - were the hired guns ("interchangeable hood ornaments on an engine of misinformation") of companies fearing an accelerated move to wean the world from fossil fuels. Unearthing a dense layer of internal memos, quotes and budget numbers, author Ross Gelbspan offered readers a brief but illuminating archeology of these powerful businesses' attempt to control the American public's perception of climate change.

Gelbspan still kept digging, and his collections to date are now on display in a book by the same name. Its purpose, as stated in the introduction, is "not only to bring home the imminence of climate change but also to examine the campaign of deception by big coal and big oil that is keeping the issue off the public agenda.... The reason that most Americans don't know what is happening to the climate is that the oil and coal industries have spent millions of dollars to persuade them that global warming isn't happening."

A big part of the problem, Gelbspan quickly points out, is the sheer financial muscle of these groups, which has enabled them to take pages from the tobacco industry campaign and add volumes. Pulling in a trillion dollars annually, the oil industry can afford a slick PR scheme to spread its message. The American Petroleum Institute spends for public relations alone nearly as much as the total budget of the top five U.S. environmental groups.

Another challenge is the complexity of the issue - climate change is occurring on a geological time scale and outside the range of previous human experience - and the need for writers to somehow convey its magnitude without paralyzing the reader to the point of inaction, when precisely the opposite is needed. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Gelbspan has covered global environmental issues extensively for a quarter-century. His background and muckraking style serve him well here, as he sprinkles unusual climatic events and new scientific discoveries in between the political blow-by-blows just enough to remind the reader of what is at risk. He also takes time to translate the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) findings into lay terms, emphasizing both their seriousness and the degree of scientific agreement they represent.

To his credit as well, Gelbspan probes the scientific community for experts less known to the public, but with important insights on the debate. One of these is James McCarthy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard at the forefront of international climate research, who plainly asserts, "There is no debate among any statured scientists of what is happening. The only debate is the rate at which it's happening." The irony of the public misperception, adds McCarthy, is that because atmospheric scientists are traditionally so cautious in their statements, it is the extreme arguments of hired-gun skeptics which appear more authoritative in a public arena. This is particularly true in the United States, where heated debate is often the preferred medium of discussion. McCarthy also notes a point that rarely finds its way into the popular media: the important question is not whether the Earth is warming, but how sensitive the climate is to disturbances, and how its growing instability is likely to disrupt our planet and our lives.

These cool, reasoned observations contrast sharply with those of the coal and oil industry-funded scientists whom Gelbspan devotes the majority of his book to debunking. As he asserts, a mere handful of scientists have been used in a multi-million dollar campaign by coal and oil industries to downplay the threat of climate change. These companies have exerted considerable influence on the U.S. Congress, where scientists like Singer - who does not publish in peer-reviewed journals - is given equal time as the IPCC's lead authors.

In the most illuminating sections of the book, Gelbspan examines each of the major skeptics, detailing their professional background, undisclosed funding from coal and oil interests (e.g., $300,000 to the University of Arizona's Robert Bailing since 1991), and scientific basis for their skepticism. In this light, their reasons for publicizing their disagreements with the IPCC appear to be simple opportunism: making a stir about the issue to attract more funding for research (precisely what they accuse the scientific mainstream of doing). Nor may their connections to conservative institutions be particularly surprising (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Richard Lindzen, for example, is affiliated with the ultraconservative Marshall Institute).

More unsettling, however, may be the vicious ad hominem attacks to which industries and their skeptics resorted as the IPCC's agreement on manmade climate change continued to strengthen. In the summer of 1996, industry-lobbyist groups confronted Benjamin Santer - lead author of the 1995 report that confirmed a human influence on the global climate - at a congressional hearing, accusing him of "scientific cleansing" by removing dissenting opinions from the text. One hired gun, Michaels, followed suit with a report questioning the integrity of Santer and the IPCC. Op-eds and articles coveting the dispute appeared in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times soon thereafter.

These attacks cost the lobbying groups some of their industry support, as did a growing acceptance of the legitimacy of the IPCC's findings. "We didn't want to fall into the same trap as the tobacco companies who have become trapped in all their lies," said an oil executive opting out of the Western Fuels Association. "Global climate change is a serious problem and we need to take steps to deal with it," announced a utility executive withdrawing his company from the Global Climate Coalition.

Such exposes are the meat of The Heat Is On, and are supplemented by an appendix critiquing the skeptics - consisting of rebuttals from leading climate scientists such as Santer. In between are chapters coveting a range of related subjects, including the growing presence in international climate talks of the insurance industry and sustainable energy businesses; the latest evidence for climate change; and a graphic depiction of what the future may hold should we not act swiftly enough. The author weaves these threads into a cogent argument that climate change is above all a threat to democracy, as its impacts will likely ripple through society and challenge political institutions.

This point has not been lost on U.S. President Clinton, who read The Heat Is On while on summer vacation and upon returning announced that "Climate change represents a great test for our democracy...There is ample evidence that human action is disrupting the climate...we can see the train coming but most ordinary Americans, in their day-to-day lives, can't hear the whistle blowing." In the months since, cabinet members, diplomats, and U.S. Vice President Al Gore - a champion of this issue for nearly a decade - have conducted a whistle-stop campaign of sorts, travelling to melting glaciers, threatened coastlines, and parched cornfields in order to better educate Americans on the risks of climate disruption, and to try to rally support for action on climate change in the leadup to the Kyoto protocol talks in December of 1997.

But the campaign to confuse had by then changed its approach. Sensing perhaps a subtle shift in public acceptance of the science, a $13 million "Global Climate Information Project" launched that fall focused instead on clouding the politics and economics of the debate. Radio, print and television advertisements were soon in circulation, claiming that developing countries were exempt from the treaty, and that American consumers would suffer heavily from any agreement to reduce emissions.

The saddest irony in this sophistry is that - be it the science, economics, or politics of the issue - the industries argue the precise opposite of the truth. Skeptics have stressed the uncertainties of climate change science as a reason for delaying action - when such uncertainties now appear to argue even more for more aggressive action (see Molly O'Meara, "The Risks of Climate Change," November/December 1997). It is the industrial, and not developing, countries which have largely taken a "free ride" on the climate treaty over the last five years: only a handful will meet their Rio goal of returning emissions to 1990 levels. And more than two thousand U.S. economists, including four Nobel laureates, have concluded that sound policies can address climate change in ways that will not harm American lifestyles - and may in fact improve the productivity of the U.S. economy.

Perhaps the finest testament to the impact of Gelbspan's book is the relative silence of the skeptics today. Many of them, in fact, now agree that a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations would increase the planet's average surface temperature by only slightly less than the lower end of what the IPCC itself has projected. But while the fossil fuel industry's desire for their doublespeak may have lessened, it has not disappeared: when pressed, Michaels now acknowledges that humans are changing the climate - but he questions whether these changes will have significant impacts.