This just in: Global warming a myth -- National Post

By Donald Gutstein
From NewsWatch Canada
2001


The vast majority of the world's climatologists and every country in the world -- except for the oil- industry controlled US government -- agree that the earth's temperature is increasing. They agree also that the increase is caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, and will have serious consequences for humanity.

In Canada, the National Post -- together with its sidekicks at the Fraser Institute -- fight an increasingly lonely rear-guard action against the reality of global warming, continuing to deny any of the consensus propositions regarding climate change reached by over 2000 scientists and 150 countries. In a kind of solarcaust denial, the Post performs a valuable propaganda service for the fossil-fuel industry, the primary source of global warming.

The Post's editorial pages are particularly noteworthy for the consistency of its anti-global warming messaging. Between January 2000 and June 2001, the Post published 53 opinion pieces (unsigned editorials, columns and guest opinion pieces) on climate change and global warming. Of these, three are neutral while 48, or 90 percent, deny that global warming is occurring, that it is caused by burning fossil fuel or that it will have harmful consequences. The two pieces that argue for urgent action on climate change -- one by David Suzuki -- were written in response to earlier diatribes by Terence Corcoran, the Post's resident meister propagandist.

Not surprisingly, Corcoran wrote the most anti-global warming pieces, 12 in all. He took every opportunity to attack the Kyoto Protocol (the agreement to reduce CO2 emissions to below 1990 levels by 2010). In one piece he calls it a massive plot by UN bureaucrats to redistribute wealth from Canada to China and Sudan (29 Mar 2001). And just before Earth Day 2000, Corcoran called Kyoto a Soviet-style exercise in bureaucratic planning that Ottawa is preparing to impose on Canadians (20 Apr 2000).

Many of the anti-global warming pieces are provided by guest writers. One frequent contributor is Patrick Michaels, who earns his living being skeptical about climate change. In Nov. 2000, as 20,000 officials, scientists and observers headed to The Hague, Netherlands to hammer out the specifics of reaching the targets established at Kyoto, Michaels wrote a piece titled "Science tricked again on global warming," charging that negotiators from 150 countries and 2000 scientists on the United Nations-mandated panel which determines the forecasts were 'tricked' by power-hungry UN bureaucrats (4 Nov. 2000).

Thousands of climate scientists have achieved a difficult consensus on climate change. Michaels and a handful of scientists, many not climatologists although Michaels is, claim it is not occurring. They are called 'skeptics' by the media but are usually funded by the fossil-fuel industry, as Michaels is -- 'bought experts' is more accurate. Michaels is funded by Western Fuels, a $400-million coal industry front group, the German Coal Mining Association, the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utility companies, and Cyprus Minerals, a backer of the Wise Use movement.

Right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute provide a platform for the 'skeptics' to disseminate their views, most usually that global warming is not happening and that any possible future warming will be slight and may even be beneficial. Michaels is a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, which enjoys lavish funding from the energy industry and others, campaigns against "unnecessary and harmful" environmental regulations, and promotes free- market environmentalism.

Corporate news media like the Wall Street Journal and National Post give the doubts raised by the skeptics a status beyond that awarded them within the scientific community itself. This creates a sense that widespread disagreement exists among scientists, exaggerating the uncertainty associated with climate change and leading the public and politicians to conclude that since the global warming debate is not over, action is not yet warranted. And every year action is delayed is another year the fossil-fuel industry can reap its gargantuan profits.

Recently the Post has featured another skeptic, David Wojick, who wrote five pieces over the 18-month period. In one piece he calls Kyoto a license for more federal power and more government spending and a plot by hard-line greens to force wrenching life-style changes they long for people to endure. (19 Oct. 2000) In another, he calls the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a plot by under-developed countries to bring down the Western way of life. (23 Nov. 2000)

The Post calls Wojick a journalist and policy analyst but does not say for whom. In fact, Wojick is a columnist for The Electricity Daily, an industry newspaper which covers the North American electricity market and promotes energy deregulation. And his policy analysis is mainly for the electric power industry, the second largest producer of CO2 emissions.

In the early 1990s Wojick worked with AES Corp., one of the world's largest electricity producers, which owns dozens of coal-fired electricity plants in the US and around the world. In 1995, just after Wojick had completed his work as a "strategic planning consultant" helping to make the company "one of the world's largest independent power producers," Greenpeace wrote a report on this company. It calls AES's track record "a sordid one, filled with illegal dumping, toxic spills, and lawsuits covered by falsified reports, political schmoozing and greenwash. In short, AES tries to buy, deceive, or sue communities to allow it to build and operate dirty, unnecessary power plants that pollute neighbourhoods and endanger the global environment." [http://www.greeneapce.org/~usa/reports/energy/AES.html]

Of course you won't find a word about the Greenpeace study in the Post.

Even in its news stories the Post distorts its coverage. A story in March, 2000 reports a study by the US National Research Council confirming earlier findings that the Earth's surface is warming. But the story gives only three paragraphs to this study and the earlier findings. Most of the story -- ten of 18 paragraphs -- is given over to the skeptics or 'dissenters,' as the story also calls them. The other five paragraphs are neutral or mixed. The story presents the impression that the skeptics and the "adherents of the dominant view" are equals and either viewpoint could be valid. As the headline puts it, "Global warming debate heats up," even though there is no debate among the vast majority of scientists (1 Mar. 2000).

Another story at the end of May was solely about the skeptics, with not one word from the adherents of the dominant view. "Global warming theories criticized; models faulty: scientists," the headline proclaims, as if those who formulate the theories and build the models are not scientists but perhaps something worse, like radical environmentalists. National Post reporter Jan Cienski says that "Global warming is all hot air, according to a group of scientific skeptics who gathered yesterday Š to denounce the climate science that says the world is getting hotter because of greenhouse gases" (31 May 2000). The first skeptic quoted is Richard Courtney, a British energy and environmental consultant, who was already well-known to the Post. On Earth Day 2000 (April 22), the entire business editorial page was turned over to him for a 1900-word anti-global warming rant.

Even when it reported in November 2000 on The Hague meetings, the Post gave most coverage to another skeptic, Julian Morris of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a corporate- backed sponsor of the skeptics in the United Kingdom. Morris complains that there is "so much conflicting data" we shouldn't do anything.

In 2001, the Post provided more coverage to the consequences of climate change, reporting on the melting of the permafrost in the European Alps, droughts on the Canadian Prairies, the extinction of countless species of animals, birds and plant life, the disappearance of the snows of Killimanjaro, a precipitous drop in the number of icebergs in the North Atlantic and a likely increase in the number of monster forest fires in Canada.

But only three stories made the front page, and all three were skeptical of or hostile towards global warming. In one, George W. Bush proclaims that he has no intention of reducing CO2 emissions if it means harming the US economy (30 Mar. 2001). A month later, Dick Cheney, an oil-industry executive who moonlights as Bush's vice president, testily asserts that US consumers do not have to apologize for their gluttonous energy appetites (1 May 2001).

But the Post's anti-environmental agenda was exhibited most clearly on 11 June, 2001, when it gave front-page coverage to a Danish statistician who was once a member of Greenpeace. The reason for the story? He wrote a book.

Thousands of books are written each year. Most are not even reviewed by the Post, let alone reported as front-page news. Titled The Skeptical Environmentalist, this one is news because it attacks environmentalists for being critical of capitalism.

"The book could be the most dangerous tool in a backlash against the green agenda," Post writer Mary Vallis claims, without citing any sources for this proposition. By providing front-page treatment for the story, though, the Post is doing its part to ensure the book becomes such a tool.

Donald Gutstein is writing a book about corporate propaganda in Canada.