Oil companies such as ExxonMobil, BP, and Total are well-documented in their efforts to suppress action on climate change. As Michael Mann put it in his latest book, The New Climate War, these companies have engaged in a well-funded campaign aimed at “down-playing, deflecting, distracting, and doom-mongering” the causes and impacts of climate change. It’s also well-known that the media has played a massive role in helping these corporations and, as the journalist and activist George Monbiot describes, granted them a crucial social licence to operate.
The Climategate Scandal
One of the most successful examples of propaganda used by these companies and the think tanks/experts-for-hire is the manufactured Climategate scandal in 2009. Originating in the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun, this scandal centred around a hacked trove of emails between climate researchers, notably Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth.
Michael Mann was also involved, as the climate denial movement tried (and still tries) to discredit his work as a scientist and public educator. In my belief Climategate highlights, better than any other example, how propaganda is conjured up and spread to the masses across news media organisations globally. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and many others continued to use Climategate as an example of a bombshell revelation that "shook up the field of climate research." This framing continued long after investigations from governmental institutions (in the UK and USA), the universities involved, and after independent organisations all concluded that it was no more than a right-wing conspiracy.
The leaked emails between climate scientists mostly contained discussions about their approaches to research e.g. the statistical tools best suited to their data, and how to best interpret the data. Despite the years of email exchanges leaked, over 1000 in total, two paragraphs best captured the attention of media outlets like the Herald Sun. At first glance, some of these emails do look suspicious. Yet, a few minutes of google searching or speaking to the people involved in sending the emails (to clarify what they meant) would have cleared things up. In a world where journalism isn’t such a tribalistic mess, this wouldn't be a story. Over a decade of misinformation and recontextualizing these emails (to suit a pro-fossil fuel narrative) is what followed.
Before mentioning the content of the messages, it’s probably worth noting that informal discussions between scientists are just that - they are merely discussions about research and the best ways to move forward. They are not rigorously peer-reviewed, nor do they need to be. The work itself has to be peer-reviewed before it can be published regardless. Even if there was a conspiracy of scientists trying to manipulate data (spoiler: there isn’t), it would not influence the credibility of countless studies from other institutions and researchers that conclude that anthropogenic warming is occurring in lockstep with rising atmospheric CO2.
The first controversial part of the emails, written by University of East Anglia researcher Phil Jones, is as follows:
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
The main controversy surrounding the “trick” mentioned ignores much of the context behind the discussion. The trick was merely a statistical method to compare palaeo data reconstructions and those from instrumental records. Unravelling past climates offer a broader understanding of climate since instrumental records do not go back very far. Researchers ensure that the errors associated with past climates, which become more tricky to reconstruct far back in time, are accounted for. “Trick” is a commonly used word in science and does not refer to a way of falsifying data.
The “hide the decline” comment was also seen as a problem as it appeared that the researchers were talking about the decline in global temperatures i.e. they were engaging in an attempt to lie about climate change. This couldn’t be further from the truth when the full context of the conversation reveals itself. The decline referred to is the accuracy of tree ring data that does not agree with other data methods after 1960. The accuracy declines after 1960 and is known as the divergence problem. Another aspect of climate science is to use proxy records when reconstructing past climates. This should involve using multiple proxies (usually some geochemical property associated with climate) from different archives such as tree rings, rocks/fossils, ice cores, and direct measurements to be as accurate as possible. The tree ring data agree with these other measurements until around 1960 when it records cooling and all the other measurements indicate warming. The issue is some unaccounted-for property regarding tree ring data that the researchers were talking about “hiding”. They were trying to get their tree ring data to make sense in the context of the wealth of other data available showing clear warming patterns.
Another passage picked up by the Herald Sun was made by Kevin Trenberth, a leading IPCC author, making him an ideal target for the made-up scandal. He stated, “The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.” The full context of this quote is provided on scepticalscience, one of my favourite websites for debunking major climate myths.
In short, Trenberth said we cannot account for the total energy budget of the Earth. Observations and models show that the excess energy added to the planetary system through increased CO2 does not directly contribute to increased surface temperature. Energy is used in melting ice sheets, transferred deep into the ocean, and in various other chemical and physical processes. By not being able to quantify the exchanges between these systems in full, there is a mismatch between expected values for energy added to the Earth and what we can observe directly. This is largely due to the ocean system and its ability to store and transfer heat. About 80% of total heat over the past 50 years has been added to the ocean system, and only recently have we been able to measure this accurately at varying depths in the ocean.
These quote-mined emails, that took two out-of-context passages from over 1000 emails, spanning over 13 years, led to enormous blowback from the conservative media. Fossil fuel companies that finance these organisations through advertising and direct contributions were framed as the victims of a coordinated campaign to manipulate scientific data. This was supposedly part of a global conspiracy to regulate their industry and establish communism, as it always is. The usual smear tactics were used to turn the masses against the scientists, who were only discussing the best ways to carry out their work in private. Since these emails were hacked they were never intended to be taken. The researchers knew what words like "trick" mean in their scientific context, as opposed to their everyday use. Of course, the media pundits and writers who manufactured the scandal knew this. They needed a boogeyman to distract people from the destructive policies and business practices they favour, including those that pollute on a mass scale.
How Did it Get This Bad?
The most depressing thing about this scandal is that it has been effective. Something so easily discredited has been able to worm its way into discussions about climate change and helped, as with so much more misinformation, delay action by intentionally withholding the full context. The media probably deserves the largest share of the blame for climate change. They have stalled progress for decades by promoting pro-oil politicians, framing the issue as a two-sided debate, allowing the denialists to wield more influence over the public discourse, and prioritising profit over real journalism.
Both sides of the political aisle in the US have failed, with one side very clearly pushing outright lies and the other being unwilling to provide the scientific basis of the issue and the weight and urgency of its ramifications. When outlets such as CNN and MSNBC provide the facts (they responded well to the Climategate issue), they also legitimise politicians like Joe Biden, which does little more than keeping the oven warm for the next, more right-leaning Republican. He is a longtime friend of big oil who voted in support of a war that killed a million people in the pursuit of the resource and was vice-president to someone who bragged about increasing US oil production (while marketing himself as the “change” president). They are saying one thing and doing another intentionally and are part of a corrupt system that values short-term profit over everything else.
While it's not too late to minimise the impact of climate change, the hostile, hyper-partisan nature of politics right now, a beast created in large part by the media, has made the challenge so much more difficult to overcome. I fear that the US and UK will be caught in a trap where increasingly right-wing politicians gain power and stall progress even further moving forward. The US has become more left-wing on individual issues, yet votes for proto-fascists like Trump because traditional politicians refuse to help them, and it is clear that progress in the US has stalled. Economic instability is always a precursor to fascism. Fascism growing and taking over major centres of power will be worse for the environmental movement than anything and come at the worst possible time. According to the latest research, the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement is already out of reach. This means that, in under a decade, we are already moving the goalposts when it comes to collective action. People continuing to elect “outsiders” like Trump will act as the next major barrier that I don’t seem to see discussed nearly enough and, based on recent history, the next Republican president will be either Donald Trump or somebody worse. We have to acknowledge that there is a reason this propaganda succeeds and it is based on enormous amounts of distrust that fomented over decades. The media, politicians, and corporations have colluded to ensure that this division sustains itself while they make fortunes as regular people become increasingly disenfranchised.
Now is the time to explore alternatives e.g. applying public pressure to force changes. Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are gaining traction which will hopefully spark the enormous change needed to reverse our contribution to climate change.
Comments