"A lie," Mark Twain said, "can get halfway 'round the world before Truth can get its boots on."
Which, when you think about it, helps explain the ascendancy of neoconservative politics in this country.
The latest example of this connection: The Heartland Institute, a division of the right wing think tank the Hudson Institute, has released a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-made Global Warming Scares."
The problem: the list is a lie. Scientists on the list do NOT deny that global climate change is happening. Nor do they deny that human emissions are causing it. Quite the opposite: many of the scientists on the list are the scientists whose work established that the climate is changing and that human emissions are the primary cause. Dozens of them who have been contacted are outraged at having their work misrepresented and are demanding to be taken off the list.
You can catch details of the story at desmogblog. The blogger set to work contacting scientists on the list--a bit of virtual shoe-leather journalism--and within hours began getting outraged responses. A sample:
"I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite."
Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh
"I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there."
Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University
The list was put together by Dennis T. Avery, Hudson Institute Director and a Senior Fellow at its Heartland Institute. It got instant and widespread circulation on right-wing blogs, where it no doubt gave comfort to that brand of right-wing conspiracy nuttiness that thinks that this whole global warming thing was something gotten up by Al Gore for personal profit, or as consolation for losing an election. (Really. I've talked to people who believe that.) "500 scientists" sounds impressive--it's a nice round number, and seems overwhelming. But it is false, absolutely false.
It seems that one of two things must be true: Either Avery put the list out in good faith, or he didn't.
If he put it out in good faith, he's incompetent, and the standards for becoming a Senior Fellow at a right-wing institute are evidently pretty low. Avery didn't bother to check with the listed scientists to see if he was accurately representing their work; did he think no one would bother to contact them? Nor does he appreciate that a scientific consensus--unlike, say, an ideological consensus--is something that grows over time, in response to evidence and inquiry. Some scientists are on the list for work they authored more than two decades ago--and they, being good scientists, respected the fundamental principle of rational inquiry, which is that skepticism is the only appropriate attitude in the face of ignorance and incomplete data. It hardly needs pointing out that the shared consensus in the field of climatology has rapidly evolved in the past two decades, and while skepticism about climate change may have been appropriate then, it is not the consensus position of the field now. (I suppose that if you work among ideologues who never change their views, it's easy to think that that's the way intelligence is supposed to operate: stake out a position and stick to it. And if you're working within a movement like the neoconservative movement that wants to appeal to a fundamentalist base that doesn't credit the operation of evolution in nature, you may have difficulty crediting its operation as a feature of our understanding of nature.)
Verdict: if Avery put the list out in good faith, he's incompetent, and probably an idiot.
But maybe Avery's failure to tell the truth was not in good faith. Maybe he's not an idiot; maybe his publication of that list was a canny, calculated, by-the-book implementation of a bit of wisdom that can be found in a report prepared by the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) during World War II:
"...people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
.
This sad observation can be found in A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler, by Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services. So: either Avery is a pathetically incompetent researcher, or he's a propagandist in the manner of Hitler and Goebbals.
Either way, the effect is the same: the rational discourse that our nation needs about this most pressing policy matter has been poisoned by a Big Lie. The movement for a sane energy (and foreign) policy has a lot of work to do, helping Americans see the interconnections between energy scarcity, increasing gas prices, food riots and destabilization in countries whose corn is going into (our) ethanol, the connection between genocide and desertification and between failed states and terrorism. The lie that global warming is a delusion is making that work harder.
We can't let the lie stand. It's got a head start, as lies like this always do and always will. It's time for truth to get its boots on and get after it. Tell your friends. Send them links to desmogblog. Write an outraged letter to the editor. Help get Truth back into place in the public arena.