Last holiday weekend, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed denying that 97% of scientists agree climate change is due to human activities and dangerous. Joseph Bast and Dr. Roy Spencer, both affiliated with climate denial experts at the Heartland Institute, penned it and dipped into the usual denier misdirection playbook — using partial facts and a flimsy scientific support for their positions.
Bast and Spencer lament that the surveys backing up the 97% figure only cover whether climate change is happening and man-made but not dangerous. What's interesting here is that Bast and Spencer don't dispute that 97% of scientists agree climate change is caused by human activity — just that the independent survey didn't also include whether they agree it's "dangerous."
Perhaps more interesting is that Bast and Spencer contend the scientific consensus the 97% figure represents "doesn't reveal much of interest." This is coming from the group that in 2012 paid for a billboard in metro Chicago comparing people who accept climate science to the Unabomber.
Not content to knit-pick the 97% claim, Bast and Spencer reference a discredited petition with more than 30,000 scientists signed on to it that states global warming is no big deal. If this were 30,000 climate scientists, this petition might be worth noting. But this list only requires that you have a bachelors degree or higher in any scientific field — and the list only comprises 0.3% of all U.S. science graduates. Beyond that, the petition has verification challenges given that notable official signers included members from Spice Girls and Star Wars.
All of this would be laughable if the tactic didn't work so well. But it does. It's why 54% of the U.S. public isn't sure global warming is the result of human activity.
This is reminiscent of the book and film Thank You for Smoking, a satire looking at Big Tobacco's campaign to deny links between smoking and bad health. This isn't surprising. The campaign to confuse the public on climate change is eerily similar to what Big Tobacco did.
Philip Morris paid think tanks and scientists to cast doubt on the science linking smoking to negative health effects, used the research to rally politicians whose elections they funded, and, for a time, avoided the regulations most impact their bottom line. In fact, Philip Morris paid Heartland Institute -- Bast and Spencer's institution — to publicly question the health risks of secondhand smoke in the 1990s.
Today, it's the fossil fuel industry spending over $1.1 billion to sow the seeds of public confusion and lobby against action on climate change. Groups like Heartland Institute are doing their bidding. To add a cartoonish twist to this real life satire, they have spokespeople like Dr. Spencer out front -- even though earlier this year he called his critics Nazis. Instead of walking the comment back, he doubled down and said it's an apt comparison since his critics will ultimately be responsible for more deaths than the Nazis.
This raises the question of why the Wall Street Journal would give space for an op-ed that does nothing to move the conversation around climate change forward from writers who've shown they don't have much or anything to add — besides confusion — to the dialogue. Let's have the scientific discussion and even disagree about what action we need to take, but let's not confuse op-eds out of a corporate satire for anything constructive.
Ryan Canney is a Senior Campaign Manager with Forecast the Facts.