Climate change science under attack from "special interests" in the US
January 27, 2007 - 9:36am
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Science a la Joe Camel
excerpts:
At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.
The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.
The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.
Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.
That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.
It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.
In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school.
And Exxon Mobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.
NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called "Running on Oil" and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel," a shameless pitch for oil dependence.
An Inconvenient Truth Squeezed from Classrooms
excerpt:
Oil industry supporters will be quick to endorse the decision, agreeing that An Inconvenient Truth does indeed represent a special interest. What they will conveniently ignore is that unlike industry friendly messages pushed into the curriculum, An Inconvenient Truth is based on, and endorsed by, objective science - the very subject the National Science Teachers Association says it promotes.
What truth is more inconvenient? It depends where your pay cheque comes from.
note: interesting comments follow...
Science teachers’ association accused of oil company influence
Nov 27, 2006
excerpts:
Some science educators are questioning whether the leading organization of U.S. science teachers has acted as a shill for the oil industry.
Writing in Sunday’s Washington Post, a producer for the movie suggested it may be no coincidence that the group’s funders include Exxon-Mobil Corp. The company has for years tried to “stifle” honest discussion of global warming, the producer editorialized.
The idea that the industry might influence a group closely involved in educating American children sparked an outcry across the blogosphere this week, including from some scientists.
The oil industry as a whole, and with other corporations, have been similarly influencing education for years, she argued.
RealClimate article about this, with an extensive discussion and other good links.
quote: ...Doing a search on "Global Warming" on the NSTA site turns up only a paltry supply of useful educational material. It is also illuminating to go into their "recommendations" section and type in "global warming." That will turn up this recommended book by Kenneth Green, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute whose article Clouds of Global-Warming Hysteria in the National Review endorsed Michael Crichton's view of global warming and called supporters of climate change action "One-worlders and other socialist sorts." Needless to say, the NSTA recommendations (as of today) did not turn up "An Inconvenient Truth" either in its DVD or book form. Nor did it turn up Revkin's book directed at juveniles "The North Pole Was Here," nor any of the other scientifically respectable introductions of which we are aware...
Today's Globe and Mail announces it's going green and even that idiot Wente admits global warming is happening and human activities have something to do with it. However, she attacks An Inconvenient Truth as being "alarmist" and says of the scientists? econimists? she talked to (I don't have time to check who they are; Wunsch is reputable apparently):
quote: ...For the record, all these experts are highly critical of An Inconvenient Truth and the scary headlines that regularly sweep the media. (Climate alarmism sells, and the media know it.).. I do not believe this, the climate scientists at RealClimate considered the science in the movie to be mostly good.
This is the next refuge of the sceptics, to try to claim the middle ground and split up the scientists into "moderates" and "alarmists". (Just like the rightwingers claiming to be moderate middle types, when they are really so far right they can hear the swastika flag flapping in the wind.)
ETA to add Wente's article linked here.
[ 27 January 2007: Message edited by: Contrarian ]
There's another whole issue here, having to do with corporate influence, the way that power flows in US nominally democratic society, and everday self-interest. Science barely enters into the discussion at all. Exxon Mobil and all those other corporations mentioned in the posts above are masters at keeping the status quo intact, and making science mostly irrelevant. I'm shocked, frankly, that corporations are able to have major influence in US classroom curriculum.
Well, look at the way some schools make deals with corporations to sell only their food, soft drinks etc. I don't know how schools are financed in the US, but they can probably always use more income, and it does corrupt.
quote:Originally posted by Boom Boom:
I'm shocked, frankly, that corporations are able to have major influence in US classroom curriculum.
The "corporatization" of U.S. universities has been happening for a long time, since Reagan admin passed Bayh-Dole, and really, unoficially since the 1950's and 60's. It goes way beyond vending machines and food catering. School officials are acting as advisors to corporate boards. Researchers, who were for a long time able to share discoveries and knowledge with other academics around the world, are sworn to trade secrecy and refuse to divulge specifics about contractual relationships with corporations. How ethical is it for academic freedom in universities to be compromised in this way ?. How ethical is it for Lawrence Livermore Labs U of California to be accepting subcontracts for military industrial complex to research what Ralph Nader suggests could be the most deadly biological weapons in history?. Again Nader is warning Canadians of the consequences if we follow suit here. Who should own the research discoveries and technological advancements made in publicly-funded schools for higher learning?.
Excellent, Fidel.
maybe the public has no interest- thus there no need to represent or give voice to it...(?)
in Michael Lind's 'Up From Conservstivism' Lind notes the 3 'hoaxes' upon which the republican gopig right based their campaign:
1)taxes too high
2)public school system a failure
3)higher rates of illegitimacy among the poorer people
>all 3 hoaxes have been debunked, repeatedly, by accredited sources. they are not true. to put it plainly:
1)US taxes rates are as low or indeed lower then other industrial nations
2)the US public school system only began failing after reagan began defunding it, until then it produced skilled workforce better then any other system in world...
3) there are as many unwed moms in middle/upper classes as in the poor, inner city. the numbers are solid proof, but media creates the opposite illusion on purpose...
If all this is so, and Lind's book has been out since 1996, then how can society just pretensd that a massively well funded scheme to cause a majority of people to believe LIES which damage the system they depend on by misrepresenting the facts about it, go unchecked? That is the big mystery. The reaction to Gore's movie might just be symptom of a basic problem - the fox is guarding the henhouse, and he's killing the hens cluck cluck because...it's nature!
a ships cap't says 'we're gonna get ridda them rats by sinking this boat in middle of sea -teach rats to swim!' wouldn't passengers say that's idiocy and fire the guy?
not in the real world, i guess....
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe was a guest on P&P today. She's a very accomplished scientist who also is an evangelical christian, and whom has come under fire because of her belief that much of climate change is caused by human activity. Here is her response to Rick Perry on the matter.
The science of climate change is based on fundamental physical principles that we've known about for several hundred years. Every time we burn coal, gas, or oil, it produces carbon dioxide. By digging massive amounts of these fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them, we are disrupting the natural carbon cycle and causing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas; its properties can easily be measured in a lab (and I have done it myself). As it builds up in the atmosphere, it traps heat, raising the average temperature of the earth.
There are many lines of evidence we rely on to document the long-term warming of the earth in response to human activities. Thermometers and satellites are just two of these. For many of us, we only have to look in our own backyards to see the evidence with our own eyes. Trees are blooming earlier in the year, winters are getting warmer, summers are getting hotter, extreme heat is becoming more frequent, birds, insects, and other animals are moving northward ... in all, more than 25,000 independent lines of physical and biological evidence point to a warming world.
None of us are happy with the idea that humans are altering the average conditions of the planet. If I had my druthers, I know that I would much rather it be a natural cycle that we couldn't do anything about! But the truth is this: if our planet were being controlled by the sun, or by natural cycles, it would have cooled over the last few decades as we've received less energy from the sun than we did before. Instead, the planet has only gotten warmer.
Shooting the messenger who brings bad news is an old habit; but we all know it does nothing to change the news itself. In the same way, dismissing hundreds of years' worth of science because it doesn't give us the answer we want to hear will not change the facts.
Humans are altering the average conditions of the planet. So what can we do?
We can continue to challenge the reality of the issue; or we can seize this as an opportunity to wean ourselves off our dependence on the old, dirty, inefficient, and limited fuels of the past. Instead, we can make wise choices - conserving the resources we do have, and investing in our own economy to develop clean sources of energy that will not run out on us and will ensure a better lives for our children. Who doesn't want that??
And Michael Byers, project leader with ArcticNet (a consortium of Arctic scientists) gave the Globe and Mail a backhander,Saturday, for the Globe's two-page spread about how an oscillating jet stream has given us a freak, mild winter:
"It's not easy to write about Canada's recently erratic weather (Whither Winter - Jan. 27) without mentioning the term 'climate change.' The unusual behaviour of the Arctic oscillation is almost certainly limked to dramatic increases in air and sea temperatures in that region. Aroundthe world, thousands of scientists are working hard to understand the complesities of these climate-weather interactions. But few, if any, doubt greenhouse gas emissiona are an important root cause."
Byers is also one of the prominent backers of Tom Mulcair's cap and trade position.
That's it. They are fully exposed to "free market forces" now. It's all about money and the lack of it from traditional sources.
What else do US and Canadian governments not want kids to learn? It's Orwellian.
Democracy should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - Rex Tillerson, CEO, Exxon Mobil