1.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted…

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

— Andrew Revkin, Industry Ignored its Scientists on Climate, his front page story in the New York Times today on industry exploiting he said, she said tendencies in journalism to sow confusion about climate change.

2.

There’s no way to gauge whether the industry-financed campaign of lobbying, public relations and advertising helped build that Senate blockade to ratification. But environmental campaigners say it’s clear that a little uncertainty goes a long way toward sustaining public inertia on an issue with the time scale and complexity of human-driven climate change.

“Their objective was always to slow things down,” said Kert Davies, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace. “Their argument was essentially the inverse of the precautionary principle: We shouldn’t do anything until we know everything.”

William O’Keefe, who was chairman of the Global Climate Coalition and a senior official at the American Petroleum Institute when the documents were produced, rejects such assertions. “The idea that there is some great industrial conspiracy to thwart progress is one of the greatest myths,” he told me. “Industry is rarely united on anything, and on this issue it’s totally not united.”

Andrew Revkin, A Climate of Doubt, blog post in the New York Times about today’s front page story on industry exploiting he said, she said tendencies in journalism to sow confusion.

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Currently at PressThink. He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User.

The bolding is my own— JR