Recent reports in the Guardian reveal how powerful groups in America have been attacking climate science from both sides – promoting the work of climate change deniers and suppressing the work of scientists.

To begin with, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – a climate change denying group (one of many) funded by oil company ExxonMobil – has been offering scientists and economists $10,000 apiece to cast doubt on the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In the words of David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, “It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims”. The only appropriate conclusion is beautifully summarised by Greenpeace’s Ben Stewart: “They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.”

Not only have many of these oil-industry funded groups been vying for greater attention in the public eye, however: their friends in government have been clamping down on independent scientific research. Another Guardian story reports on the extraordinary levels of interference:

In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using terms like global warming in speech or in their reports. The scientists interviewed were working at seven government agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their published work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate was stripped from websites and printed reports.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2002485,00.html

Moreover, the intensive interference encouraged a climate of self-censorship among scientists:

“If you know what you are writing has to go through a White House clearance before it is to be published, people start writing for the class,” said Rick Piltz, a former senior associate at the US Climate Change Science Programme. “An anticipatory kind of self-censorship sets in.”

One figure who also receives attention in the report is Phil Cooney, a Bush administration appointee with no scientific background, who made serious, substantial alterations to scientific reports. After his stint at the Whitehouse, he went on to take up a post with (you guessed it) ExxonMobil. Subtlety is apparently a lost art in Washington.

The words of one tobacco company executive from 1969 spring to mind. “Doubt is our product,” he wrote, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won't know what to believe.” Now that the climate skeptics, in an extraordinary turn of events, have themselves been linked to the tobacco industry, one can only surmise that the same logic has been transferred from old projects (refuting scientific claims on the dangers of smoking) to new (denying climate change).

For more on Phil Cooney, ExxonMobil and climate change denial, see my article “Fuelling Controversy”, available here.