There’s a buzz going round the environmentalist circuit at the moment, because the New York Times has suggested that the “Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels” ignored scientific advice given to it by its own scientists.
Here’s the basis for this, from the NYT piece. First:
“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 its private advice had been different:
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The problem is, these two paragraphs are not contradictory. Combined, they argue that the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect is well established but the role it plays in actual climate is less certain.
I don’t know whether the Global Climate Coalition was setting out to distort the public debate but in this reported example it doesn’t seem to have done so.
