[Vision2020] Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign

[Ted Moffett]

Why do those who organize coordinated well funded campaigns that claim
to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change is exaggerated as a threat,
or an outright hoax, engage in misrepresentation and what I would call
"fraud?"  Wouldn't their campaigns be more believable if they vetted their
lists of references to PhD. scientists who genuinely doubt the science
behind anthropogenic warming?  Of course, if they restricted their
references to PhD. climate scientists currently publishing in legitimate
peer reviewed scientific journals, their list would be shorter.
But nonetheless, if you claim a long list of PhD.s doubts global warming is
human caused, many in the public will find this credible, even if many of
the scientists quoted are not specialists in climate science currently
publishing in this field.

Just as with the campaign to shed doubt on the theory of evolution, and
promote creationism or intelligent design, with the lists of 100s of
scientists who sign their names to this effort, you can find hundreds of
PhD. scientists who will sign their names to lists that suggest that the
science behind anthropogenic warming is doubtful.

But to create a list of over 700 "scientists" who supposedly doubt human
impacts on climate, as Marc Moreno has done and is discussed in the article
below, and misrepresent by claiming someone is a meteorologist, when they
are not, or including a scientist in the report who does not dispute
anthropogenic warming, who later demands his inclusion in Moreno's effort be
retracted, undermines the credibility of these campaigns.

Ted Moffett
-----------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/us/politics/10morano.html?_r=1&hpw

Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign

 By LESLIE KAUFMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/leslie_kaufman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: April 9, 2009

WASHINGTON — Marc Morano does not think global
warming<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>is
anything to worry about, and he brags about his confrontations with
those
who do.

For example, Mr. Morano said he once spotted former Vice President Al
Gore<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/al_gore/index.html?inline=nyt-per>on
an airplane returning from a climate conference in Bali. Mr. Gore was
posing for photos with well-wishers, and Mr. Morano said he had asked if he,
too, could have his picture taken with Mr. Gore.

He refused, Mr. Morano said.

“You attack me all the time,” Mr. Gore said, according to Mr. Morano.

“Yes, we do,” Mr. Morano said he had replied.

Mr. Gore’s office said Mr. Gore had no memory of the encounter. Mr. Morano
does not care. He tells the story anyway.

As a spokesman for Senator James M.
Inhofe<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i/james_m_inhofe/index.html?inline=nyt-per>of
Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works
Committee, Mr. Morano was for years a ceaseless purveyor of the dissenting
view on climate change, sending out a blizzard of e-mail to journalists
covering the issue. Now, with Congress debating legislation to curb carbon
dioxide emissions, Mr. Morano is hoping to have an even greater impact. He
has left his job with Mr. Inhofe to start his own Web site,
ClimateDepot.com<http://climatedepot.com/>
.

The site, scheduled to debut this week, will be a “one-stop shop” for anyone
following climate change, Mr. Morano says. He will post research he thinks
the public should see, as well as reported video segments and ratings of
environmental journalists.

Supporters see Mr. Morano as a crucial organizing force who has taken
diffuse pieces of scientific research and fused them into a political
battering ram.

“Before Marc, efforts to debunk global warming were scattered and
disorganized,” said John Coleman, a weather broadcaster who helped found the
Weather Channel and who has called global warming “a scam.”

And environmentalists and mainstream climate scientists, however much they
disagree with Mr. Morano’s views, still pay attention to what he does.

Kert Davies, the research director of
Greenpeace<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/greenpeace/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
said he would like to dismiss Mr. Morano as irrelevant, but could not.

“He is relentless pushing out misinformation,” Mr. Davies said. “In denying
the urgency of the problem, he definitely slows things down on the
regulatory front. Eventually, he will be held accountable, but it may be too
late.”

In his work with Mr. Inhofe, Mr. Morano, whose thick build fills out his
suit like a bulldog in a restraining jacket, did not hesitate to go after
journalists he saw as biased. He promoted any study or statement that could
be construed as cutting against the prevailing view that heat-trapping gases
like carbon dioxide contribute to global warming. Peter Dykstra, a former
executive producer for CNN’s science, environment and technology unit,
recently called him the “drum major of the denial parade.”

Mr. Morano may be best known for compiling a report listing hundreds of
scientists whose work he says undermines the consensus on global warming.

But environmental advocates and bloggers say that many of those listed as
scientists have no scientific credentials and that their work persuaded no
one not already ideologically committed.

Mr. Morano’s new Web site is being financed by the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow <http://www.cfact.org/site/default.asp>, a nonprofit
in Washington that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental
issues.

Craig Rucker, a co-founder of the organization, said the committee got about
a third of its money from other foundations. But Mr. Rucker would not
identify them or say how much his foundation would pay Mr. Morano. (Mr.
Morano says it will be more than the $134,000 he earned annually in the
Senate.)

Public tax filings for 2003-7 — the last five years for which documents are
available — show that the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow received
hundreds of thousands of dollars from the ExxonMobil Foundation and from
foundations associated with the billionaire Richard Mellon
Scaife<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/richard_mellon_scaife/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
a longtime financer of conservative causes best known for its efforts to
have President Bill
Clinton<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per>impeached.
Mr. Rucker said Exxon had not contributed anything last year.

Mr. Morano grew up in a conservative household in Northern Virginia with an
affinity for nature and animals — his basement was home to a menagerie of
reptiles, including a boa constrictor.

“I used to tell people I was Republican except on the environment,” he said.

After college, Mr. Morano worked as a reporter for Rush
Limbaugh<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/rush_limbaugh/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
where he said he had learned the satisfactions of poking at the “liberal
establishment.” He made a documentary on the Amazon rain
forest<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/forests_and_forestry/rain_forests/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
he said, because it annoyed him that celebrities like Sting could dictate
what people think about the issue. They vastly exaggerated the problem of
deforestation, he concluded.

He then jumped to Cyber News Service, where he was the first to publish
accusations from Vietnam Swift-boat veterans that Senator John
Kerry<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_kerry/index.html?inline=nyt-per>of
Massachusetts, then the Democratic presidential nominee, had glorified
his war record. Many of the accusations later proved unfounded.

Mr. Morano is proud of his work, which he says is not advocacy but truth
seeking.

“Even in the Senate, I’d put up any of the stories we did against any pablum
Time or Newsweek<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/newsweek_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>has
put out on global warming,” he said. “We’d link to the other side;
we’d
present their arguments. They do one-sided screeds.”

In 2007, he points out, the Republican Web
site<http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=10fe77b0-802a-23ad-4df1-fc38ed4f85e3>of
Mr. Inhofe’s committee won an award from the independent Congressional
Management Foundation.

But some scientists and environmental advocates who have made it their
business to monitor Mr. Morano see his reports — the most recent was titled
“More than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming
Claims” — as far from balanced.

Kevin Grandia, who manages Desmogblog.com <http://desmogblog.com/>, which
describes itself as dedicated to combating misinformation on climate change,
says the report is filled with so-called experts who are really weather
broadcasters and others without advanced degrees.

Chris Allen, for example, the weather director for WBKO-TV in Kentucky, is
listed as a meteorologist on the report, even though he has no degree in
meteorology. On his Web site, Mr. Allen has written that his major objection
to the idea of human-influenced climate change is that “it completely takes
God out of the picture.” Mr. Allen did not respond to phone calls.

Mr. Grandia also said Mr. Morano’s report misrepresented the work of
legitimate scientists. Mr. Grandia pointed to Steve Rayner, a professor at
Oxford, who was mentioned for articles criticizing the Kyoto Protocol, the
1997 international treaty on curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

Dr. Rayner, however, in no way disputes the existence of global warming or
that human activity contributes to it, as the report implies. In e-mail
messages, he said that he had asked to be removed from the Morano report and
that a staff member in Mr. Inhofe’s office had promised that he would be. He
called his inclusion on the list “quite outrageous.”

Asked about Dr. Rayner, Mr. Morano was unmoved. He said that he had no
record of Dr. Rayner’s asking to be removed from the list and that the
doctor must be “not to be remembering this clearly.”

Many scientists, Mr. Morano said, are afraid that appearing on the list will
have political fallout.

And political fallout, for him, is the point.
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