By the late 1970s scientists were beginning to get twitchy, starting to speak with one increasingly concerned voice. A National Academy of Sciences report authored in 1979 by the scientist Jule Charney said, “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate changes will result from man’s combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.” It also was becoming apparent that global warming was not as benign as it sounded. Scientists were beginning to understand that even a small increase in global average temperature could throw off a balance that had existed in Earth’s climate since long before the time of humans. They began warning of melting glaciers and collapsing ice caps, of floods and droughts and rising tides. They began to contemplate a change in world living conditions that was more dramatic than anything in human history and more sudden than anything that had happened in hundreds of thousands of years.
The American political establishment joined the discussion in 1988, led by presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. Running against Democratic contender Michael Dukakis, then-vice president Bush said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the ‘White House effect’; as president, I intend to do something about it.” Bush promised, if elected, to convene an international conference on the environment: “We will talk about global warming and we will act.”1
The newly elected president was, at first, as good as his word. Later the same year, after the world community gathered to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Bush signed into law the National Energy Policy Act “to establish a national energy policy that will quickly reduce the generation of carbon dioxide and trace gases as quickly as is feasible in order to slow the pace and degree of atmospheric warming . . . to protect the global environment.”
I offer all of the foregoing for context. I am neither a scientist nor a historian, and I have no intention in this book of jumping into the actual science “debate.” For an in-depth overview, you can go online and read the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, a scientific collaboration of unprecedented breadth, depth, and reputation. You can google Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant New Yorker series, The Climate of Man. Or you can pick up one of the great populist science books on the subject: Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver’s Keeping Our Cool; Australian scientist Tim Flannery’s The Weathermakers; Kolbert’s later book Field Notes from a Catastrophe; or Al Gore’s book version of An Inconvenient Truth. Any one of these will give you a solid enough grasp of the science to leave you nervous about the state of our world.
My point, however, is that no one seemed to be confused about climate change in 1988. The great scientific bodies of the world were concerned, and the foremost political leaders were engaged. So what happened between then and now?
Well, here’s what happened in science: with each new experiment, with each new report of the IPCC, with each new article published in legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals, the science community became more certain that they were on the right track. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, tested that question in a paper she published in the journal Science in 2005. Oreskes searched the exhaustive ISI Web of Knowledge for refereed scientific journal articles on global climate change that were published between 1993 and 2003, and she analyzed them on the basis of whether they supported, contradicted, or took no position on the consensus that the human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change. She found 928 articles—and not a single one took exception with the consensus position.
Clear enough. But what was happening in the mainstream media during the same period? The best answer to that question comes from the brothers Jules and Max Boykoff, who published an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Change in 2003 titled “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press.” The brothers had searched the libraries of four “prestige” dailies in the United States—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times— and had analyzed their coverage of climate change between 1998 and 2002. They found that while the scientific press was coming down 928 to zero in accepting or, at the very least, not denying climate change, in 53 percent of their stories these four newspapers quoted a scientist on “one side” of the issue and a spokesperson on the other. I say spokesperson rather than scientist for two reasons. First, the deniers were very often not scientists, but rather political ideologues or self-appointed “experts” from think tanks. Second, even when the experts had scientific credentials, in most cases those credentials were not relevant to the topic at hand. The experts were geologists or economists commenting outside their field of expertise, not climate scientists reporting on up-to-date peer-reviewed science.
Boykoff and Boykoff telegraphed their point about the mainstream media in the title of their paper “Balance as Bias.” Journalists in the modern age find it all but impossible to stay up to speed on every issue, especially every issue of science. To protect themselves, they very frequently fall back on the notion of balance: they interview one person on one side of an issue and one person on the other. There is even a fairly common conceit in North American newsrooms that if both sides wind up angry about the coverage, the reporter in question probably got the story about right.
This has a degree of legitimacy when the subject matter is political, economic, or even moral. There are legitimate differences of opinion on the correct way to handle many political issues, and few economists agree on the right response to a specific economic event. And on a highly emotional issue such as abortion—one in which people are just as likely to be bringing forth points that are based in religion as they are to be talking about science—it is completely appropriate to canvas a range of opinions.
But science is a discipline in which there are legitimate subject experts, people whose knowledge is weighed and measured by their scientific peers. This is the process people use to decide, for example, on a new surgical method or on the structural strength of a new metal alloy. If a doctor recommended that you undergo an innovative new surgical procedure, you might seek a second opinion, but you’d probably ask another surgeon. You wouldn’t check with your local carpenter, and you certainly wouldn’t ask a representative of the drug company whose product would be rendered irrelevant if you had the operation. If you were building an apartment block or a bridge and someone offered a “state-of-the-art” new girder that was lighter and cheaper than the conventional alternative, you wouldn’t accept the recommendation on the basis of the salesman’s promises or even on the latest feature in Reader’s Digest. You would insist on a testimonial from scientific sources.
That’s not what’s been happening in the public conversation about global warming. For most of the last two decades, while scientists were growing more convinced about the proof and more concerned about the risks of climate change, members of the general public were drifting into confusion, led there by conflicting stories that minimized the state of the problem and exaggerated the cost of solutions. Somehow, we have been spun.
[ three ] FROM BERNAYS TO TODAY A brief history of private prophets and public lies
SPIN DOCTOR: (noun) A person employed to gloss over a poor public image or present it in a better light in business and politics, especially after unfavorable results have been achieved. A lobbyist; a PR person. WIKTIONARY, FEBRUARY16, 2009
I have never liked the term “spin doctor,” and I hate this definition— at least I hate that someone would propose “PR person” as a reasonable synonym. Public relations is not by definition “spin.” Public relations is the art of building good relationships. You do that most effectively by earning trust and goodwill among those who are important to you and your business. And in more than thirty years of public relations practice, I have learned that the best way to achieve those goals is to act with integrity and honesty and to make sure everybody knows you are doing so.
Spin is to public relations what manipulation is to interpersonal communications. It’s