suade governments to do nothing on grounds that "It fears climate change is bad for business."
The Global Climate Coalition "claims the scientists are going over the top and says there is as yet no proven need to do anything." The group, Brown notes, has the support of most of the U.S. Congress. A World Health organization panel denounced the group for behaving exactly like the tobacco industry 30 years earlier when the damaging effects were becoming clear. Elsewhere, Professor Anthony McMichael, co-author of the effects of global warming, warns that industrial lobbyists "are involved in types of distortion of evidence, delaying tactics and drowning out by making more noise." (The Guardian, July 7, 1996)
Among the tireless efforts made by the Global Climate Coalition has been the production of a document signed by 100 of the biggest U.S. companies asking for no action to be taken on climate change. The Coalition was also involved in feverishly handing out cuttings from papers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal<BI> at the door of the IPCC conference in a desperate bid to spread their propaganda.
Of course, there never will be any proven need to respond to global warming, for those defending short-term profits at any cost. The bottom line of the Global Climate Coalition’s efforts is at one with the Telegraph: "it might be an idea if the weather was one of the few subjects in which politicians did not interfere."
Writing in The Guardian (July 6, 1996), novelist John Mortimer joined in the general media assault on the notion that global warming is to be taken seriously. Echoing the New Statesman, the Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times, and everyone else, Mortimer, it seems, "can’t wait for global warming to bring England a Mediterranean climate," if only he "had enough faith in weather forecasters to believe it will happen." This is the cue for much ribald humour about the British climate, British work habits, lazy Mediterranean’s and so on.
Unfortunately, it matters little that Mortimer’s comments are flatly false and absurd, the fact is that articles of this kind<@151>however benign and humorous their intention<@151>serve the corporations well by making the threat of global warming seem a joke, the preserve of paranoid depressives.
To his credit, Roy Greenslade of The Observer (July 21, 1996) did manage to comment on the failure of the press to cover the global warming story. Referring to British Environment Secretary John Gummer’s declaration at the United Nations conference in Geneva that "Global climate change needs global action now. The alarm bells ought to be ringing in every capital of the world," Greenslade writes "I thought… this is sure to be big news in the morning. I imagined the front-page stories, the feature articles and the leaders." It was not to be; although Greenslade urges that we award credit where credit’s due: namely, "The Daily Telegraph alone placed the story on page one."
Elsewhere, the story was met with indifference and hostility: "Every right-wing paper has attempted to debunk global warming," Greenslade reports. As for the reason for the media’s failure to cover either the IPCC report or Gummer’s speech: "There were probably two opposing reasons…Those papers which greeted the conference by accepting its central thesis assumed they had done enough. Papers which cannot stomach the scientific evidence for global warming ignored it. This latter attitude leaves readers seriously uninformed about a serious issue."
Why some papers cannot "stomach the scientific evidence for global warming" is left to the readers’ imagination. Such an analysis<@151>at the very extreme of mainstream media coverage<@151>should be sufficient to reduce any sane person to tears. Before the world drowns in melt water, it seems sure that we will already have long since drowned in banality and half-truths. <N><BUS>Z <N>
@COMINGNEXT = David Edwards is the author of <W0>Burning All Illusions (South End Press).