ust that. Lots of hot air. In the 1960s and 1970s the doom-sayers had been warning of an impending ice age. Their anti-capitalist agenda back then was that human activity was putting so much dust in the atmosphere that it was cooling the planet."
A couple of weeks later an editorial in the Daily Telegraph (August 4, 1996) under the banner "Hot Air" argued that: "to many scientists the likelihood of man-made global warming is about as credible as stories of goblins and fairies."
Note that the Telegraph’s views are in flat contradiction to the scientific consensus. The Department of the Environment was unlucky, the Telegraph quipped: "its predictions of a much warmer Britain appeared on an unseasonably cold day, after a bitter spring. It made the prophecy seem doubly improbable." The it’s-chilly-so-global-warming-is-a-joke quip is a wearisome perennial of media reporting. The poor British summer of 1993 convinced the Times that "global warming was revealed as an empty promise." (Roy Greenslade, The Observer) More recently, the Sunday Times derided those warning of the threat of climate change for "trying to alarm a sceptical and shivering nation."
The Telegraph reports, accurately, that "The public can all too easily be misled by institutions with vested interests."
True enough. Speaking at the climate convention in Geneva, Bert Bolin, chair of the IPCC, urged journalists not to listen to individual scientists whose theories had not been tested, and whose motives appeared dubious. According to Bolin, ever since his group of scientists concluded that man [sic] was discernibly altering the climate a campaign has been waged against their findings. Paul Brown of The Guardian reports that "Dozens of stories lending credibility to dubious science have been fed to newspapers in the last few weeks in the lead-up to the Second Conference of the Parties." One group in particular, the Global Climate Coalition, representing Shell, BP, Exxon, Ford, and other noted "environmentalists," is still spending millions of pounds to persuade 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 c