ism," the facts of this issue represent a serious threat to corporate goals. Stephen Schneider, head of Interdisciplinary Climate Systems at the U.S. National Centre For Atmospheric Research, has estimated that conversion to a post-greenhouse economy would cost government and corporations "hundreds of billions of dollars every year for many decades, both at home and in financial and technical assistance to developing nations." Consequently, like inconvenient human rights atrocities and costly facts more generally, the global warming issue, and certainly the idea of a need for immediate and drastic action, tends not to be promoted by the corporate media arm of the corporate system. Instead, as Sherwood Rowland, whose laboratory first discovered the ozone-depleting properties of CFCs, has said: "It is quite common on the scientific side of industry to believe that there aren’t any real environmental problems, that there are just public relations problems." (Tom Athanasiou, "U.S. Politics and Global Warming," Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.)
No surprise, then, that sardonic ridicule is the order of the day. At the British dissident extreme, Pat Coyne argued in the New Statesman (June 14, 1994) that revision of the informed consensus that global warming was a genuine threat was "in the air" on the basis that predictive computer models are "necessarily simplifications," which may therefore "be drastically modified"; and on the basis of inconclusive speculations about "regular and irregular" fluctuations in the Gulf Stream and interglacial temperatures 180,000 years ago which may, or may not, imply impeded or enhanced global warming. Coyne’s conclusion was that, in chilly Britain, a bit of global warming "seems more than enticing<@133>the sooner the better." This, recall, representing the dissident extreme of mainstream journalism.
Some ten days after the IPCC’s report confirming "a discernible influence on global climate," on June 6, Taki of the Sunday Times had this to say: "The latest apocalypse, global warming, is just 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 per