By Julia A. Seymour, Business & Media Institute
British Petroleum’s (BP) reputation has been marred by the April oil rig explosion and subsequent oil spill which is still gushing more than 40 days later. But according to The Washington Post, the reputation of some left-wing environmental groups has also been polluted by the incident.
“T]he Nature Conservancy lists BP as one of its business partners. The Conservancy also has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years,” Joe Stephens wrote for the Post May 24. It’s not just Nature Conservancy either, the Post found $2 million in donations to Conservation International and relationships between BP and other lefty activist groups Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Sierra Club and Audubon.
“The crude emanating from BP’s well threatens to befoul a number of alliances between energy conglomerates and environmental nonprofits. At least one group, Conservation International, acknowledges that it is reassessing its ties to the oil company, with an eye toward protecting its reputation,” the Post said.
This was front page news at The Post on May 24, but received only silence from other mainstream media outlets including the three broadcast networks. Even after the oil spill, when the networks interviewed experts from two of the groups that had partnered with BP, reporters failed to make the connection. In the past, the research of conservative organizations has been undermined by reporters for such corporate contributions.
NBC’s “Today” consulted “scientists” from the Nature Conservancy on May 8 as many coastal communities feared damage from the spreading oil spill. Reporter Mike Taibbi examined artificial reefs off the Gulf coast and spoke with the group who said, “All we’re trying to do is restore some of the injustices we have done to it in the last few decades.” Taibbi didn’t mention the BP/Nature Conservancy partnership in his report.
Sierra Club’s ties to BP also escaped the notice of CBS “Morning News” on April 29, when the network interviewed the group’s director of land protection, Athan Manuel, about the oil spill in the Gulf. Manuel told CBS, “We’ve always said that oil and gas drilling is a dirty and dangerous business, both in terms of pollution, but also in terms of what damage can be done to workers and to the environment.”
“NBC Nightly News” also interviewed Manuel on March 31 (before the oil spill). Manuel expressed opposition to Obama’s call for “expansion of drilling” as “too aggressive.” “[D]rilling is just a dirty and dangerous business that we think is incompatible with our coastlines and our beaches,” Manuel claimed.
Yet in 2007, the Sierra Club joined forces with many liberal environmental groups and companies including BP Wind Energy to create the American Wind & Wildlife Institute. Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and many other eco-groups like it have been uncritically treated as experts for years by the mainstream news media. The networks brought their spokesmen on to discuss a range of issues from global warming, to land preservation. In contrast, conservative groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and scientists including Patrick Michaels have been undercut by network reporters.
“Public awareness [about global warming] lagged behind, partly because of a disinformation campaign funded by the fossil-fuel industry,” ABC’s Bill Blakemore said on “World News” Sept. 23, 2007. During his statement, Blakemore aired video footage of a CEI commercial, insinuating that it was “disinformation.”
Liberal Anger at Green Groups Mostly Ignored
The revelation that BP was heavily tied to eco-groups like Conservation International and Nature Conservancy angered many of their supporters, yet the networks and other major papers have so far failed to report the relationships between green groups and BP. The Post quoted Reagan De Leon of Hawaii who had called for a boycott of “everything BP has their hands in,” before finding out that the oil company had its hands in the Nature Conservancy. “Oh, wow,” De Leon reacted, “That’s kind of disturbing.”
According to the Washington City Paper’s blog, there was a “deluge” of angry comments from members of Nature Conservancy including Cindy D. who “accused the organization of censoring comments to its blog.” One commenter on City Paper called Nature Conservancy a “whore.”
City Paper pointed out that BP spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” to “transform its image from that of a dirty old oil company into ‘Beyond Petroleum’ - a company so environmentally friendly it had transcended oil drilling (and spilling) for happy, sunny and clean technologies such as wind and solar.”
They also noted that the environmental groups “trumpeted their ties to corporations, arguing that these partnerships lead to better corporate environmental policies and less damage to the planet.” That’s exactly how the relationship between BP and Conservation International was framed by ABC’s “Nightline” back in 2002.
Fill-in anchor Chris Bury introduced the segment calling it an “exception” from the stories about rich and famous people doing “trivial” things. This was different, “rich and powerful and famous people trying to create something of lasting value.” Bury was talking about the “highly aggressive environmental organization” Conservation International partnering with a number of prominent businesspeople, actors, athletes and others to purchase and protect millions of acreage around the world.
“[T]ogether, with other environmental groups, they have launched an extraordinary, planet-sized experiment,” correspondent Robert Krulwich said. That alliance included the head of British Petroleum, according to ABC.
Media Hypocrisy: Conservative Groups Blasted for Ties to Exxon
In news reports, eco-groups (like all the ones tied to BP) were rarely labeled negatively. Words like “naturalists,” “conservationists,” and occasionally “auto-industry watchdog” have all been used to describe the groups’ liberal missions. On the other side, CEI and Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels have been labeled with disparaging terms like “denier” and statements about funding were used to undermine them.
In 2007, ABC’s Bill Blakemore alleged that CEI was behind a “disinformation campaign” that had prevented more people from understanding the threat of global warming. “Public awareness [about global warming] lagged behind, partly because of a disinformation campaign funded by the fossil-fuel industry,”
Blakemore said on Sept. 23, 2010, while airing footage of a pro-carbon dioxide commercial from CEI.
Blakemore, a longtime advocate of global warming alarmism, didn’t include anyone from CEI or the fossil-fuel industry to respond. According to MSNBC.com, ExxonMobil stopped funding CEI in 2006. NBC’s primary global warming alarmist Anne Thompson also undercut CEI on Aug. 15, 2007. After presenting the argument that “science” showed man has a role in global warming, Thompson said, “Getting to that point involved fighting interest groups fueled by powerful companies, including oil giant ExxonMobil.”
“The Union of Concerned Scientists says ExxonMobil, gave almost $16 million over seven years to denier groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute,” Thompson continued. The Business & Media Institute’s parent organization, the Media Research Center, was also listed by the Union of Concerned Scientists among the groups receiving funds from ExxonMobil. In addition to using the pejorative term “denier,” to label CEI, Thompson failed to mention that Exxon had stopped funding the non-profit organization.
A similar media contradiction happened when the news media labeled the grassroots Tea Party movement as corporate-sponsored “Astroturf” or fake grassroots. At the same time, the media have all but ignored the issue of corporate sponsorship of the left-wing green movement. And one has to look no further than Earth Day 2010 to see the corporate fingerprint on so-called green activist efforts. Major U.S. corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Siemens, Wells Fargo, AT&T, UPS, Philips and Ford all had a major presence at the so-called Earth Day “Climate Rally” on the National Mall back on April 25. That’s in addition to a sponsorship from NASA, a federal government entity and media outlets, including The Washington Post and Gannett’s USA Today.
Even though that fits the left’s own definition of “Astroturf,” the news media refused to apply the term to those efforts. See post here.
By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit , posted on Jun 4, 2010
I asked Ronald Oxburgh, chairman of what may be the most [self-snip] “inquiry” in recent experience, a few simple questions about the terms of reference and documentation of this “inquiry” - an “inquiry” in which, to their shame, Kerry Emanuel, David Hand, Herbert Huppert, Lisa Graumlich, Michael Kelly and Huw Davies, were complicit.
Oxburgh sent me an all-too-academic answer in which he editorialized about all sorts of things while evading or refusing to directly answer my questions. I’ll provide my email, Oxburgh’s answer and then re-examine my questions and insert the answers net of the editorializing.
The net result, as you will see, is that Oxburgh says that they have no documents evidencing the terms of reference of the inquiry or the selection of the eleven papers, no notes, transcripts or other documentation of the interviews with CRU employees and Oxburgh refused consent for panelists to directly provide me with any notes that they might have taken.
Breathtaking.
Here is my email to Oxburgh:
Dear Dr Oxburgh,
I would appreciate it if you could clarify some issues pertaining to your recent report (the Report) on the University of East Anglia.
Unlike most inquiry reports, the Report does not contain an Appendix stating its terms of reference. Is there a document setting out the terms of reference of the inquiry? If so, could you please provide me with a copy of this document? Did the terms of reference specifically precluded from considering one of the most important CRU activities - Lead Authorship in IPCC reports - or was this omission your own decision?
The Report states that the eleven papers were “selected on the advice of the Royal Society” and that “CRU agreed that they were a fair sample of the work of the Unit.” Can you provide me with copies of the documents evidencing the Royal Society providing this advice and the CRU agreeing that they were a “fair sample”. Did you carry out any due diligence of your own to verify that the articles were in fact a “fair sample”?
The report states that the panel made two visits to the University to question members of the University. Are there any minutes of these visits? If not, could you tell me who was interviewed and when and by whom? Were interviews recorded or transcribed for the benefit of panellists not in attendance for the entire proceedings? If not, were notes on any of the interviews transcribed and distributed? If not, do you have any personal notes on the interviews?
Finally, would you consent to Dr Emanuel providing me with any documents that he received in the course of participating in this inquiry.
The Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee has urged openness and transparency and I hope that you respond in this spirit, rather than seeking to utilize possible FOI exemptions.
Thank you for your attention,
Steve McIntyre
Oxburgh promptly replied:
From: OXBURGH, Lord
Sent: June-03-10 12:35 PM
To: Steve McIntyre
Cc: ‘Prof David Hand’; ‘Prof Herbert Huppert’; ‘Prof Huw Davies’; ‘Prof Kerry Emanuel’; lisag@cals.arizona.edu; ‘Prof Michael Kelly’; Williams Lisa Ms (VCO)
Subject: RE: SAP Report
Dear Dr McIntyre,
Thank you for your message. I am afraid that I am not able to be very helpful as none of the documents about which you inquire exists. It may, however, be useful if I give a little more information about the review
The University approached me to chair this review, which I was rather reluctant to undertake, to try to determine whether their staff had been deliberately dishonest in their research activities. If we had had any doubts I suspect that the University would have instituted a more formal inquiry that could have led to the dismissal of the individuals concerned. Given the seriousness of the allegations they wanted our inquiry to be completed as quickly as possible both for the benefit of the individuals concerned and for the University’s internal concerns as well as for their wider concerns about the science. The intention was to supplement the wider and more formal Muir Russell review that was already underway and which I believe will report later this year.
For these reasons the inquiry was established with a minimum of formality and many of the arrangements were made verbally. I saw no reason to seek any documentary evidence to establish that the Royal Society had been involved in the selection of suggested papers that gave us somewhere to start. Although I believe that all members of the Panel read all the papers on the list and found them an excellent introduction to a subject that was new to many of them, everyone went far beyond this and examined other published and unpublished material. There were no constraints on what we looked at and we were able, and did, ask for anything we wished. All our requests were answered promptly.
The important point to emphasise is that we were assessing people and their motivations. We were not assessing the wisdom of their judgement or the validity of their conclusions. It was for this reason that the membership of the panel included outstanding and very experienced scientists from outside the field. All had long experience of assessing scientists. I think that we all felt that looking people in the eye over many hours of discussion about their work and their methods, are just as important as what they say. I believe that the presence of third parties or recording devices could not begin to capture that. It was my judgement that we were most likely to be able to make a fair assessment if proceedings were as informal as possible. We played things very much by ear and at regular intervals withdrew to assess progress, compare impressions and discuss whether we wished to change tack or do anything differently. This was an exercise that depended totally on the experience and judgement of the Panel members.
The main people we interviewed were Phil Jones and Keith Briffa but a number of other researchers were present for some of the time and questioned as well.
The only written record, apart from any notes that individuals may have kept privately but of which I am unaware, is our final report that was agreed unanimously. Similarly the terms of reference were given to me verbally and are encapsulated in the introductory paragraphs of our report.
I apologise for replying somewhat briefly but am unclear as to the purpose of your inquiries and am reluctant to agree that other members of the Panel should be further involved. The Panel asked me, and I agreed, to handle all inquiries about our work. The understanding in securing their full participation at short notice was that there should be minimum incursion on their time. Within the time available to me - and I like the others on our panel am now buried in my day job - I will try to answer any other reasonable requests but I might be able to be of more help if I understood what you wish to establish.
Yours sincerely,
Ron Oxburgh
Reviewing the Bidding
Unlike most inquiry reports, the Report does not contain an Appendix stating its terms of reference. Is there a document setting out the terms of reference of the inquiry? If so, could you please provide me with a copy of this document?
No. My contact left a folded copy of The Times from the previous day in a secret location. Berlin Rules, y’know. I proceeded to a pre-assigned meeting place in a safe location in a heath to avoid surveillance. We made sure that there would be no evidence of the actual terms of reference.
Did the terms of reference specifically precluded from considering one of the most important CRU activities - Lead Authorship in IPCC reports - or was this omission your own decision?
Do you seriously think that you can get me to comment in writing about CRU’s activities within IPCC? I’m not going to touch that with a bargepole. Next question.
The Report states that the eleven papers were “selected on the advice of the Royal Society” and that “CRU agreed that they were a fair sample of the work of the Unit.” Can you provide me with copies of the documents evidencing the Royal Society providing this advice and the CRU agreeing that they were a “fair sample”.
We are “outstanding and very experienced scientists”. We don’t ask for documents. If it was worth knowing, we already knew it.
Did you carry out any due diligence of your own to verify that the articles were in fact a “fair sample”?
Due diligence??? Puh-leeze. We are “outstanding and very experienced scientists”. The report states that the panel made two visits to the University to question members of the University. Are there any minutes of these visits?
You must be on drugs. If not, could you tell me who was interviewed and when and by whom?
You think that I’m going to give you a schedule that says something like:
April 6 11 a.m. - 11.55 a.m. - Phil Jones interview. Oxburgh, Hand, Emanuel, Huppert, in attendance
April 6 2 pm - 2.30 pm - Keith Briffa interview. Oxburgh, Hand, Emanuel, Huppert, in attendance
Do you think that we’re going to tell you something that you don’t already know? See if this “helps” you.
The main people we interviewed were Phil Jones and Keith Briffa but a number of other researchers were present for some of the time and questioned as well.” Were interviews recorded or transcribed for the benefit of panellists not in attendance for the entire proceedings? If not, were notes on any of the interviews transcribed and distributed?
And let people actually see what we asked and what their answers were? If not, do you have any personal notes on the interviews? Moi? I’m Lord Ron Oxburgh, Chairman of Falck Renewables. I don’t do notes.
Finally, would you consent to Dr Emanuel providing me with any documents that he received in the course of participating in this inquiry.
Try FOI. We’ll see you in three years. Ta, ta, for now. [Note - a reader recommends re-reading Bishop Hill’s post at the time of the Oxburgh release. I do too.]
[Note 10 am - I edited the last section in the first 45 minutes or so after the post went online to increase the satirical content. Initially, it just had plain vanilla answers - No; no; no comment… On reflection, I thought that the total unresponsiveness of Oxburgh “answers” deserved satire. The editing was stylistic and not substantive, other than being more satirical. Satire is a difficult voice to pull off and reasonable people can differ on whether it succeeds. In this case, I am shall-we-say “gobsmacked” at an inquiry which doesn’t have any documents or even a written terms of reference.]
See more here.
Bloomberg News
June 2 (Bloomberg)—The global temperature this year reached its warmest on record based on a 12-month-rolling average, James Hansen, the top climate change scientist at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said today.
The rolling average surface temperature in April was about 0.65 of a degree Celsius (1.17 degree Fahrenheit) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to a graph in a 37-page draft paper on the website of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That makes it a fraction warmer than the previous peak in 2005. Absolute temperatures weren’t published in the paper.
“Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010,” Hansen and three co- authors wrote in the paper. “As for the calendar year, it is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature in the GISS analysis also will be a record.”
The figures provide the clearest evidence yet of climate change. Critics of efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by industries that burn fossil fuels had pointed to another data series, compiled by the U.K. Met Office, which puts 1998 as the warmest year, as evidence that the Earth is cooling.
The document will be submitted to Reviews of Geophysics, a scientific journal, Hansen said today in an e-mail.
Climate Debate
Efforts to stem global warming have taken a knock in the past six months after a cold winter in parts of the U.S., China and Europe at the same time as errors were revealed in the United Nation’s biggest climate change report and scientists at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were accused of suppressing dissent on the issue.
The latest findings may reinvigorate international talks on fighting global warming in Bonn this week. Those discussions stalled in Copenhagen in December. Skepticism about man-made global warming by senators including James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, has helped undermine efforts to pass U.S. laws to limit greenhouse gases.
NASA’s temperature series and another compiled by the U.S. National Climatic Data Center currently have 2005 as the warmest calendar year on record. Those two, along with the Met Office’s data set, are the three main gauges of global temperature used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its assessments of global warming. Read more here.
ICECAP REALITY CHECK
There was indeed a global pop in temperatures despite the harsh (in places record) winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The El Nino was at least a moderate strength El Nino. It and the record negative arctic oscillation helped make the higher latitudes warmer and suppress clouds and winds in the subtropics and tropics, helping keep water temperatures in this the widest latitudinal belt above normal. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which went into its warm mode in 1995 rebounded from a slide with the helps of these effects. Drought in India and southeast Asia after two successive monsoon failures related to low solar, high latitude volcanoes and summer El Ninos also contributed to the pop.
As La Nina comes on and the PDO dives, and tropical activity and increasing winds in the Atlantic cool the waters, the global temperature will dive again like it did in the late 1990s and late 2000s. Note how every El Nino leads to a spike up and La Nina to a dip down. Prof. Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said in 2008: “Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature”.
Hansen, NOAA NCDC, Hadley CRU/UKMO all have reason to find warmth and veriify their scary projections from their tinkertoy models despite the many shortcomings found in these models. Hansen has a proven history of manipulating data to come closer to verifying projections.
E-mail messages obtained by CEI in a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate data was inferior to those of the CRU and NOAA. In 2007, a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal NO! “My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S… and [East Anglia] data for the global...”
NASA’s GIStemp program recalculates old temperatures with every new data run. Like CRU and NOAA, NASA has managed to cool off the prior warm period (like Michael mann did with the Medieval Warm Period. See below (enlarged here) how in 1980, Hansen had the 1960s 0.3C colder than the 1950s. By 1987, it was just 0.05C colder and by 2007 it had become 0.05C warmer.
This was also done with the 1930s and 1940s, a notoriously warm period where most of the nation (and North America) heat records were set. See below (enlarged here)
NASA makes frequent changes to the data as noted. John Goetz in a guest post on Watts Up With That noted how NASA changed 20% of the station data 16 times in the 2 1/2 years ending in 2007. Recall also in 2007, Steve McIntyre found a ‘millennium bug’ in the NASA software that caused excess warmth post 2000. NASA quickly adjusted the data down 0.12 to 0.15C. This also pushed 1934 back into the lead as the warmest year. that lasted all of one year (NASA kept the old data the same because the world was watching) before NASA returned all that warmth and then some. See below (enlarged here)
Hansen is a man on a mission to save the planet and this includes civil disobedience. As Michael Goldfarb described it “Recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as “factories of death.” This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England.” Could this civil disobedience carry over to the data?
The cooling with the recent two year La Nina has put pressure on NOAA and NASA to accelerate adjustments - NOAA removed urban heat island adjustments for the USHCN in 2007 and announced a new warmer version of GHCN (V3) coming soon. NASA’s cooling of the 1930s to 1950s and adjustment upward of this decade last year (shown in table above as much as 0.19C for a year) put them in a position to make the claim in the release. Should you believe the NASA and NOAA claims? No, no more than those from the Hadley Center/IPCC. (PDF) See David Whitehouse’s take on the NASA claims here.