Putting the Heat on Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg continues to surface in newspapers around the globe. There is, he claims, "a tsunami of nonsense" out there about global warming, and he's here to set us all straight. As a phrase, "tsunami of nonsense" is attention-grabbing. Clever though it may be, I found that Lomborg was not the first to use the phrase. In November of 2003, the phrase popped up in a discussion of the game Halo. And in 2005, in an interview in Washingtonian magazine, CNN terror analyst Peter Bergen said that "A tsunami of nonsense has been written about [Osama] bin Laden." The title notwithstanding, Lomborg just repeats the same arguments from Cool It that you will find refuted elsewhere on this page.

What keeps Lomborg and the deniers of climate change going? The Canadian Broadcast Corporation program The Fifth Estate has produced a documentary, updated last fall, called "The Denial Machine" that gives an excellent introduction to the decades-long effort by the oil and coal industries to confound and confuse the public debate about the science behind global warming. I was especially struck by the direct links between the tobacco industry's denial campaign and the global warming deniers, including some of the very same scientists. Here's how The Fifth Estate describes this show:

"The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate
the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities
of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for Big
Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil
companies.

Who is keeping the debate of global warming alive?

The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global
warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global
warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It
shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public
relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as
those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the
cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those
willing to question the science behind climate change, providing
funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

The Denial Machine also explores how the arguments supported by oil
companies were adopted by policymakers in both Canada and the US and
helped form government policy."