Global what?

The Denial of Global Warming
The ignorace of educated people can be mind boggling. One of the panelists on last night's political questions and answer show, 'Question Time' was Peter Hitchins, the editor of the Mail on Sunday newspaper. On the environment, he says: "It has yet to be proved that global warming results from human activity. It's still open to debate." I'm glad to say that the audience laughed at him when he said this.

Now, I'm not an environmental scientist, but then neither is Peter Hitchins. What I do know is that for the first time in its history of 350 years, the Royal Society has written directly to funders of 'research' to challenge their activities. In this case the letter was written by the President of the Society to the CEO of Exxon Mobil telling him to stop funding groups who produce bad science to muddy the issues relating to global warming - you can read the full article in the Guardian newspaper here. Given that one of the remits of the Royal Society is to ensure that standards of research are met, I'm more inclined to believe the Royal Society.

Exxon Mobil's (and others like them) campaign of disinformation must be working if Peter Hitchins, who is after all an editor of a newspaper read by thousands, holds the views that he does. Of course he is entitled to his view, but do the shareholders of the newspaper really want a man like this at its helm? I suppose so, as long as he can sell newspapers. Perhaps he should read the Guardian?

Exxon's disinformation campaign is an example of a tool called astroturfing , defined by Wikipedia below:

In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal PR campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf" (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support. The goal of such campaign is to disguise the agenda of a political client as an independent public reaction to some political entity —a politician, political group, product, service, event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt ("outreach," "awareness," etc.) and overt (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by anything from an individual pushing their own personal agenda through to highly organised professional groups with financial backing from large corporations

You can listen to a lecture on global warming posted on the Society's website here