http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=3107&method;=full

The Industry's "ICE" Campaign

The year before the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio, a coalition of coal and utility companies launched a disinformation campaign designed by a public relations firm to create the Information Council on the Environment (ICE).

The plan specified the use of three so-called "greenhouse skeptics" -- Drs. Robert Balling, Pat Michaels and Sherwood Idso -- in broadcast appearances, op-ed articles and newspaper interviews in selected markets.

The goal of the campaign was to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," according to strategy papers developed by a polling firm used by the public relations company that managed the ICE campaign. ...

http://organizenow.net/cco/right/globalwarm.html

Sellout Scientists: Industry-funded Skeptics Undermine Global Warming Consensus
by Ross Gelbspan

Even as global warming intensifies, the evidence is being denied with a ferocious disinformation campaign. This campaign is waged on many fronts: in the media, where public opinion is formed; in the halls of Congress, where laws are made; and in international climate negotiations. In their most important accomplishment, global warming critics have successfully created the general perception that scientists are sharply divided over whether it is taking place at all.

Key to this success has been the effective use of a tiny band of scientists -- principally Drs. Patrick Michaels, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling, and S. Fred Singer -- who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis. Deep-pocketed industry public relations specialists have promoted their opinions through every channel of communication they can reach. They have demanded access to the press for these scientists' views, as a right of journalistic fairness.

Unfortunately, most editors are too uninformed about climate science to resist. They would not accord to tobacco company scientists who dismiss the dangers of smoking the same weight that they accord to world-class lung specialists. But in the area of climate research, few major news stories fail to feature prominently one of these handful of industry-sponsored scientific "greenhouse skeptics."

http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/archive/kpresspack/debate.html

Industry And The Climate Debate

Some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful companies have gathered forces behind a host of industry front groups in an increasingly intensive campaign to derail agreement on global climate protection.

Their aim is to prevent the international community to achieve agreement on significant CO 2 reductions at the UN climate summit in December in Kyoto in Japan. Household names such as Shell, Exxon, Chrysler, Ford, DuPont, and many others hide their real agenda behind lobbying organizations with such innocent names as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) or the International Climate Change Partnership (ICCP). Other front groups are the American Petroleum Institute and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA).

Most of the major multinational oil, coal and car companies are part of a huge disinformation effort that claims that there is no real need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or that it is too costly.

Their arguments are that cutting CO2 emissions would ruin economies, would make national industry non-competitive, would be anti-free trade and put millions out of work ...

...  The Global Climate Coalition and Western Fuels Association - i.e. the US coal lobby - are notorious in their spearheading the fossil fuel industry's long fight to discredit and undermine the science behind climate change, particularly that of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They rely on a small band of mainly U.S.science sceptics whose arguments are isolated and which in many cases have failed or in certain cases never even undergone rigorous scientific peer review .

Five of the best known US sceptics - Sallie Baliunas, Fred Singer, Robert Balling, Patrick Michaels and Sherwood Idso are also members of the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF) which promotes sceptics views in Europe.

The links between the fossil fuel industry and a handful of the key climate science sceptics can be well documented. Corporate sceptic campaigns are detailed in Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan book "The Heat is On". ...

http://www.epilogicconsulting.com/cascadiac/altviews.htm
Consensus Denied
Holy War Over Global Warming
By Alexander Ewen

One of the main vehicles for attacks on climate change initiatives during the Rio Conference was a campaign known as the Information Council on the Environment "ICE," funded by energy companies-in particular, Edison Electric Institute, the Southern Company, and the Western Fuels Association. Like the more recent initiative by the American Petroleum Institute, the ICE campaign, launched in 1991, was designed to put scientists in front of the media to portray global warming as "theory rather than fact," and plant stories that would minimize the seriousness of the threat. The ICE campaign introduced the country to three major scientific critics, who became known as skeptics of the global warming process: Drs. Patrick J. Michaels, Robert C. Balling Jr. and Sherwood Idso.

... Balling continued to take temperature measurements at isolated sites around the world, and continued to report signs of a cooling, not a warming trend, but no one was taking him seriously. Although Idso restarted his "carbon dioxide is good" campaign by forming the Greening Earth Society with the support of the coal industry, Idso's visions of a green planet were being taken less seriously as well. ...

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1997Q4/warming.html

ICE Melts Down

In 1991, a U.S. corporate coalition including the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association and Edison Electrical Institute created a PR front group called the "Information Council for the Environment" (ICE) and launched a $500,000 advertising and public relations blitz as the first salvo in a campaign to, in ICE's own words, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)."

The ICE was run by Bracy Williams & Co., a Washington-based P.R. firm. Using opinion polling, it identified "older, less-educated males from larger households who are not typically active information-seekers" and "younger, lower-income women" as "good targets for radio advertisements" that would "directly attack the proponents of global warming . . . through comparison of global warming to historical or mythical instances of gloom and doom."

To boost its credibility, ICE created a Scientific Advisory Panel that featured Patrick Michaels from the Department of Environmental Services at the University of Virginia, Robert Balling of Arizona State University and Sherwood Idso of the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory. Michaels has been the leading scientific sceptic of the global warming theory.

"It will be interesting to see how the science approach sells," commented an internal memo by the Edison Electric Institute's William Brier. The campaign collapsed, however, after Brier's comments and other internal memoranda were leaked to the press. An embarrassed Michaels hastily disassociated himself from ICE, citing what he called its "blatant dishonesty." ...

http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/helvarg.htm
"Energy Companies Try the 'Tobacco Approach' to Evidence of Global Warming": The Greenhouse Spin
David Helvarg
The Nation magazine (New York)
November, 1996

... Despite this compelling evidence, a stealth campaign led by energy corporations in the United States (in cooperation with a bipartisan group of oil- and coal-state politicians including Murkowski and West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd) has managed to convince the public that there is still significant "debate" on global warming. Among the leading advocates for what's been called "the Tobacco Institute strategy" of alleging scientific uncertainty are a number of Beltway think tanks, publications and public relations outfits. These include: the George C. Marshall Institute (a conservative think tank—and longtime Star Wars promoter—funded by Scaife, Bradley and other right-wing foundations); the million-dollar-a-year Global Climate Coalition (founded in 1989 by several dozen corporations to counter "the myth of global warming"); the American Energy Alliance (made up of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and Edison Electric Institute); the Climate Council (run by a member of the oil-client-heavy law firm of Patton Boggs, of which the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was a partner); the Science and Environmental Policy Project (founded as an affiliate of a Moonie think tank); and the "World Climate Report," a newsletter funded by the Western Fuels Association.

With this array of talent for hire, the fossil-fuel industry has beep able to lay a heavy smog of suspicion over the light of science. Even before release of the I.P.C.C. report, Frederick Seitz, chairman of the Marshall Institute, wrote an Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal headlined "A Major Deception on Global Warming." Echoing a Global Climate Coalition report published three weeks earlier, Seitz insisted that the final version of the l.P.C.C. report was not the version approved by contributing scientists, that it was in fact a "corruption of the peer-review process" that censored greenhouse skeptics.

The l.P.C.C. chairman and others involved in the review strongly -- and credibly --denied Seitz's charges (which didn't stop The New York Times from running a story on the "controversy" or pro-oil politicians from demanding that Congress hold hearings on the l.P.C.C. Benjamin Santer, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the highest-ranking U.S. scientist involved in the report's preparation,wrote a letter to the Journal that read in part, "[Seitz's] actions reflect an apparent attempt to divert attention away from the scientific evidence of a human effect on global climate by attacking the scientists concerned with investigating the issue."

If the Op-Ed was part of an industry attempt to slander and discredit the bearers of bad news, it wasn't the first such attempt. As early as 1991 an organization called the Information Council on the Environment (I.C.E.) was formed to "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)." Run by a Washington-based P.R. firm, Bracy Williams & Co., I.C.E. was financed by the coal-mining and utility companies that make up the Western Fuels Association. Its science advisory panel consisted of Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso and Dr. Patrick Michaels, three leading "climate skeptics" who, by their own account, have received close to a million dollars of coal- and oil-industry funding (including a publishing grant from the government of Kuwait) for their efforts to refute the scientific consensus on global warming. I.C.E.'s media strategy, revealed in internal documents, was to move people from advocating "extreme positions on global warming," meaning legislation, to "less extreme positions," i.e., further study.

"'Some members of the media scare the public about global warming to increase their audience and their influence.' People who respond most favorably to such statements are older, less-educated males...who are not typically active informationseekers," l.C.E.'s pollsters reported. "They are good targets for radio advertisements." The council then developed a series of radio spots to be delivered by Dr. Balling and talk-radio heavyweight Rush Limbaugh. ("Get real! Stop panicking! I'm here to tell you that the facts simply don't jibe.... Minneapolis has actually gotten colder," Limbaugh incorrectly claims in one of the spots.) The l.C.E. campaign lasted six months, and then was terminated by the Western Fuels Association. "The issue was too complicated and the ads were a little simple, more of a sledgehammer than a subtle effect," says Ivan Brandon, the P.R. executive who oversaw the project. "We decided to focus more on what our contrarian scientists were saying."

After dumping l.C.E., the association has gone on to fund "World Climate Report," a biweekly "science" publication, edited by Patrick Michaels (who's also a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute), that attacks mainstream theories on global warming. In addition, Western Fuels funded a $250,000 video titled The Greening of Planet Earth, which was distributed by the Global Climate Coalition to more than 1,000 U.S. journalists, the White House and various oil states in the Middle East. The video claims that industrial carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere acts as a kind of airborne nutrient that aids plant growth and therefore, by increasing crop yields, could be the solution to world hunger. ...

Here are the Global Warming counterfacts (partial list):

• 1992 -- "Warning to Humanity" petition circulates, signed by 1,700 working CREDIBLE scientists.
• 1992 -- Oil, Coal, pollution-industries counter-attack at Rio conference, fake Heidelberg Appeal circulates with their funding, using their paid-science-traitors, like the documented corrupt Fred Singer, documented corrupt Fred Seitz, documented corrupt Bruce N. Ames.
• 1997-1998 -- hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded in human history.
• 1998 -- hottest year in recorded human history.
• 1998 -- 86% of all corals bleached, came 2 degrees from known heat-death of species, and 10 days away from known heat-associated digestion failure starvation deaths. No fossil record shows such massive simultaneous incident ever in global geologic history other than 5 mass extinction incidents.
• 1999 -- strongest super-cyclone (310km/h winds) in human recorded history hits Orissa, India. 1.9 million houses damaged or destroyed, 10,000 people swept out to drown at sea.
• 2002 -- Severe droughts on five continents simultaneously -- at one moment the crops to feed one sixth the human race are threatened by brutal killing weather.
• 2002-2003 -- Worst drought in Australia recorded human history leads to wildfires invading Austrialian capital city and burning down hundreds of city blocks. At one moment not long afterwards a 250 kilometer firefront threatened to engulf the entire largest city in that country, Sydney.
• 2003 -- More people displaced by flooding than any year in recorded human history, over twice the geographical area flooded than second-worst flood disaster year in recorded human history.
• 2003 -- 562 tornadoes sweep the USA in ten days -- largest swarm of tornadoes ever recorded in US history, almost 50% worse than previous historical record, and nearly three times worse than any May in US history.
• 2003 -- Largest hailstone in human recorded history falls in Nebraska, 18 inches diameter, "cannonball size" which denialists say is impossible according to THEIR understanding of physics. Canteloupe-sized, softball-sized, baseball-sized, golf ball-sized all fell in 2003 hell storms.
• 2003 -- Weeks of unrelenting pounding of constant storms finally break northeast US power grid, 50,000,000 utility customers blacked out in US and Canada. Indiana governor, Frank O'Bannon, dies of heart attack from stress of one declared sequential "state of emergency" after another. Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Toronto especially hit hard.
• 2003 -- Worst forest firestorms in Portugal's recorded human history, blamed on excessive heat and changed air currents denying rainfall.
• 2003 -- 20,000 forest fires in Russia, 16,000 of them before the heat of summer, the largest number in human recorded history.
• 2003 -- 1,400 heat-stroke deaths in Andhra Pradesh, India from sustained heat wave and delayed monsoon -- largest mass heat-killing in local recorded human history.
• 2003 -- 35,000 excess heat-stroke deaths across Europe, largest mass heat-killing in European recorded history.