Meet the climate sceptics

Barack Obama may be worried about greenhouse gases - but not everyone is. Suzanne Goldenberg reports from this week's gathering of climate change deniers
Suzanne Goldenberg, The GuardianC 12 Mar 09;

It is 8.50am in a windowless room in a hotel off New York's Times Square and the speaker is rounding off a talk called "Climate change and extreme events: lies, damned lies and statistics". There are nearly 100 people in the room. "How many people understood that statistical discussion?" he asks. Half a dozen hands go up. In the last row, a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is regarded as a luminary by climate change revisionists, sits with mouth wide open and head tilted back, asleep.

In Copenhagen, scientists have been gathering this week to air the latest research on global warming. In Washington, Barack Obama and Congress are working on legislation to curb the burning of greenhouse gases. European government leaders returning from the US talk of how the new administration is giving fresh momentum to efforts for a global climate change treaty. Then there is this gathering, almost ignored by the media, which talks about climate change as a relic from the past: "Global warming: was it ever really a crisis?"

For those who reject the science that climate change is man-made and caused by carbon dioxide, and those who oppose government efforts to reduce carbon emissions, this is the anti-global warming jamboree: a gathering of the world's leading revisionist scientists and activists. It is also the launch of a new campaign against Obama's efforts to green the economy and sign America up to a climate change treaty.

"This is the counter-offensive to what is happening in the mainstream media and among our leadership in Congress and in the White House," says Marc Morano, an aide to James Inhofe, the Republican senator who notoriously dismissed global warming as a "hoax".

Conference attendees, from the US, Britain, Europe and beyond, readily admit that their views are dismissed by the leading scientific institutions and government. But they refuse to give up. They see in the economic recession new potential to re-open - and possibly win - the battle on global warming.

"The economic crisis has taken the wind out of the sails of [emissions] cap and trade and energy tax," says Joseph Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago thinktank that hosted the conference and was funded in the past by Exxon Mobil.

"If Obama cannot get cap and trade or an energy bill passed in the next two months, I think it is dead for the duration of the administration," he says.

It would be easy to dismiss this gathering as a pity party for people on the fringes of modern thought. The contrast with the America embodied by Obama's election is stark. The 600 attendees (by the organisers' count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers. Aside from a smattering of academics from well-known universities, they are affiliated with rightwing thinktanks, such as the Ayn Rand Institute, the Carbon Sense Coalition, or the scarily named Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow, that operate far outside the mainstream of public discourse.

Unlike Obama, who owed his victory to millions of supporters and donors, the climate change deniers operate within narrow bands of support: the conservative wing of the Republican party and the extreme end of the Christian Right. According to DeSmogblog, an environmentalist website, the 50 or so thinktanks linked to this conference between them have received $47m in funds over the years from Exxon and the Koch and Scaife families, who are the leading patrons of conservative causes in America. Both families made their first fortunes in the oil business.

But on one point, environmentalists and their opponents agree: after the skirmishes of the last decade about the science explaining the causes of climate change, and policy debates about carbon trading in Europe, the stage is set for a final showdown in Washington.

Conversation in the corridors regularly turns to how the naysayers could be more effective at influencing the debate and blocking new legislation. "What about taking out lawsuits against Hollywood celebrities who lend their prestige to environmental causes?" someone asks.

Morano, once a producer for the chatshow host Rush Limbaugh, will be crucial to that new PR push. He is leaving his Senate job to start a new climate website. The main thrust of his argument is that the carbon reduction targets set in Europe and under consideration by Congress will not work - "a symbolic solution for an alleged crisis", he claims.

But although the next phase of combat will be in the policy arena, conference-goers are not willing to concede any ground to the scientific establishment. They insist there are other causes of climate change, such as the sun or volcanos.

Richard Lindzen, the MIT meterologist who is treated with near-reverence among the conference-goers, admits such sessions are closer to therapy than shared scientific discovery. "It's fundamentally a support group," he says. "Let's have a vehicle for people who are sceptical to get together and meet each other."

Not that the mingling process is without awkwardness. Among climate change deniers there is little agreement on who they are fighting, and why, beyond the most basic. They all share a loathing for Al Gore. In the exhibition hall, a film-maker promotes a documentary on the environmental champion called Not Evil Just Wrong. Gore is regularly excoriated in the speeches as the leading "climate change alarmist".

Some of those in attendance see themselves as modern day Galileos, pure scientists trying to get the truth out against a hostile academic orthodoxy. Others see the concern about global warming as just another attempt to get in the way of business trying to turn a legitimate profit. For some, the enemy is government of any kind. Arthur Robinson, a leading rejectionist, gets a smattering of applause when he says he opposes the idea of state-funded schools for children.

Still others, like the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, the leading European climate change sceptic, are still fighting communism. "Environmentalism is an ideology," he told the conference. "It really is a replacement of some of the sins of the last century."

Environmentalists see that fracturing in the ranks as a sign of weakness. They note that large corporations, such as Exxon, which supported Heartland for nearly a decade, are now eager to be seen as partners for the Obama administration as it seeks to shift the US economy from fossil fuels to other sources of energy.

But though weakened in this age of Obama, the climate change revisionists remain determined not to go down without a fight. "It's almost a lost, lost battle," the Czech president said. "Nevertheless, for me, I must persevere and go on."