Look out for junk science and suppression of the truth The Leipzig Declaration story By the middle of the last decade, scientists all over the world had arrived at the conclusion that global warming was a great threat to the planet and called for immediate actions. For that end an international conference was held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. It was meant to arrive at firm resolutions to decrease the generation of greenhouse gasses all over the world. Right before the conference, a document was effectively circulated to the media all over the world and to leading decision-makers, involved in the issue. It stated a/o: “In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both weather satellites and balloon-borne radiosondes show no current warming whatsoever--in direct contradiction to computer model results.” This evidently absurd statement was found in the so-called “Leipzig declaration on climate change”. It claimed to be signed by 100 “scientists”. The Leipzig Declaration effectively offset the unanimous conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consisting of over thousand of the foremost experts in the whole world, covering all relevant science fields relating to global warming. The issue suddenly became “controversial” and the politicians were confused. Thereby it weakened the motivation to commit to through effective measures at the Kyoto conference. So the Kyoto conference became a half-failure. Later a journalist at the journalist, Øjvind Hesselager, at the Danish National Broadcasting Company (DR1) discovered that a majority of the signatories were not climate scientists at all:
Who was behind this propaganda bluff? - Nobody knows for sure. The effective world-wide distribution of this document indicates some powerful actor. The most likely suspect is a lobby of major multinational companies producing hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal). It has been systematically exerting great pressure on politicians not to limit the use of hydrocarbons. They are hiring leading PR companies to manipulate decision-makers and the public opinion. Fabricating this kind of documents belongs to the standard strategies of the PR companies, see eg “The enemies of Democracy” at http://www.psrast.org/indmanipsci.htm. Science is loosing its independent status Another part of the strategies of multinationals is to have scientists support their interests. This is easy today as scientific research has become very expensive. Therefore, a large part of university research is dependent nowadays on sponsorship from companies. This is destroying the impartiality of science, see e.g. Dysfunctional science - Towards a "pseudoscientfic world order"? So it is good to remember that very powerful industries have a great interest in confusing people about the global warming issue, using very clever and impressive means, including dependent scientists (who, of course would deny any dependence). Even today, there are a few professors, who deny that any global warming is taking place. This reminds of the scientists, working covertly for the cigarette industry, who denied any harmful effects of smoking for several decades after their harmfulness was proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Governmental interference suppressing scientific truth Especially the US government has repeatedly inferred with scientist judgments. This has lead a group of leading US scientists to write an Open Letter in February 2004:
This open letter was published the same
day as a new report from the National Academy of Science[1],
which expressed serious concern about the US government plans how to deal with
climate change. Apparently, by ignoring and suppressing
science, the US is trying to deceive the public about the Global warming
problem. ____________________________________________ Related article PR strategies used to manipulate public opinion . It is based on a document that leaked from a PR company hired to improve public attitudes to genetic engineering. But the methods are the same. |