Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie

Refuting lies takes far more time and energy than making them

Spitting oil? An excellent illustration by Jim Cooke perfectly illustrates this article. We are enveloped by disinformation every day.

This article is longer than usual. Slapping down lies takes extra time and work. It may need to be read in the app or in your browser if it’s too long for email.

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A few weeks ago, I read an article talking about the potential for the slowing Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to eventually tip Europe into an ice age. I’ve been aware of this scenario for a long while. On an intuitive level, it’s bewildering to consider as global temperatures inexorably rise. In fact, currently the European continent is warming faster than the world as a whole at 2.3° C above pre-industrial levels compared to 1.3° C globally. Another reader of the article who apparently didn’t understand the importance of AMOC’s role in regulating global temperature (or likely the basics of climate science) jumped on this possibility to share a movie promoting the lie that CO2 as a driver of climate change is a hoax, and posted a link to Climate: The Movie, a slick piece of disinformation posted on YouTube produced by Martin Durkin, a notorious climate change denier. Durkin sees the environmental movement as a threat to personal freedom and in favor of crippling economic development.

Many of you likely know such a denier in your life. The most important thing I can do as a writer is give you the facts needed to persuade others of the dilemma we face. You are my ambassadors. I watched this film as a necessary exercise to understand what this person believes. We can only change minds by giving respect and time to those misled, and possessing information that can change their thinking. Refuting lies takes far more time and energy than making them. The enemy knows this, the ones pulling the strings of the commenter on the article.

We live in a time of unhinged conspiracy theories and dangerous science denial. In the case of this film, a tiny minority of accomplished scientists themselves are participating in undermining overwhelming scientific consensus, outliers who have connections to big oil, the military industrial complex, and the billionaires who fund benignly named institutes and foundations to keep the oil and their money and power flowing, no matter the cost. This film is unintended proof advanced degrees don’t guarantee wisdom or ethics.

The movie’s cast of characters

First, it must be pointed out the “experts” in this movie are all physicists. While respected in their fields, they are not climatologists. Climatology requires expertise in atmospheric sciences, physical geography, oceanography, and biogeochemistry, completely different areas of study. A physicist declaring an expert opinion on climate change is about as legitimate as my car mechanic offering to do open-heart surgery for me. I think I will look for other opinions, thank you.

There is also guilt by association to be found when you look at the company they keep with ties to oil and gas, billionaire driven right-wing think tanks, and pedestrian scammers. While you may wish to watch Climate: The Movie, it’s not necessary to do so. This article will provide you with general insights into the organized denial community that can be applied universally.

Steven Koonin

Steven Koonin, is an American theoretical physicist and professor at New York University (NYU) in New York City. He is author of the book Unsettled, which argues that, “Mainstream scientific studies accepted by official agencies do not support the notion that there is any kind of climate crisis at all.”

Holding a BS in Physics from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Koonin was a professor of physics at Caltech from 1975-2006, and the Institute’s Provost for almost a decade.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the JASON, a scientist advisory group whose sponsors include the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the U.S. Intelligence Community. Dr. Koonin is also an adjunct staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, which evaluates weapons systems.

Dr. Koonin spent five years as Chief Scientist for British Petroleum (BP), where he played a central role in establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute, headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley, partnered with Royal Dutch Shell, and funded by BP.

Koonin was the Under Secretary of Science and advisor for President Obama in the U.S. Department of Energy from May 19, 2009, through November 18, 2011.

Climate: The Movie characterizes Koonin as one of the world’s leading physicists, but that hardly tells the complete story. In addition to Big Oil and DOD relationships, Steven also has associations with two well-known right-wing and libertarian disinformation “think” tanks, The Heartland Institute and The Hoover Institute, which both promote climate change denial. The Heartland Institute, formed in 1984 also worked with Philip Morris to discredit health risks of secondhand smoke and lobby against smoking bans. These relationships are not revealed in the film. A short biography of Koonin’ s career can be found here on Hoover, and his association with Heartland is established in this rebuttal to criticism of Unsettled by the journal Scientific American. The rebuttal was published by a climate troll, Anthony Watts, on ClimateRealism.com, a cheap and overt climate change disinformation site. Watt’s bio on Climate Realism claims he’s a “senior fellow” for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, and that he has co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. Remarkable for a man who attended Purdue University, but received no degree. Watts also publishes the disinformation site Watts Up with That?, which ridiculously claims to be the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change.

In the film, Koonin says:

“I teach climate science to my students at NYU, and I always tell them check the data or the papers yourself. And they all come out of that course with their eyes wide open.”

His students would be well advised to open their eyes to the professor’s associations.

Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist with a magna cum laude BA in physics, 1960, a Master of Science in applied mathematics, 1961, and a PhD in the same, 1964. Retired in 2013, Lindzen was a Professor of Meteorology at Harvard from 1972 to 1982, then appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT where he retired in 2013. Lindzen published 230 peer-reviewed scientific papers during his career.

In Climate: The Movie, it’s stated the professor served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On Climate Change the “Facts,” an Australian website that appears to have been abandoned at three in the morning after too much rotgut bourbon and not enough motivation or talent, a minimal bio of his career appears, claiming he was not just a panelist, but a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. However, I found that publication on the IPCC website, called Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report. Although numerous authors are credited, curiously, Lindzen’s name is nowhere to be found. Huh.

Where is our lead author Richard Lindzen on this report?

Richard’s bio can also be found on the Heartland Institute site. A handy list of miscreants who fund Heartland is provided below.

With a few clicks the true motivation for the Climate Change The Facts site was revealed, to pedal a climate change denial book called, Climate Change The Facts 2020, by a Jennifer Marohasy. Ms. Marohasy, is a biologist, not a climate scientist, but hey, unlike Mr. Watts she does possess a degree. Jennifer has also been a “senior fellow” at a “free-market” think-tank called The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The IPA, based in Melbourne, advocates for neoliberal economic policies such as privatization, deregulation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalization, deregulation of work places, and abolition of the minimum wage. It also rejects climate science.

Neoliberal economics at work. Read more from my article on the subject here.

Professor Lindzen has also been honored by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that boasts billionaire oil man Charles Koch as one of its founders. Lindzen joined Cato as a “Distinguished Senior Fellow in its Center for the Study of Science,” in 2013.

I really have to get in on this senior fellow stuff.

“Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if you go to their section on working one group one which is the science, they don’t support any of these claims, and I assure you having served on, it’s biased, but you couldn’t get any real scientists to agree some of the nonsense that’s being promoted.”

Inconvenient that over 15,000 scientists disagree with you, Richard. A full list of them can be downloaded here for you to refute. Have fun with that. Here’s a direct link to the zip file, supplemental file S2, to help you get started, buddy.

William Happer

William Happer received a BS in Physics from the University of North Carolina in 1960 and a PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 1964. His academic career began at Columbia University, where he became a full professor, leaving for Princeton University in 1980. In August 1991, he was appointed Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy by President George H. Bush, where he stayed until May 1993. He was dismissed by the Clinton Administration after disagreements on the ozone hole. He’s credited with a key insight in 1982 that made adaptive optics possible which deforms mirrors to compensate for light distortion, which improved astronomical telescopes.

Happer joined the staff of Donald Trump's National Security Council, in the fall of 2019. “We've got to push back vigorously on the demonization of fossil fuels,” he said in his speech. “They're not demons at all. They're enormous servants to us.”

Happer became a member of the JASON advisory group in 1976, serving as Chairman of the Steering Committee from 1987 to 1990. He also served as a trustee of the MITRE Corporation formed in 1958 as a military think tank, and the George C. Marshall Institute, which he chaired from 2006 until 2015. The Marshall Institute focused on defense, science, and public policy, and the promotion of environmental skepticism, particularly climate change denial, and received extensive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Disbanded in 2015, its climate denial mission carries on with the Happer’s CO2 Coalition.

The CO2 Coalition

Established in 2015, the CO2 Coalition is considered the successor to the Marshall Institute. Dr. Happer is a co-founder and chairs the coalition.

The organization continues climate change denial in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Happer has described the group as aiming to “educate the public that increased atmospheric levels of CO2 will benefit the world.” The site describes its purpose to be “of educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.”

This is a common spin employed by the billionaire funded climate change denial community.

Forget about those melting ice sheets and elevated ocean temperatures destroying coral reefs. Don’t worry about succumbing to wet bulb temperature. Additional CO2 is making the world greener (true, but a cynical point of deception), so it’s good for crops (when they're not withering from drought or submerged by floods), I guess.

Let’s talk money.

Institutes and foundations do good work, right? Answer, sometimes. Advice, view them with suspicion. Their benign names often belie their intent.

Remember, such organizations are created by the wealthiest, who’ve often committed crimes to gain their wealth. A foundation or institute provides opportunities to sanitize reputations, inflate egos, and execute endless agendas to procure additional wealth and power. In this article, we’re talking about a conspiracy to keep burning fossil fuels. The aforementioned Heartland Institute sounds nice, doesn’t it? However, let’s consider its contributors.

Highlighted are Heartland donators relevant to this article. The American Petroleum Institute and Exxon are self-explanatory, as is Charles Koch. More on Donors Trust and the Mercer and Sarah Scaife Foundations follow.

The CO2 Coalition’s funding sources are murky, as it doesn’t disclose its donors. However, tax filings confirm $150,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation in 2016, and $150,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2018. Sarah Mellon Scaife is the niece of the famous banker and industrialist Andrew W. Mellon, who was instrumental in founding the Gulf Oil Corporation. Sarah’s son and successor, Richard Mellon Scaife, continues the foundation’s support of right wing public policy organizations, and the billionaire libertarian is heir to an oil and banking dynasty that still includes $30 million of shares in twenty-two energy companies that include $9 million in Exxon and $5.7 million in Chevron, according to financial filings just a few years ago.

The Heartland Institute holds so-called “International Conferences on Climate Change,” an oil soaked gathering of climate change deniers. By the seventh event the Scaife foundation had provided $45,337,640 to Heartland according to Desmog.

When you have luminaries such as Lauren Boebert and Ron Johnson at a “climate conference,” you know it’s going to be a real shitshow. Johnson has received $952,798 from the oil and gas industry since 1990. He’s small potatoes. You can check out the whole odious list here. Top taker? Mitt Romney, $8,611,244.

The Mercer Family Foundation, operates as a tax-exempt 501(c)3 non-profit. They used their money to assist Trump’s election victory in 2016. As of September 2021, they’ve also invested nearly $20 million last year into a GOP-friendly dark money fund that hides the ultimate destination of their contributions, which went through Donors Trust, a conservative and libertarian financial vehicle.

The Mercers have also combined forces with Steve Bannon on projects, co-founding Glittering Steel, a production company that makes right-wing propaganda and poured money into Breitbart News, buying a minority stake. In 2015 Robert Mercer donated over $11 million to political action committees to support presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in the 2016 primaries. He shifted his support to Donald Trump when Cruz and Fiorina dropped out. Cruz is fourth on Open Secrets list for taking oil money at $4,881,748.

Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, leads the Mercer Family Foundation. She also sits on the boards of multiple right-of-center organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, whose “Project 2025” is a plan to foment an authoritarian takeover of American government.

In 2016, tax receipts obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal the Mercer family gave nearly $4 million to groups denying scientific consensus on man-made climate change. And the Mercer family’s foundation donated millions to the Heartland Institute over the years. Between 2008 and 2015, they gave the group over $5 million, according to tax filings obtained by the Washington Post.

From Climate: The Movie, Happer says:

“There’s this mischievous, uh, idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is promoted by consensus. In real science there are always arguments, no science is ever settled you know its just, uh, absurd when people say the climate of science is settled, there’s no such thing as settled science, especially climate.”

No science is settled? How do you feel about gravity, buddy?

John Clauser

John Clauser holds a BS in physics from Caltech, earned in 1964. He received a MA in physics in 1966 and a PhD in physics in 1969 from Columbia University. Known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in 2010 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, and became a joint Nobel Prize winner with two other scientists in 2022. Clauser also worked as a research physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Berkeley University from 1975 to 1997.

That’s all fine, however, in 2023, well into retirement at age 81 he joined the board of the CO2 Coalition. Suddenly, our Johnny became an expert on climate change. Maybe he went to night school.

In November 2023 he participated in an event at the Four Seasons hotel in Baltimore, organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of more than a dozen Catholic organizations that argues “those pushing the anti-God and anti-family climate agenda need to be called out and exposed.”

An atheist, Clauser somehow became the keynote speaker, participating with others who denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal” including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and leaders of the Catholic Church.

Climate: The Movie proclaims John Clauser to be “one of the most respected scientists in the world.” Okay, in physics maybe, but not as a climate scientist or person with the last word in good judgement, apparently.

From the film Clauser says:

“The science that’s being done is appallingly bad in my opinion. There are a large number of scientists who are in violent disagreement. They refer to themselves as skeptics. Since I am no longer worried about funding or a job or whatever, I call myself a climate change denier.”

Sounds like a load, not a deposit of faith to me, John boy. Define what a large number of scientists are. The four of you called out in this article?

I hope this my work gives you some tools for persuading a climate change denier in your life. We can’t win them all, but every mind awakened to the truth counts. Thank you for reading.