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Oil firms fund campaign to deny climate change

David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday January 27, 2005
Guardian

Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.

Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says a "a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change" is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.

Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Prof May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.

Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute.

Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that claimed to "undermine" climate change claims. The Marshall institute received £51,000 from ExxonMobil for its "global climate change programme" in 2003, and an undisclosed sum this month.

Prof May's warning comes as British scientists publish new research in the journal Nature showing that emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say average temperature could rise 11C, even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is limited to the levels expected to be reached in 2050.

David Frame, who coordinated the climate prediction experiment, said: "If the real world response were anywhere near the upper end of our range, even today's levels of greenhouse gases could already be dangerously high."

Emission limits such as those in the Kyoto protocol would hit oil firms because the bulk of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuel products.

Prof May writes that during the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded (through the so-called Global Climate Coalition) sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change. The GCC was "deactivated" in 2001 once Mr Bush made clear he intended to reject the Kyoto protocol. "But the denial lobby is still active and today it arrives in London."

The Scientific Alliance was set up in 2001 and is run by Mark Adams, a former private secretary for parliamentary affairs at No 10 and a private secretary to Tony Blair for six months after the 1997 election.

An alliance spokesman said today's meeting was sponsored but its policy was not to reveal its funders. ExxonMobil said it is not involved. The alliance spokesman said funders do not influence policies.

One adviser is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, a noted global warming sceptic and senior scientist with the Marshall Institute. In 1998 Dr Baliunas co-wrote an article that argued for the release of more carbon dioxide. It looked like a paper of the US National Academy of Sciences and was mass-mailed to US scientists with a petition asking them to reject Kyoto.

Prof King said several speakers at today's event have been to briefings he attended, including a summit meeting he organised in Moscow last July. "Astonishingly, when I arrived the programme had been dramatically altered. This was in the run up to the ratification of Kyoto by Putin and clearly the same group of people had decided to target our attempt to explain the current science."