Clearing the haze.

• Author: Dunn, Seth
• Position: International environmental policies needed regarding the Earth's ongoing climate changes

In the winter of 1995, an article appeared in Harper's magazine which thrust into public view a symbiotic relationship between members of the coal and oil industry and a handful of scientists who were vocally disputing the overwhelming consensus of their peer-reviewed contemporaries supporting a human role in ongoing changes in the Earth's climate. The article, entitled "The Heat Is On," revealed that these "skeptics" - Fred Singer, Robert Bailing, Richard Lindzen, and Pat Michaels, among others - were the hired guns ("interchangeable hood ornaments on an engine of misinformation") of companies fearing an accelerated move to wean the world from fossil fuels. Unearthing a dense layer of internal memos, quotes and budget numbers, author Ross Gelbspan offered readers a brief but illuminating archeology of these powerful businesses' attempt to control the American public's perception of climate change.

Gelbspan still kept digging, and his collections to date are now on display in a book by the same name. Its purpose, as stated in the introduction, is "not only to bring home the imminence of climate change but also to examine the campaign of deception by big coal and big oil that is keeping the issue off the public agenda.... The reason that most Americans don't know what is happening to the climate is that the oil and coal industries have spent millions of dollars to persuade them that global warming isn't happening."

A big part of the problem, Gelbspan quickly points out, is the sheer financial muscle of these groups, which has enabled them to take pages from the tobacco industry campaign and add volumes. Pulling in a trillion dollars annually, the oil industry can afford a slick PR scheme to spread its message. The American Petroleum Institute spends for public relations alone nearly as much as the total budget of the top five U.S. environmental groups.

Another challenge is the complexity of the issue - climate change is occurring on a geological time scale and outside the range of previous human experience - and the need for writers to somehow convey its magnitude without paralyzing the reader to the point of inaction, when precisely the opposite is needed. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Gelbspan has covered global environmental issues extensively for a quarter-century. His background and muckraking style serve him well here, as he sprinkles unusual climatic events and new scientific discoveries in between the political blow-by-blows...