Remember The Global Climate Coalition? Here's How They Tried To Smear, Undermine The IPCC
A secretive fossil fuel lobby group undertook a decades-long campaign to undermine mainstream climate science while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to try and influence major scientific reports, a tranche of newly released documents shows.
The Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was a fossil-fuel backed lobby group active in the mid-90s and early 2000s. A collection of briefings, meeting minutes, notes, and correspondence from the group, released by the Climate Investigations Centre in collaboration with DeSmog and Climate Liability News, show how the GCC tried to manipulate the UN’s official scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The lobby group focused its efforts on trying to constrain the strength of the IPCC’s statements about human causes of climate change in the run up to the UN’s annual climate meeting in Kyoto in 1997, where world leaders agreed to the world’s first global climate change treaty. Officials from President George W. Bush’s administration would later credit the GCC for influencing his decision to abandon the landmark Kyoto treaty. Despite sophisticated coordination, connections to the highest political echelons, and huge resources, the GCC had limited success at influencing the UN’s main scientific body. The group was disbanded in 2002 after many members left, citing reputational risks around the groups’ peddling of climate science denial as the reason for their departure.
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The GCC also sought to smear specific scientists whose work was helping to establish the scientific basis for anthropogenic global warming linked to burning fossil fuels. In one well-documented case, the GCC targeted the work of Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1994, as a lead author of a chapter of the IPCC’s SAR, Santer and his colleagues wrote: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” It was one of the first instances of the scientific community explicitly linking climate change to human activity. And the GCC didn’t like it. It has been widely reported, including by Santer, that in 1996 the GCC circulated a briefing titled “The IPCC: Institutionalized ‘Scientific Cleansing’?”. That report claimed Santer had manipulated the IPCC’s peer-review process to make unsubstantiated claims.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/24/how-big-oil-tried-failed-capture-un-intergovernmental-panel-climate-change