Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan Richard Littlemore

Author:James Hoggan, Richard Littlemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL044000, NAT011000
ISBN: 9781926706771
Publisher: D&M Publishers Inc
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

[ eleven ]

SLAPP SCIENCE

Using courts and cash to

silence critics of climate confusion

A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SL APP) is a lawsuit intended to intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. Winning the lawsuit is not necessarily the intent of the person filing the SL APP. The plaintiff’s goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate.

WIKIPEDIA, APRIL 30, 2009

It’s a tricky business, accusing someone of filing a lawsuit merely to silence their critics. By saying so, you must necessarily suggest motive on the part of the plaintiff, which can be difficult or impossible to prove. So for the record, I have no direct evidence that the suits I am about to explore were SL APPs. In the first case, plaintiff Dr. S. Fred Singer prevailed, winning an apology from his target, Justin Lancaster. In the second case the plaintiff, Tim Ball, bailed without comment as soon as the target put up a fight. And in the third case, plaintiff Stuart Dimmock lost, but by cleverly spinning the result—and by recruiting the assistance of ideologically primed journalists—his supporters were able to turn defeat into a bizarre kind of victory.

The first suit keyed off the reputation of Roger Revelle, a giant of science whom you may remember from Chapter 2 as one of the early voices raising alarm about the potential danger of global warming. Revelle is also an icon of climate science, in part because Al Gore speaks of him so fondly. Revelle taught Gore at Harvard during the 1960s, explaining even then the complications that might evolve if humans continued to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without regard for the consequences. It’s clear from the recent activities of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former vice president that Revelle had the capacity to engage and inspire. Gore never forgot the lesson and has been one of the most influential advocates in the world for action on global warming.

But Revelle had also caught the attention of people who were less enthusiastic about acknowledging the threat of unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. One of those people was Dr. Siegfried Frederick Singer, who as early as 1990 was arguing for inaction. In fact, in an article written for the journal Environmental Science & Technology in 1990, Singer concluded that for economic reasons, we should be wary of overreacting to climate change: “Drastic, precipitous, and especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity without being effective . . . It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. ‘Look before you leap’ may still be good advice.”

That may have sounded like cautious wisdom in 1990. It most certainly sounded like the words of a man who was in no hurry to disrupt the status quo.

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