Exx-Cons by the Editors Post date 05.25.06 | Issue date 06.12.06 Al Gore seems to have touched a nerve. An Inconvenient Truth, his new documentary about global warming--a simultaneously frightening and inspiring film--hadn't yet arrived in theaters last week when a guerrilla movement to discredit the movie had already begun. A network of oil-funded think tankers and conservative media outlets have joined arms to launch the most massive offensive against a PowerPoint presentation ever recorded by man. But there is one salutary effect of this new campaign. The Swift-Boating of An Inconvenient Truth has brought into public view yet another shining star in the right's anti-science constellation. While the fundamentalist theo-conservatives sowed doubts about evolution during the debate over "intelligent design," the Exxon conservatives are storming into battle against global warming. The Exx-con campaign is one for the textbooks, a laboratory-perfect case study of modern conservative media. First, there is the bizarre and aggressively anti-intellectual Drudge Report item, in this case an "**Exclusive**" about Southern California teenagers being frog-marched by their science teacher to view the perfidious Gore film. We imagine the poor Beverly Hills High students were strapped into their seats wearing eyelid clamps, as in the brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange. The science teacher, Drudge reported, "has annoyed some students with her instance [sic] that 'global warming' is a proven science." (Note to Drudge: Even the Exx-cons concede they have lost the war against thermometer-reading. Everyone agrees the planet is warming.) Next, there is the ad campaign. The two 60-second spots created by the oil industry-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)--over $1.5 million in donations from ExxonMobil alone since 1998--will be remembered for breaking the barrier between advertising parodies and actual ads. In "Energy," a young girl dreamily exhales carbon dioxide while evergreen trees soak in the life-sustaining compound. Our right to freely exchange this compound, CEI suggests, is now under attack. The ad makes the War on Christmas look like a mild skirmish compared with the impending confrontation over CO2. "Carbon dioxide," an announcer intones. "They call it pollution. We call it life." CEI's second ad takes a stab at refuting the science behind global warming--specifically, studies documenting melting polar ice sheets. "The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner," the ad cheerily declares, while an image of a study from Science flashes across the screen. Just one problem with the claim: It's completely misleading. The study's author, Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, was so horrified that he released a statement. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said. "They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims." Global warming is melting sea ice and the coastal areas of Antarctica at an alarming rate, which in turn has increased precipitation, thus thickening the ice in the interior. In other words, the melting coasts are making it snow more in the middle. But this is a bug, not a feature. Overall, the ice sheet is losing mass, not gaining it. As Davis said in response to the CEI ads, "The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming." The CEI ads really are a new low. Washington think tanks are not always paragons of intellectual integrity, but we can't quite remember the last time that an institution ostensibly devoted to research so transparently whored itself to corporate backers--in this case, the oil industry. But CEI is just the tip of the, er, iceberg. Like clockwork, a National Review cover story debunking glacier melt arrived this week. It relies on research from three scientists connected to the energy industry. Meanwhile, on "The Journal Editorial Report," a TV show featuring the folks from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, Rob Pollock claimed, "Everyone agrees there has been some warming over the past century, but most of it happened before 1940." (Not true. The last three decades have seen the sharpest rise.) On Fox, a global warming documentary Sunday night featured the entire cast of Exx-con luminaries, including Patrick Michaels, John Christy, Roy Spencer, and Senator James Inhofe, whose contribution included the claim that global warming is "a total hoax." Finally, the rollout of the new anti-Gore campaign was capped by another ridiculous Drudge item. Gore and his entourage, Drudge breathlessly reported, took five vehicles to move 500 yards at Cannes. The only problem was the story wasn't true. (They walked.) How inconvenient. the Editors
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