The year the team drafted the plan, ExxonMobil—then the world’s second largest emitter of carbon emissions, behind Chevron—began dumping money into a network of free-market groups—often, unambiguously, for work on climate change, according to an analysis of data provided by the Climate Investigations Center and the database ExxonSecrets, an initiative led by the environmental group Greenpeace. For some of these groups, ExxonMobil would become the single largest corporate donor. The company, for example, had been making small donations of $5,000 to $20,000 in the mid-1990s to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank, but in 1997 it gave the institute $95,000 earmarked for climate change work. In 2000, Exxon gave CEI $230,000 in non-climate-specific funds. (ExxonMobil’s corporate media office did not respond to requests for an interview, but CEI President Kent Lassman said in an email, “Alarmist policies to restructure American life pose a grave threat to human health and financial security.”)While people around this warming earth protest inaction, the United States, which is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, actively represses climate science throughout federal agencies and slashes environmental regulations to the glee of the network that bolsters these contrarian celebrities.
At 68, Christy is well established: He has taught and researched at the University of Alabama in Huntsville for 32 years. He is Alabama’s state climatologist, the interim dean of the university’s science college, and the director of a lab with some 60 researchers. The database he and Spencer created for their 1990 Science magazine paper spurred more research into satellite temperature monitoring, which found errors in his monitoring. (Christy told me he believes the errors found in his work have been minor.) I told him I’d emailed with Trenberth, who said he distanced himself from Christy around 2001, worried that every time a decision was called for in processing data, Christy was choosing values that gave little or no trend. Christy grimaced. “He doesn’t want to admit that my work stands on its own.” Christy, ethically in some ways, stands on his own, too. He’s not quoted as frequently or fervently in newspapers as the other eight holdouts. He refuses to take money from oil, mining, or automotive companies. Notably, he avoids the semi-annual international conferences led by the Heartland Institute, today the hub of doubt. “There is a sense that some of those in the skeptical camp are…” he said, pausing to search the beige walls of his office for the right words, “not scientifically grounded. Appearing in those venues, you get tainted.”“It’s not all that complicated. There is a political demand for climate skepticism out of the academic community,” and by signaling it, lesser-known researchers can gain visibility and get private grants.
This is a main point to anyone willing to listen: Climate change is a weapon. Thomas Rustici, the George Mason University economics professor, wants that to be clear. Rustici is not a scientist. He is an economist who has done research for the Charles Koch Foundation, a major funder of doubt. Koch family foundations poured more than $127 million into 92 organizations that attack climate science between 1997 and 2017, according to Greenpeace. Rustici, who has taught for nearly thirty years, has required students to read The Science of Success by Charles Koch; and he’s recommended they read books by climate change contrarians such as Fred Singer, Robert Balling, and Patrick Michaels, who have all taken money from the oil and gas industry. Rustici also advised Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. Repeated efforts to reach Rustici were unsuccessful, but hours of audio recordings made by a student in 2012 and shared with the advocacy group UnKoch My Campus open a window into his ideology.For the early part of his career, there was room in what Christy calls “the establishment” for work that questioned the severity or cause of climate change. “The first studies were welcomed and had a big impact,” recalls Kevin Trenberth. “At the time there was no political agenda attached.”
In February 2001, ExxonMobil faxed a memo to the Bush White House’s Center for Environmental Quality with a number of recommendations: Boot all Clinton-era scientists with “aggressive agendas” from “any decisional activities” on the IPCC and move scientists with a history of doubting the climate crisis into positions of authority, including Christy. In May 2001, the Bush administration ordered a reassessment of the nation’s position on climate change, but the findings were no boon for ExxonMobil: “Temperatures are, in fact, rising,” the report stated. The Bush administration ordered a broader reassessment the following year, in part to square Christy’s ongoing work with satellites with those from thermometers on land, which were recording warming. It found errors in Christy’s work and, when accounted for, his data showed warming. (Although Christy co-wrote the executive summary and three chapters, later that month, in a deposition, he struggled with the word “error.”)But ExxonMobil had already achieved a victory when the Bush administration announced in March of that year that it would not sign the U.S. on to the Kyoto Protocol, the binding international treaty to cut carbon emissions. The Guardian reported the administration balked in part due to pressure from the oil giant. And the network sparked by its largesse continued fighting for inaction throughout the Bush years.The Trump Administration, infamous for alternative facts, has vigorously renewed demand for an alternative science that was losing salience.