Thanks to a recent poll from ABC News and the Washington Post, we know that nearly two-thirds of American adults think global warming is “a serious problem facing the country.”

And now, thanks to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change (full study available at this link), we know exactly how many people are out there taking money from dirty energy interests to try and confuse Americans about climate changeto derail overdue action and protect the fossil fuel industries' profits.

Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the author of the report, studied both the institutional and social network structure of the climate denier movement and found that there are some 4,556 individuals with ties to 164 organizations that are involved in pushing anti-climate science views on the public.

“The individuals in this bipartite network include interlocking board members, as well as many more informal and overlapping social, political, economic and scientific ties,” Farrell wrote in the report. “The organizations include a complex network of think tanks, foundations, public relations firms, trade associations, and ad hoc groups.”

Farrell notes that while funding from ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundations have notoriously played a part in building the climate denial movement, there was very little empirical evidence demonstrating exactly how much influence these corporate benefactors had on the actual output of climate deniers and, in turn, how much they affected what politicians and other decisionmakers were saying about climate change.

So Farrell studied all of the written and verbal texts relating to climate change produced between 1993 and 2013 by climate denial organizations (40,785 documents comprising nearly 40 million words), as well as any mention of global warming and climate science by three major news channels (14,943 documents), every US president (1,930 documents) and the US Congress (7,786 documents).

He focused on Exxon and the Koch Brothers’ family foundations because, he writes, they are “reliable indicators of a much larger effort of corporate lobbying in the climate change counter-movement."

What Farrell found was that organizations taking funds from “elite” corporate funders of climate denial like Exxon and the Koch Brothers — groups like the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute — “have greater influence over flows of resources, communication, and the production of contrarian information” than other denial groups.

After performing a sophisticated semantic analysis, Farrell was able to show that climate denial organizations with ties to those two major funders were more successful at getting their viewpoint echoed in national news media. Presidential speeches and debate on the floor of Congress showed less of an impact.

According to Bloomberg, Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted similar research but was not involved in the Nature Climate Change study, said that Farrell’s findings beg a very obvious question:

"Why is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?”  

That is very similar to the questions posed by DeSmog's executive director Brendan DeMelle in his coverage of Justin Farrell's other recent study on this issue: Research Confirms ExxonMobil, Koch-funded Climate Denial Echo Chamber Polluted Mainstream Media. DeMelle listed three questions for media outlets to ponder: 

Will this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation?

Will false balance — quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote — finally stop?

Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn’t published any longer?

Image credit: P.WOLMUTH/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/Redux

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A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) shows that the climate denial echo chamber organizations funded by ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate. 

The abstract and full text of the study can be found here: Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change.

The analysis of 20 years' worth of data by Yale University researcher Dr. Justin Farrell shows beyond a doubt that ExxonMobil and the Kochs are the key actors who funded the creation of climate disinformation think tanks and ensured the prolific spread of their doubt products throughout our mainstream media and public discourse.

“The contrarian efforts have been so effective for the fact that they have made it difficult for ordinary Americans to even know who to trust,” Dr. Farrell told the Washington Post which was first to cover the news of the study's release. “This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own,” Dr. Farrell said.

From PNAS’s press briefing note about the article by Dr. Farrell:

Corporate funding likely influences the nature and content of polarizing texts pertaining to climate change, according to a study. Political polarization has become a hallmark of climate change policy discussion, with multiple groups in various sectors contributing to public discourse regarding climate and energy. To quantify the influence of corporate funding in climate change discourse, Justin Farrell analyzed more than 39 million words of text produced by 164 organizations active in the climate change counter-movement between 1993 and 2013. The author examined the ideological content of the produced texts, as well as the funding behind the organizations that produced the texts.

Organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have produced polarizing texts, the author found, with ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundation acting as influential funders (emphasis added). Further, according to the author, corporate funding may have influenced the ideological content of produced texts. The results suggest quantitative evidence of the influence of funding in the climate change debate that had previously been hypothesized, and suggests an analytical model for integrating texts with the social networks that created them, according to the author.

This study confirms once again the central thesis of industry-funded attacks on climate science, which inspired the DeSmog book Climate Cover-up and countless articles about the deception campaign over the past decade.

Now let’s see how the mainstream media cover this story — that is what I’m most curious to see. (The Washington Post article was pretty straightforward, although it gave ExxonMobil an unchallenged last word, and Joby Warrick seemed to pose a bogus question to Dr. Farrell equating the fossil-funded disinformation campaign with pro-climate-action campaigns, but Dr. Farrell correctly rebutted such a comparison.)

Will this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation?

Will false balance — quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote — finally stop?

Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn’t published any longer?

It’s critically important today that the public hears the scientific facts about climate change without the confusion injected into the policy debate by well-funded think tanks and their highly paid PR operative counterparts.

Dr. Farrell’s research also provides further evidence of the public deception orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, and should prove valuable to investigators examining ExxonMobil as well as other current and future efforts to hold polluters accountable for their PR pollution.

Here is a video produced years ago, "Doubt" by The Climate Reality Project, which provides a nice overview of this issue:

Also highly suggested: track down access to Merchants of Doubt, the full-length documentary by Food Inc. director Robert Kenner that exposes the history of tobacco-to-climate denial and their common PR manipulators such as Marc Morano and Fred Singer.

It's far beyond the time to end the climate cover-up. And responsible media can lead the way.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.