‘Truth Squad’ to target climate-change journalists at COP15

By: Mike Shanahan on October 8th, 2009

A US Senator is proposing to set up a ‘Truth Squad’ of climate-change deniers in an effort to derail global efforts to tackle climate change during the key COP15 summit in Copenhagen in December.

So says Kevin Grandia, a communications expert who manages DeSmogBlog, a website that exposes misinformation about climate change. He made his comments in an interview at the UN climate change negotiations underway in Bangkok. Click the image at the end of this article to watch the interview.

Grandia says Republican Senator James Inhofe will be hoping to reduce public pressure for political action on climate change by confusing journalists at COP15 with misinformation about the scientific consensus that climate change is real and happening now.

When asked about this claim, Inhofe’s former director of communications Marc Morano said Inhofe is “going to join in with dissenting scientists and create havoc.”

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced the most authoritative scientific assessment of climate change to date.

It said climate change was real and could create “abrupt and irreversible” impacts in addition to those that are already being observed. It concluded that human activities were 90% likely to be the cause of the recorded increase in the global average temperature.

The IPCC report was authored by more than 2,000 scientists and endorsed by almost every government in the world – including that of the United States.

Grandia says journalists who are new to climate change are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by the public relations experts in Inhofe’s “truth squads”, which he says will be actively seeking out journalists in the media room at the Copenhagen summit.

Inhofe has been an active denier of the science of climate change for many years, and he is not alone.

DeSmogBlog’s cofounder James Hoggan recently published Climate Cover-Up – The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, a book that exposes the way US industry groups that profit from polluting activities have funded major disinformation campaigns. It describes how journalists have in some cases been manipulated and in other cases have colluded willfully with the deniers.

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