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Industry Muffled Own Scientists on Warming
Coal, oil, companies suppressed experts' findings for years
By Jason Farago
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Posted Apr 24, 09 7:27 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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A coalition of industries linked to fossil fuels lobbied for more than a decade to cast doubt on global warming—while the companies' own scientists advised them that climate change was irrefutable, the New York Times reports. The Global Climate Coalition, financed by the oil, coal, and auto industries, conducted a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to challenge the environmental consensus, despite an internal report as early as 1995 that the impact of carbon emissions "is well established and cannot be denied."
Documents filed in a federal lawsuit and sent to the Times detail how the now-disbanded coalition threw out its experts' findings and sowed doubt on the reality of climate change at the moment the world was negotiating the Kyoto Protocol. One scientist at the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the coalition was "engaging in a full-court press" at the time, and said he was "amazed and astonished" that it suppressed the information.