Editorial: Stacking the warming deck

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007 | 7 a.m.

C onfused about global warming? Not sure if early springs, disappearing glaciers, melting polar ice sheets, more wildfires, extended droughts and record and near-record average high temperatures for the country and world are natural or caused by human activity?

Uncertain, even though there is consensus among most of the world's leading scientific organizations that global warming is real, that it is caused by burning fossil fuels and that the consequences are being felt now and rapidly getting worse?

Those who remain unsure are likely being influenced by the fact that global warming is still being debated, much as the debate over the health risks of cigarettes raged for 40 years despite overwhelming evidence that tobacco ravages the body's vital organs.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental group headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., lays the blame for at least some of the ongoing uncertainty squarely on the shoulders of the world's largest publicly traded company - ExxonMobil.

In a 57-page report released this week, the scientific group documents that the oil company has "funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science."

Many of the organizations have overlapping staffs, board members and scientific advisers, according to the report, leaving the public with the impression that agreement on the certainty of global warming is far from universal. Funding by ExxonMobil allows these affiliated organizations to "publish and republish the works of a small group of climate-change contrarians," the report states.

ExxonMobil has a lot at stake. A shift toward cleaner forms of energy could affect its revenue, which reached $339 billion in 2005.

In our view, ExxonMobil is being shortsighted. It should stop its deception and adapt to the reality that a new energy age will dawn not too far into the future. It should learn from what has happened to the American car companies. By failing to adapt to the demand for more energy-efficient vehicles, they lost their supremacy and are now losing billions.

ExxonMobil will avoid that fate only if it stops denying global warming, and begins developing new fuels that will curtail it.