One of the major players in last decade's arguments over anthropogenic climate change and its policy implications was the Global Climate Coalition, which received funding from both individual companies and industry groups. Now, documents from that era have come to light thanks to the involvement of one of the GCC members, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, in a suit that has attempted to block California's efforts to regulate automotive greenhouse gas emissions. During discovery for the suit, a memo came to light in which the GCC's scientific advisors suggested that certain aspects of climate science simply weren't controversial; that memo was leaked to The New York Times, which has placed it online.

The documents include a few introductory memos, followed by a primer on climate science prepared by the GCC's in-house scientific advisory committee. The goal of the primer appears to be to bring everyone who would be speaking on the issue up to speed on the state of climate science; it apparently dates from late 1995, about the time when the IPCC published its second assessment of climate science. It appears to have been prepared by members of the industries represented by the GCC; the accompanying article in The Times indicates that the advisory committee was chaired by someone at Mobile, while two of the people listed as commenting on it appear to have worked for an oil company and an electric utility group.

Not surprisingly, the group wasn't entirely sold on the concept of anthropogenic climate change. At the time, given the state of scientific knowledge, the IPCC's analysis was far more tenuous than it is currently, and the GCC's advisors didn't even buy that. The primer quotes the IPCC as concluding "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate," but the GCC advisors suggest that this statement, "goes beyond what can be justified by current scientific knowledge."

The report reserves its most striking language for attempts to deny the eventual impact of continuing greenhouse gas emissions.

Part of the problem, in the view of the primer's authors, is that computerized climate models weren't yet sophisticated enough to separate anthropogenic causes from natural variability. At the time, they felt, scientists lacked sufficient raw data to build good models, and lacked the computing power to run them. Nevertheless, the authors recognized that "improvements in both are likely, and in the next decade it may be possible to make fairly accurate statements."

From there on out, however, things don't exactly toe the GCC's party line. There are two striking things about the remainder of the primer: one is how little the arguments have changed in the past decade and a half, and the second is how badly off the GCC's message is compared to that advocated by its own scientific advisors.

The primer dismisses a wide series of arguments that are still widely in use today. "The scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gasses such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," it concludes, noting elsewhere that the basics of this, "can be demonstrated in a laboratory." Although there are some uncertainties about individual temperature records, the authors conclude that global average temperatures have risen over the last century. They also leave no room for doubt regarding the trajectory of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or its cause: "human activities have raised the concentrations of CO 2 by more than 25 percent."

Several pages of the primer are also spent on what it calls "contrarian" theories, such as solar variability and ideas promoted by Richard Lindzen. Although these are considered interesting, the GCC's advisors conclude that none of them are actually consistent with the available data, and "they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of grenehouse gas emission-induced climate change." Apparently, this section was deleted from the final memo, although nobody that The Times could find was willing to identify who did so or why.

The report reserves its most striking language for attempts to deny the eventual impact of continuing greenhouse gas emissions. "The potential for a human impact on climate is based on well-established scientific fact," the primer reads, "and should not be denied." Elsewhere it states, "neither solar variability nor anomalies in the temperature record offer a mechanism for offsetting the much larger rise in temperature which might occur if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse sases were to double or quadurple."

The fact that the GCC was out of touch with the science became ever more obvious as time went on; by 2000, many of its most significant industry backers had abandoned ship; shortly afterwards, the group shut down, leaving its site preserved in the web archive.

It's tempting to make comparisons to the cigarette lobby—indeed, the comparisons are made in The Times, but the issue is probably more subtle than that. The GCC's advisors were pointing out that some areas of climate science were actually quite certain, while others remained open to scientifically valid skepticism; the GCC ignored its science advisors only in that it treated everything as equally uncertain.