The latest global warming disinformation campaign is set to be launched by the coal industry, this time by throwing new money behind a an old propaganda campaign that had been discredited in the early 1990s. A leaked memo reveals that the coal industry, valued at $1 trillion annually, is paying climate change skeptic Pat Michaels $100,000 to help spearhead their campaign, which includes distribution of misleading information on global warming and a proposed film to counteract the enormous positive impact of An Inconvenient Truth.

False claims made in the industry sponsored memo include:

1) The primary cause of global warming is variations in orbit and solar output and plate techtonics, not carbon dioxide.

As recent data released from Antarctic core drilling reveals, there is an irrefutable correlation between C02 and global temerature increases over the past 400,000 years, with a overwhelming increase in C02 in just the last few decades:

Source: mongabay.com

2) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activity.

This claim was thoroughly refuted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their comprehensive review of 928 randomly selected peer refereed scientific articles on climate change. In that review not one article disagreed with the conclusion that the planet is warming and human generated C02 was to blame.

3) The memo also alleges an imbalance in global warming discussions and a need to stop the discussion from being "monopolized by extremists".

The public debate is actually been greatly skewed in favor of "skeptics" by the mass media. A 2004 study found that despite the IPCC findings above, 53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result of natural fluctuations. That is a proportion of content granted to skeptics that is wildly out of line with reality.

Action on global warming will begin when the facts about the risks about its true nature are discussed in earnest, rather than spun in circles by well funded industry mercenaries.