And they took a big sample of 10%, 928 articles.

And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and that it's a serious problem?

Out of the 928, zero.

The misconception that there's disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people.

One of their internal memos leaked.

And here's what it said, according to the press.

Their objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.

This has happened before.

After the Surgeon General's report.

One of their memos leaked 40 years ago. Here's what they said.

"Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public's mind."

But have they succeeded?

You'll remember that there were 928 peer-reviewed articles.

Zero percent disagreed with the consensus.

There was another study of all the articles in the popular press.

Over the last 14 years, they looked at a sample of 636.

More than half of them said,

"Well, we're not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem."

So no wonder people are confused.

Hey.

What did you find out?

Working for who?

Chief of Staff?

I'm gonna...

That's the White House environment office.

American Petroleum Institute. It's fair to say that's the oil and gas lobby.

Is that fair?

Totally fair.

Do a little bit more and see who his clients were.

So he was defending the Exxon Valdez thing.

Uh, very. Thank you.

Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it.

Why do you directly contradict yourself in the testimony you're giving about this scientific question?

The last paragraph in that section was not a paragraph which I wrote.

That was added to my testimony.

If they force you to change a scientific conclusion, it's a form of science fraud by them.

You know, in the Soviet Union, ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology...

I've seen scientists who were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income, simply because the facts they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on telling.

He worked for the American Petroleum Institute.

And in January of 2001, he was put by the president in charge of environmental policy.

He received a memo from the EPA that warned about global warming and he edited. He has no scientific training whatsoever.

But he took it upon himself to overrule the scientist.

I said, "I want to see what this guy's handwriting looks like."

This is the memo from the EPA. These are his actual pen strokes.

He says, "No, you can't say this. This is just speculation."

This was embarrassing to the White House, so this fellow resigned a few days later.

And the day after he resigned, he went to work for Exxon Mobil.

You know, more than 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this.

That it's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

The second misconception.

Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment?

This is a big one.

Lot of people say we do.

I was trying to convince the previous administration, the first Bush administration, to go to the Earth Summit.

And they organized a big White House conference to say, "Oh, we're on top of this."

And one of these view graphs caught my attention.

And I want to talk to you about it for a minute.

Now here is the choice that we have to make according to this group.

We have here a scales that balances two different things.

On one side, we have gold bars.

Don't they look good?

I'd just like to have some of those gold bars.

On the other side of the scales, the entire planet.

I think this is a false choice for two reasons.

Number one, if we don't have a planet...

The other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we're gonna create a lot of wealth - and we're gonna create a lot of jobs. - Yes.

Because doing the right thing moves us forward.

I've probably given this slide show 1,000 times.

I would say, at least 1,000 times.

Nashville to Knoxville to Aspen and Sundance.

Los Angeles and San Francisco. Portland, Minneapolis.

Boston, New Haven, London, Brussels, Stockholm, Helsinki, Vienna, Munich, Italy and Spain and China, South Korea, Japan.

Thank you.

I guess the thing I've spent more time on than anything else in this slide show is trying to identify all those things in people's minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this.