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NoteThis American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. PrologueIra GlassFrom WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I want to tell you about two police investigations. One of them is done so inspiringly well, it's like the detectives in it are like detectives on a television show-- smart and resourceful and great judgment and just police at their very best. The other case-- the same crime, lots of the same facts-- is the opposite. It goes terribly.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY, PRI's The Takeaway: [voice-over] It was a big weekend in Chicago. Last spring, the president was in town, along with the leaders of NATO, to discuss threats to global security and nuclear proliferation. At a huge convention center, the eyes of the world were watching.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: The message here is that man-made global climate change is a myth, a hoax. This conference is an annual pilgrimage for the key skeptics. We came here to understand how they have made their views a mainstream fact of American politics.

MYRON EBELL, Competitive Enterprise Institute: If you add up all of the resources of our side of the debate and all of the resources of the other side of the debate, this is a David versus Goliath story.

MYRON EBELL: There are holdouts among the urban bicoastal elite, but I think we've won the debate with the American people in the heartland, the people who get their hands dirty, people who dig up stuff, grow stuff and make stuff for a living, people who have a closer relationship to tangible reality, to stuff.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] Myron Ebell chairs a group called the Cooler Heads Coalition, one of a team of skilled policy advocates driving a remarkable turnaround that has already changed the U.S. political landscape.

In the years prior to 2007, the 2008 elections, we actually heard from many folks that we should tone it down on global warming, we should not talk about the issue, because the court of public opinion had already decided and we were on the losing end. But we believe that if we present the case to the American people and it resonates, if they get it, then that's going to work its way up the political stepladder.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: And Fred Singer, the veteran scientist at these proceedings. He's a retired physicist once responsible for government weather satellites, who tells people the climate needs no help from worried humans.

FRED SINGER, Founder, Science and Env. Policy Project: Climate, to me, has become a non-issue. It's a phantom issue. There's nothing wrong with climate. It will change no matter what we do. It'll get colder. It'll get warmer. We just have to wait a little.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] Armed with that conviction, this team of skilled political messengers and contrarians has certainly changed the game. In just four years, the number of Americans who agree global warming is manmade has dropped to about half. It's a message that is inspiring a new generation of skeptics.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: This comprehensive report in 2007 took it to another level. Scientists from 30 nations concluded that global warming is unequivocal and that human activity is mostly the cause.

TIM PHILLIPS, Pres., Americans for Prosperity: I think it was his tone and manner. He did at a certain point come across as holier than thou. And that's another thing about Americans. They're not really big on holier than thou.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Myron Ebell was acting on a broad strategy he helped create more than a decade ago. In this 1998 action plan, "Victory will be achieved," it said, when the public "recognizes uncertainties in climate science."

MYRON EBELL: Yes. And we did it because we believed that the consensus was phony. We believed that the so-called global warming consensus was not based on science, but was a political consensus, which included a number of scientists.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] In 2009, agreement on global warming seemed part of the solid wave of enthusiasm that elected Barack Obama. With the changing of the guard in Washington, there was a bipartisan call to action, a sense of inevitability.

Sen. JOHN KERRY (D), Massachusetts: There was an uneasy consensus, but the people who have always objected to change had not yet really engaged. And because of the consensus, because there was a sense that there was going to be movement, that galvanized the action of the people who oppose it.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] The soft consensus for taking action ran into the bitter partisan divisions in Congress. Congressional hearings on cap-and-trade would become a stage where opposing views would get equal time.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Skeptics had found a seat at the table, but the scientific consensus still had the momentum. When cap-and-trade came up for a vote in the House in 2009, it passed with eight Republicans on board.

MYRON EBELL: The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed the House very narrowly, 219 to 212. The members of the Senate, who were going to take it up in July, went home for the 4th of July recess, and they got an earful from their constituents.

We got up a hot-air balloon, put a banner on the side of it that said, "Cap-and-trade means higher taxes, lost jobs, less freedom." And we went all over the country doing events and stirring up grass roots anger and frustration, concern.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Events like these fertilized the growing public doubt about climate change that was beginning to register with senators. With widespread anxiety over a shrinking economy, cap-and-trade was tabled in the Senate. The momentum towards action on global warming was vanishing.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: In a sense, what Dessler saying is that you can do this at home. On a complex chart, depending on the beginning points X and ending points Y, you can select a trendline that does indeed show temperature going down.

GAVIN SCHMIDT, Climate Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute: Oh, you could totally do that! In fact, you could take the entire climate history that we have in the instrumental record and you could find cooling trends every 10 years.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Against the backdrop of all the pressure from skeptic groups, Congress ordered a comprehensive review of climate change research by the National Academy of Sciences. The findings came back even stronger on human-caused climate change, and a subsequent study showed 97 percent of active climate scientists agreed.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: What's the bottom line, though, on human-caused global warming? I raise my hand in a high school science class and you're the teacher. Are humans causing the global warming we're seeing? What's your answer?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] The 14-year-old petition is not exactly an exclusive club. A bachelor of science degree is all it takes to get you on the list. This document, skeptics claim, counters the scientific consensus on global warming.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] It's a time-honored tactic by the skeptics, authentic-looking documents and reports that don't stand up to independent scrutiny. Singer also signed the Oregon petition, and this is not his first time going up against accepted science.

ANDREW DESSLER: Fred Singer is, I think, a professional contrarian. When I was in graduate school, I worked on stratospheric ozone depletion. And Fred would call me when I was in grad school and talk to me about how he didn't think humans were depleting ozone.

And before that, he had real questions about whether humans were causing acid rain. And he didn't think that nuclear winter was sound science. And he really criticized the work that connected secondhand smoke to health impacts. And now he doesn't think global warming is an issue.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: A few suspicious-seeming emails, taken out of context, would become "climate-gate." Even though nine subsequent investigations would find no tampering with data, the impact of these emails would live on.

KATHARINE HAYHOE, Climate Scientist, Texas Tech Univ.: Even the lady in the supermarket has heard of the "climate-gate" emails that purport to show that scientists have fabricated data or manipulated data and that the whole idea of global warming has been proven to be a hoax.

That is completely ridiculous. Continuing to use those emails as evidence that global warming is not real is inaccurate. By continuing to use those emails to slander the scientific reputation not only of those individual scientists, but of a field as a whole, is irresponsible.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Katharine Hayhoe personally felt the effects of "climate-gate." A climate scientist at Texas Tech in the panhandle, she's the lead author of a federal research report detailing the impact of global warming in the U.S.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: I think the perception is often that climate scientists are godless, tree-hugging liberals out to suck all the money out the average person and use it all to fund all of this research.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: My faith is integral to who I am. That's what defines me, not what I do on a day-to-day basis. And so when I study the planet, I feel as if I'm studying something that God created.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Every single professor, when invited to write a submitted chapter for an edited volume to be published by an academic press pro bono, would say, "Yes, that's part of our resume, that's part of what we're asked at the end of each year, did you write any edited book chapters." So it's part of our job to do that.

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