The Greening Earth Society, now defunct, was a

public relations Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. P ...

organization which denied the effects of climate change and the impacts of increased levels of

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide (chemical formula ) is a chemical compound made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in the gas state at room temperature. In the air, carbon dioxide is transpar ...

. The Society published the

World Climate Report World Climate Report, a newsletter edited by Patrick Michaels, was produced by the Greening Earth Society, a non-profit organization created by the Western Fuels Association. Early editions were paper based; it was then transferred to a web-only ...

, a newsletter edited by

Patrick Michaels Patrick J. Michaels (February 15, 1950 – July 15, 2022) was an American agricultural climatologist. Michaels was a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute until 2019. Until 2007, he was research professor of environmental ...

of the

Cato Institute The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries.Koch Indust ...

. It was a non-profit organization created by the

Western Fuels Association The Western Fuels Association is a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities based in Westminster, Colorado. Western Fuels Association supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities in th ...

, with which it shared an office and many staff members. It has been called a "front group created by the

coal industry Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when de ...

" and an "industry front". Fred Palmer, a Society staffer, is a registered

lobbyist In politics, lobbying, persuasion or interest representation is the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying, which ...

for

Peabody Energy Peabody Energy is a coal mining and energy company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Its primary business consists of the mining, sale, and distribution of coal, which is purchased for use in electricity generation and steelmaking. Peabody ...

, a coal company. Although the Greening Earth Society generally rejected the science of climate change, it acknowledged some degree of

global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

as real: "Fact #1. The rate of global warming during the past several decades has been about 0.18°C per decade".Greening Earth Society
/ref> Note that the actual increase in the

global surface temperature In earth science, global surface temperature (GST; sometimes referred to as global mean surface temperature, GMST, or global average surface temperature) is calculated by averaging the temperature at the surface of the sea and air temperature ...

during the 100 years ending in 2005 was 0.74 ± 0.18 °C.

References

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.greeningearthsociety.org Climate change denial Defunct climate change organizations Organizations of environmentalism skeptics and critics Political organizations based in the United States Year of establishment missing {{org-stub