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Mother Jones magazine has a pretty incredible set of articles that clearly exposes the ExxonMobile "Global Warming Hoax" funding machine.

Entitled, As The World Burns, the tagline reads: "Think tanks and journalists funded by ExxonMobile are out to convince you that global warming is a hoax."

In one of the essays, Bill McKibben concludes with this:

IN SHORT, the deniers have done their job, and done it better than the environmentalists have done theirs. They've delayed action for 15 years now, and their power seems to grow with each year. How, even as the science grew ever firmer and the evidence mounted ever higher, did the climate deniers manage to muddy the issue? It's one of the mightiest political feats of our time, accomplished by a small group of clever and committed people. It's worthwhile trying to understand how they work, not least because some of the same tactics are now being used in debates over other issues, like Social Security. And because the fight over global warming won't end here. Try as they might, even with all three branches of government under their control, conservative Republicans can't repeal the laws of chemistry and physics.

In another essay, Chris Mooney writes:

Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In the IPCCís first assessment report, published in 1990, the science remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCCís second report, completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping the climate, humankindís distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with the release of the IPCCís third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. ìConsensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,î wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

And Ross Gelbspan gets to the heart of this campaign to make fuzzy the clear facts of global warming:

The carbon lobbyís tactics can sometimes be heavy-handed; one television editor told me that his network had been threatened with a withdrawal of oil and automotive advertising after it ran a report suggesting a connection between a massive flood and climate change. But the most effective campaigns have been more subtly coercive. In the early 1990s, when climate scientists began to suspect that our burning of coal and oil was changing the earthís climate, Western Fuels, then a $400 million coal cooperative, declared in its annual report that it was enlisting several scientists who were skeptical about climate changeóPatrick Michaels, Robert Balling, and S. Fred Singeróas spokesmen. The coal industry paid these and a handful of other skeptics some $1 million over a three-year period and sent them around the country to speak to the press and the public. According to internal strategy papers I obtained at the time, the purpose of the campaign was ìto reposition global warming as theory (not fact),î with an emphasis on targeting ìolder, less educated males,î and ìyounger, low-income womenî in districts that received their electricity from coal, and who preferably had a representative on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

This series of essays are a "must read" on this most important topic. As citizens, we must realize that the fossil fuels industry is intent on ensuring it's survival at the expense of future generations.

Don't let them!

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