Updated: June 15, 2009

There is a line between public relations and propaganda - or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth - to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival.

And it is infuriating - as a public relations professional - to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.

That's what is happening today, and I think it's a disgrace. On one hand, you have the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – as well as the science academies of every developed nation in the world – confirming that:

• climate change is real;
• it is caused by human activity; and
• it is threatening the planet in ways we can only begin to imagine.

On the other hand, you have an ongoing public debate - not about how to respond, but about whether we should bother, about whether climate change is even a scientific certainty. While those who stand in denial of climate change have failed in the last 15 years to produce a single, peer-reviewed scientific journal article that challenges the theory and evidence of human-induced climate change, mainstream media was, until very recently, covering the story (in more than half the cases, according to the academic researchers Boykoff and Boykoff) by quoting one scientist talking about the risks and one purported expert saying that climate change was not happening – or might actually be a good thing.

During a radio interview in her home state of Minnesota over the weekend, Republican Representative Michele Bachmann [R-MN] called on all global warming deniers to report for duty “armed and dangerous,” ready to “fight back hard” in a “revolution” against President Obama’s cap and trade plan, warning that it “has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

BACHMANN: And really now in Washington, I’m a foreign correspondent on enemy lines. And I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington. […]

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

Bachman, displaying her membership card from The Flat Earth Society, claimed that humans aren’t responsible for global warming:

BACHMANN: And actually, we want this debate because the science is on our side on this one. And the science indicates that human activity is not the cause of all this global warming. And that in fact, nature is the cause, with solar flares, etc.

Representative Bachman, who when it comes to global warming denial might as well be James Inhofe in a skirt, has declared her leadership role in the GOP’s anti-science movement – hoping to be their new Sarah Palin, perhaps?

Yesterday I wrote a piece outlining the apparently illogical pseudo-science being sold by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters as justification for doing nothing to solve the crisis of human-induced global warming. 

Shepard tries to make the claim that the discovery of the world's oldest tree by Dr. Leif Kullman, professor at Umeå University's department of ecology and environmental science in Sweden, somehow brought into question the entire theory of human-caused global warming. 

Presumably, Shepard did not attempt to contact Dr. Kullman before putting in front of his readership the misinformation that he did. I know this because I emailed Dr. Kullman last night to comment on Sheppard's piece and got this concise answer:

I find it quite strange how an old tree can be used in the climate change controversy." 

So will Newsbusters be willing to correct their mistake? Will Sheppard do the responsible thing and print a correction? 

It didn't take long for Noel Shepard at Newsbusters to twist a new study on the discovery of the oldest living tree to fit his notion that the world' top scientists have it all wrong when it comes to human-induced climate change.

The study, carried out by a team led by Leif Kullman, professor at Umeå University's department of ecology and environmental science in Sweden, has found the world's oldest tree living in the mountains of Sweden.

Somehow Sheppard has got it in his head that this finding:

[results] in a total rewrite of climate history while bringing into serious question global warming theories espoused by Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his sycophant devotees."