The fossil fuel industry is doing its best to cast doubt on the fact -- supported by the consensus of 2,500 leading climate scientists from 100 countries -- that unstable climate is due to emissions from the burning of coal and oil. Each year, six billion tons of heat-trapping carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.

The Mobil Oil magazine ads contradict a basic tenet of climate science. "Any effect from human-made greenhouse gases," it asserts, "will develop slowly over decades." This statement flies in the face of the accepted scientific knowledge that climate change happens in abrupt, non-linear shifts and frequently involves surprise changes in many natural systems.

The reason for the industry's campaign is quite simple. The world's leading scientists are nearly unanimous in their opinion that restoring our planet's atmosphere requires a 60% to 70% cut in coal and oil burning. Since 1991, the industry has spent millions of dollars, according the Internal Revenue Service, to persuade the public and policy makers that there is too much uncertainty about global warming to warrant radical changes.

In 1991, Western Fuels, a $400-million coal consortium, declared in its annual report that it was launching a direct attack on mainstream science and enlisting several scientists who are skeptical about climate change: Dr. Robert Balling of Arizona State University, Dr. Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia and Dr. S. Fred Singer.

Six years ago, a half-million-dollar public relations campaign (the ICE Program) called for local press, radio and TV appearances by Drs. Balling, Michaels and Singer to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." The document identifies the campaign's target as "older, less-educated men, and young, low-income women" in districts which receive their electricity from coal and, preferably, have a representative on the House Energy Committee."

After the media exposed the ICE campaign, Western Fuels spent $250,000 on a propaganda video that seeks to convince viewers that enhanced carbon dioxide will benefit humanity by increasing crop yields to help feed an expanding population. But the video overlooks bugs. One of the most sensitive of all natural systems to temperature change is insects; even a slight warming will trigger an explosion of crop-destroying, disease-spreading insects. Plant biologists point out an even bigger omission. While enhanced carbon dioxide may increase yields in northern latitudes, it will decimate food crop growth in the tropical latitudes where the majority of the world's hunger is concentrated. It will cause a substantial decline in rice yields in Southeast Asia -- and a dropoff of 20 percent of the wheat crop in India where a third of population -- more than 300 million people -- live in extreme poverty.

After producing the video, the coal industry began to underwrite the publication of a climate journal published by Dr. Michaels, World Climate Review. This is not a scientific journal. It is funded by the coal industry and its articles are not subject to scientific peer review.

The use of this tiny group of dissenting "skeptics" became clear when they were compelled to disclose under oath in a St. Paul, Minnesota administrative hearing two years ago how much funding they had received from industry sources -- funding they had never before publicly acknowledged.

Dr. Balling received $300,000 from coal and oil interests between 1990 and 1995. The money came from the British Coal Corp., the German Coal Mining Association, Colorado-based Cyprus Minerals and OPEC.

They used a report prepared by the private weather forecasting firm AccuWeather. A press release quoted an AccuWeather executive as saying: "Scientific evidence squarely disputes the hypothesis that hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent, that tornadoes have increased in number, and that droughts and floods are becoming more common. In fact, the data show that temperature and precipitation extremes are no more common now than they were 50 to 100 years ago."

The report was a laughing stock among mainstream scientists. The report used a very simplistic methodology to temperature readings from three towns in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Iowa. By contrast, the NCDC analyzed all the U.S. weather data compiled since the beginning of weather instrumentation. The data was enough to fill 500,000 1995 personal computers. The GCC report also flies in the face of insurance industry figures which show that the $2 billion a year in weather-related disaster claims in the 1980's has increased sixfold to $12 billion a year in the first half of the 1990s.

Dr. Singer misquoted Dr. Bert Bolin, the esteemed retiring chairman of the IPCC, as well as a distinguished Swedish meteorologist, saying that Bolin said: "man-made increases in temperature are so small as to be barely detectable." Dr. Bolin, however, refutes Singer's version and instead expressed support for statements linking recent extreme weather events to rising global temperatures, and said Vice-President Al Gore was "scientifcally accurate" when he said that this year's Midwestern floods "are consistent" with the predicted effects of climate change.

In 1996, weeks before the international climate change treaty conference in Japan, executives of such industry giants as British Petroleum, General Motors and Shell did an about face, acknowledging the destructive potential of climate change. Some have gone as far as to suggest carbon taxes to reduce energy use.

The fossil fuel lobby spent another $13 million on T.V. and newspaper ads opposing any U.S. acceptance of any restrictions on burning of coal and oil that are not also applied to India, China, Brazil and other developing countries. That condition contradicts provisions of an earlier treaty signed by President George Bush which exempt developing nations from the first phase of any mandated emission cuts on the grounds that it is the industrialized countries who are responsible for the overwhelming proportion of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.