Over the last few years, a number of websites, supposedly run by groups of "concerned citizens" have sprung up criticizing climate change science, and lobbying against environmental policy. Fair enough, people are entitled to their views... but a lot of these outfits aren't what they seem at all. In an environment in which many people talk of some kind of giant conspiracy to over-hype climate change for some vaguely defined reason, a very clear and well-documented conspiracy is taking place, completely legally, before our eyes. Companies like Exxon-Mobil are pumping millions into fake groups and websites to spread disinformation about science to the public. Here, I'm going to give a quick introduction to some of these bogus outfits, and the rise of insidious PR techniques like paid commenting.

Type the phrase "Junk Science" into google, and the first result points to Steven Milloy's website, junkscience.com. The site claims to debunk Junk Science, which it claims is "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". That seems fair enough, until you start to look at some of the content - the site at present is dominated by a constant stream of heavily-biased global warming denialism. When you go back through the articles far enough, you start coming across "evidence" denying the health risks of second-hand smoke. But Steven Milloy isn't some crackpot conspiracy theorist, he's a paid lobbyist. You won't see any indication of it on junkscience.com, but this "opinion" is paid for, by such wonderful clients as tobacco firm Phillip Morris and Exxon-Mobil.

Junkscience links prominently to a number of other sites through its search engine: FriendsOfScience.org; GlobalWarming.org; ScienceAndPublicPolicy.org; and CO2Science.org. All these sites take a similar view to Steven Milloy, focusing almost exclusively on climate change denial, and all of them appear to be independent non-profit groups. It turns out that Friends of Science was funded by oil companies, to the considerable embarrassment of the University of Calgary. GlobalWarming.org is the website of the Cooler Heads Coalition, which consists of a dizzying array of climate lobbying interests. CO2Science.org - home of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change - is rather shy about its funding, which is unsurprising given that it includes at least $90,000 from ExxonMobil. ScienceAndPublicPolicy.org is run by Robert Ferguson, and according to Greenpeace was set up with a $200,000 "donation" from ExxonMobil.

I could go on, but a picture is worth a thousand words. To give you an idea of the scale of what's going on, Greenpeace have made an attempt to map the network of lobbyists funded by Exxon-Mobil alone. Here's one sub-map showing just the major recipients of oil company cash in the climate change denial community.

Again, these are just the biggest recipients of climate-change denial cash from one company. We're not talking about a couple of sites, but an entire network across the internet, spewing disinformation to the masses.

It's not just limited to these static pages - increasingly, people are beginning to point to the use of paid bloggers, and even paid commenters, posing as random members of the public, feeding a stream of corporate information to the public. Erick Erickson, author of the popular hard-right Conservative blog redstate.com was surprised when a new regular commenter showed up praising John McCain's softer brand of Conservatism, McCain being a deeply unpopular figure among the blog's readers. Curious, he investigated further, and discovered that the poster "was a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain's political action committee".

Staggeringly, the McCain campaign actually has a "consultant for blogger outreach", Patrick Hynes (who also runs his own blog called Ankle Biting Pundits). It's not just McCain - any self-respecting presidential wannabe needs a good internet strategy, as Ron Paul so ably demonstrated. To serve businesses and interests looking to get a boost in the blogosphere, companies like New Media Strategies (NMS) have sprung up, a firm that claims in an orgy of unnecessary capitalization to have "pioneered the Online Intelligence, Brand Promotion and Brand Protection Industry". On it's website, NMS states "Tens of millions of blogs, message boards and websites can not only reflect public opinion, they also affect public opinion. Don’t wait for your target audience to come to you; NMS delivers your message directly to your customers where they live online." In other words, they can be employed to carefully spam an entire online community with disinformation on behalf of a hidden source.

I've barely scratched the surface in this post, but I hope I've shown you enough to make it very clear that there is a massive, coordinated disinformation campaign attempting to shift public opinion, not just on climate change but on a number of other political and scientific issues. We bloggers are going to have to come together in the very near future, and figure out how to work together to maintain the integrity of our sites. Faced with a coordinated assault, there is a need to develop tools to rapidly spot and deal with this disinformation as and when it arises, and that's something that we can only do as a community.

In the midst of all this confusion, how do you know who to trust? For this, I should mention the website SourceWatch, a community wiki that has meticulously gathered information on many tens of thousands of media sources. You shouldn't take anything on the web at face value, but SourceWatch provide thorough links to primary sources, and the site is probably the single best weapon that you, the reader, has when trying to uncover the truth about the sources you use. That, and remembering to always keep the critical side of your brain ticking over.