Ross Gelbspan, who exposed the roots of climate change deniers, dies at 84

Ross Gelbspan, an investigative journalist whose reporting on climate change exposed a campaign of disinformation by oil and gas lobbyists to sow doubt about global warming — a denial embraced by Republican officials and, in some cases, by gullible news media – died on January 27 at his home in Boston. He was 84.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his wife, Anne Gelbspan.

Mr. Gelbspan's career has included reporting on dissidents in the Soviet Union and on the FBI's harassment of domestic critics, and his interest in the climate crisis, like those other topics, grew out of a sense of outrage that powerful interests suppressed the information necessary for democracy.

“I didn't go into the climate issue because I love the trees – I tolerate the trees,” he says said last year on YouTube. “I became interested in this issue because I heard that the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists under the table to say that nothing was happening to the climate.”

In a 1995 cover story for Harper's Magazine headlined “The Heat Is On,” which he expanded into a 1997 book of the same title, Mr. Gelbspan shines a light on a group of scientists who had paid coal and oil groups to tell lawmakers and oil companies that global warming is not a serious threat. He cited a 1991 memo from the fossil fuel lobby calling for a strategy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” At a press conference, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said he was reading it.

“In 'The Heat Is On,' Ross was the first to seriously debunk the oil and coal companies' campaign to promote and finance a pseudoscientific narrative of denial,” Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American magazine Prospect, which Mr. Gelbspan contributed to, said in an email. “He combined a deep concern for our common future with the passion and skill of a dogged investigative journalist.”

Mr. Gelbspan wrote in Harper's that one of the prominent climate skeptics, Richard S. Lindzen of MIT, speaking on behalf of a coal lobby group, testified at a government hearing in 1994 that doubling carbon emissions over the next century would stop temperatures from rising than a negligible 0.3 degrees Celsius. Since that testimony, the planet has already warmed 0.86 degrees Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a second book, “Boiling Point” (2004), Mr. Gelbspan was tough on his own profession, accusing reporters of laziness in falling for the fossil fuel industry's “manufactured denial.”

Many journalists, he said, were undermined by their ethics of impartiality, which added a false balance to stories that reflexively included climate skeptics.

“For years the press gave equal weight to the 'skeptics' as to mainstream scientists,” he wrote. “The issue of balance is irrelevant when the focus of a story is factual. In this case, what is known about the climate comes from the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.”

Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, wrote in his review of “Boiling Point” in The New York Times: “Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media's reporting of global warming for the past twenty years.”

But Mr. Gelbspan's main targets remained companies like Exxon Mobil, which funded climate science denial, and officials who supported the industry, mostly Republicans, such as President George W. Bush, who ran for the White House and promised to Limit CO2 emissions from power. factories, before resigning months into his term under industry pressure. That same month, his government withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement among industrialized countries to reduce global warming.

(The Wall Street Journal announced this last year that newly discovered documents showed that Exxon tried to confuse scientific findings that could harm its business, even after the company publicly said it would stop funding think tanks and scientists who minimized climate threats.)

“It is an excruciating experience,” Mr. Gelbspan wrote, “to watch the planet disintegrate piece by piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial.”

Mr. Gelbspan, a journalist and editor for 31 years before leaving daily journalism to concentrate on books, worked for The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and The Boston Globe.

In 1971, he spent three weeks in the Soviet Union for a four-part series that appeared on The Voice. “It was a very sobering journey,” he later recalled, in which he describes how he interviewed political dissidents in bugged apartments, how he memorized his notes before destroying them so they wouldn't be confiscated, and how he was interrogated by the KGB for six hours before being allowed to leave Moscow. The experience was an awakening “to the cruel reality of living in a totalitarian state,” he said.

Mr. Gelbspan joined the Globe in 1979. As a special projects editor, he oversaw a series on employment discrimination against African Americans in the Boston area that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for specialized local investigative reporting. Although Pulitzers are awarded to reporters and newspapers, The Globe named Mr. Gelbspan a “co-recipient” of the award for creating and editing the series.

In 1991, he published another book, “Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI,” an investigation into what he called covert federal harassment of critics of the Reagan administration's policies in Central America.

Ross Gelbspan was born in Chicago on June 1, 1939, the son of Eugene Gelbspan, who ran a kitchen supply company, and Ruth (Ross) Gelbspan. He received a BA in political philosophy from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1960.

While covering the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, he met Anne Charlotte Broström, born in Sweden. They married the following year. She worked for 25 years as a nonprofit developer of low-cost housing for homeless families in Massachusetts.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Thea and Johanna Gelbspan, and a sister, Jill Gelbspan.

Early in his reporting on global warming, Mr. Gelbspan read the work of some climate skeptics and for a time became convinced that there was no crisis. He then met James J. McCarthy, a Harvard professor of oceanography and a leading climate expert who co-chaired the UN panel on climate change. He convinced Mr. Gelbspan that the skeptics were wrong.

“When I asked McCarthy whether climate change was a really serious threat,” Mr. Gelbspan recalled on YouTube last year, “he said as slowly and clearly as possible: 'If this unstable climate we're starting to see started 100 years ago, , the planet would never be able to support its current population.'”

Looking back at his reporting On the environment, Mr. Gelbspan added that he had felt “both the sense of wonder of a young man and the despair of an old man.”

“I was a reporter,” he continued, “and despite my sadness at our collective human failings, my only response was to look reality in the eye and write it down.”