Like the tobacco industry that for decades denied a link between smoking and lung cancer, ExxonMobil has waged a "sophisticated and successful disinformation campaign" to mislead the public about global warming, according to a major new report by the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)... [S]ince 1998...[ExxonMobil's] major rivals, notably Shell and BP, began dropping out of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an industry group that campaigned against the [Kyoto Protocol]... In a statement issued Wednesday, company spokesman David Gardner charged that UCS report was "yet another attempt to smear our name and... to connect unrelated facts, draw inaccurate conclusions and mislead the audience with a fiction about ExxonMobil's true position...our financial support [for certain public policy groups] does not connote any substantive control over or responsibility for the policy recommendations or analyses they produce."