Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study

w1z4rd writes "According to an article in the Guardian, scientists and economists have been offered large bribes by a lobbying group funded by ExxonMobil. The offers were extended by the American Enterprise Institute group, which apparently has numerous ties to the Bush administration. Couched in terms of an offer to write 'dissenting papers' against the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, several scientists contacted for the article refused the offers on conflict of interest grounds."

Comments

The Report

[eldavojohn]

I'm not sure if this has been posted or linked on Slashdot before but the IPCC Final Report[PDF Warning] is public as of today. The BBC has a summary:

• Probable temperature rise between 1.8C and 4C
• Possible temperature rise between 1.1C and 6.4C
• Sea level most likely to rise by 28-43cm
• Arctic summer sea ice disappears in second half of century
• Increase in heatwaves very likely
• Increase in tropical storm intensity likely

It's a 20 page report and I know we're all really busy but I think this is the first document one can read and really catch up on what's been decided recently in the scientific community.

I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet. What I have seen is criticism from right wing papers about this report either being "unsurprising" or "offering no hope, grim." On the other hand, leftist papers have been in a sort of "we're doomed" sort of mode. I haven't really seen anyone stepping up to the plate and telling the public that it's on our consciouses now. We are responsible--if you have the money, start paying more for green products or products from carbon neutral companies. Increase incentive for companies to be carbon neutral. Right now, as a consumer, I don't know how I would figure out if the car I bought comes from a more or less environmentally friendly company. Consumers need to start driving this change because it sure the hell isn't going to be our ignorant president.

from the you're-wrong-and-i-think-mr.-lincoln-knows-why dept.

Also, Zonk, I think you mean Mr. Chase knows why, Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill. Offering nominal fees for paper and pen to write reports is one thing but when the incentive is a large percentage of my yearly income, I think Exxon should be ousted as scientifically backwards assholes.

Re:The Report

[evil agent]

What I have seen is criticism from right wing papers about this report either being "unsurprising" or "offering no hope, grim." On the other hand, leftist papers have been in a sort of "we're doomed" sort of mode.

I haven't read the report but I've read two summaries:

From cnn:

And the report said no matter how much civilization slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and sea level rise will continue on for centuries.

From foxnews:

Scientists from 113 countries issued a landmark report Friday saying they have little doubt global warming is caused by man, and predicting that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will "continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution.

However, they both do go on to say that it would be irresponsible to just sit back and do nothing. Also, we have to adapt to a warmer earth.

Re:The Report

[SnapShot]

Actually, your comparison to an open source bounty is pretty apt: Exxon wants something built (fake science in regards to climate change) and is willing to pay a bounty to have it built.

The difference is that in one example the experts are building wi-fi drivers or utility softare. In the other example, the "experts" are building SFUD (smiley faces, uncertainty, and doubt).

Re:The Report

[SnapShot]

For fear that you were miss-informed rather than just stupid: the incident you are referring to was one weather person's blog referring to other weather people (meterologist not climatologist). I realize Republicans have a real problem with the difference between weather and climate.

I realize that in your and Rush L.'s mind there is perfect analogy between a random blogger and Exxon corporation (who made 180 million dollars a day last year); roughly like comparing a grocery store parking lot speed bump to the Himalayas.

Most of the rest of us are able to see the difference...

Re:The Report

[theodicey]

That $90 million figure is complete BS. It's the budget of the entire Sierra Club Foundation, which funds the Sierra Club's outreach and legal work. It does not fund any basic climate research.

That figure seems to be repeated by climate conspiracy theorist senator James Inhofe (R-OK) here.

Sorry, there's no substitute for political action. We're not going to stop the Iraq war by not buying gas, and we're not going to stop climate change by buying hybrids.

Re:The Report

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Except when the subject of climate change comes up. Then, it's all about consensus, and anyone who has a different theory, or who criticizes the current theories is a denier and a foe of science.

Making decisions is about consensus. Science establishes facts and provides support for theories.

Is it a bad thing to hear from those who don't agree with, or who think the study was not done correctly?

It is a bad thing when hearing from those people is disguised as science, but in fact does not follow the scientific method. The method is to take facts and existing scientific theories to formulate a testable hypothesis, test the hypothesis, then present the methodology and results of that testing along with analysis for peer review. That is science. It works, which is why it is important to us. Hearing opinions is not necessarily science. If a researcher looks at the existing theories and tries to find something wrong with them, or find some way to argue against them, but does not create a specific, testable hypothesis and then experiment, then they have not done any science. Trying to pass that off as science and calling that person a scientist is deceptive. A person is only a scientist when acting in that role. This company is offering to pay people to not act in that role, but publish papers anyway. That is deceptive.

Wouldn't this rather be a continuation of "interpreting the results of that testing...by peers?"

No. Unless they form a different hypothesis and test it, it is not science. The method relies upon testing to determine what is true. Looking at existing, known data (to the researcher) and trying to draw conclusions from it is not science and does not provide the same time tested method of correctly determining facts. I can find facts to support any belief. When I come up with a test for that belief, perform that test, and analyze the results openly with input from peers, I'm a scientist.

If you're still not understanding this, reply again and I'll provide you with an example of how all this works and why studies funded to look for problems are not credible or useful.

Re:The Report

[WhiplashII]

This could make many hot places like Arizona and Texas, which now have August days of 120F, nigh uninhabitable.

But that is exactly my point - no studies I know of say this! They say the average will go up 6C maximum - and that the poles will melt. Think about it, the poles are going to go up above freezing from an average temperature of -15C. So the poles, call it 25% of the planet are going up 15C at least, and yet the planet as a whole only goes up 6C. The places that are currently warm or hot stay warm or hot, but the cold places get warmer.

Think about it! This is not the first time this has happened. The artic once was a paradise - there was a much lower variation in temperature from the equator to the poles.

Where is the actual, detailed data that shows this? Is it not published in the mainstream media because it would not prove the desired point?

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this have anything to do with newsworthy material? This is just another left-biased newspaper attacking the right (take wiki-related info however you want).

Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the liberal to left-wing ends of the political spectrum. This is reflected in the paper's readership: a MORI Poll taken between April-June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters (cited in International Socialism Spring 2003, ISBN 1-898876-97-5); according to another MORI poll taken in 2004, 44% of Guardian readers vote Labour and 37% vote Liberal Democrat[1].

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars The Guardian attracted a significant proportion of anti-war readers as one of the mass-media media outlets most critical of UK and USA military initiatives.

In October 2004 The Guardian published a humour column by Charlie Brooker in its entertainment guide, which appeared to call for the assassination of US President George W. Bush.[19] This caused some controversy and the paper was forced to issue an apology and remove the article from its website.[20]

Despite its early support for the Zionist movement, in recent decades the Guardian has often been perceived as critical of Israel. In December 2003 journalist Julie Burchill left the paper for The Times, citing this as one of the reasons for her move.[14] In a recent controversy, the paper has been accused by Alan Dershowitz writing in the Jerusalem Post of bias and failure to print corrections of mis-statements of fact in their articles and editorials.[15] This allegation was denied by the Guardian's foreign editor, Harriet Sherwood, who says the paper aims to cover all viewpoints in the Israel-Palestine conflict.[16]

Next time, try reporting newsworthy sources instead of obviously biased ones.

Why is ExxonMobil different from other oil cos?

[jonwil]

Several European oil companies (most notably Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum) have gotten involved in other energy sources than just oil (hydrogen, solar, wind and others).

However, the US oil companies (such as ExxonMobil and Chevron) refuse to acknowledge that any energy sources other than oil even exist and are fighting tooth and nail all alternative energy sources and anything that would show that humans are killing the planet with fossil fuels.

Why aren't the US companies following the lead of the Europeans and trying to become world leaders in the new technologies before someone else (such as Shell or BP) beats them to it?

Is any of that funding contingent on results?

[benhocking]

The problem with most institutions like CEI is that when they fund the research, they typically add a clause that says that the results of the research cannot be published without their explicit authorization. (This happens in other fields, as well.) This is most likely not the case with either Branson or the Sierra Club. If it is, I'll gladly call shenanigans on them, as well.

Also, Senator Inhofe is not exactly the best source for such information. His position on the relative importance of the environment is well documented.

Re:How is that different

[ishark]

Accepting a grant from a company is not the same as accepting results from a company.

Re:Funding or Bribery?

[Socguy]

Someone posted the difference between legitimate and illegitimate scientific funding yesterday in the comments on Slashdot. Legitimate funding is when you pay someone to do research in a specific area (eg. climate change). Illegitimate funding is when you pay someone to research a specific conclusion (eg. climate change is right/wrong), because then you're assuming the conclusion.

Environmental groups

[wytcld]

Environmental groups fund research because their mission is to steward the environment, and they require accurate data to do that. The interest of ExxonMobil, however, isn't in acquiring accurate climate data. Their mission isn't impacted directly by climate change. Rather it is only impacted if they are politically required to modify their behavior to mitigate climate change.

The environmental groups would be perfectly happy to learn that climate change wasn't a problem, if the research showed that. Why? Because they have a number of other active priorities too. There are issues of species and habitat loss which have nothing to do with climate change - and which were sufficient to motivate donations to the environmental groups before there was any hint of climate change. There are also issues of various sorts of pollution which are unconnected to climate change. The environmental groups are overwhelmed with good causes, and if they can get themselves out from under a few of them, they will still have more than they can handle, and still have vast fund-raising appeal. They have no vested interest in global climate change being as serious an issue as science says it is; they are following the science, not leading it. But since they do need to follow the science, they fund it. ExxonMobil by contrast has a strong interest in discrediting the science. Consider:

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

This is deliberately-misleading propaganda. He's implying that there are two equal groups. There aren't: Within science, 99+% of credentialed professionals agree there's a major problem, thus the new international report. Yet the AEI, by commissioning statements of doubt, wants to achieve some sort of 50/50 compromise between doubt and belief. That's to say, they want to deny the near-certainty of 99+% of the scientists qualified to make judgments in the field, and return the issue in the popular mind to the "he said, she said" status that ExxonMobil has so successfully promulgated in the media, science-ignorant as the communications majors who do most of the reporting are.

Re:What is wrong in ExxonMobile?

[theodicey]

If you trust Steven Milloy's JunkScience.com, you've been duped.

Exxon has paid Milloy at least $100,000 (that we know of) to promote global warming denial. And probably several times that.

The topic of discussion is the corrupting effect of $10,000. How much more corruption do you think $1 million would buy?

Re:How is that different

[jazman_777]

First off, Mathematics is a science and honestly, I really don't see a difference ...

It's not a science. Science may use it heavily, but it's really Logic.

Right, so...

[benhocking]

So, if you ignore all research funded by environmental groups and all research funded by ExxonMobil and friends, what are you left with? Research that universally supports the idea that global warming is real and anthropogenic. So universal, that even Lindzen seems genuinely surprised that anyone would doubt that:

[Gregg Easterbrook] concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested.

The IPCC Report

[E 99]

It is important not to confuse this report with science. It is also important in general not to confuse the claims and opinions of scientists with science. This report contains claims and charactorizations. I suppose a lot of the data in this report probably comes from scientific studies, but as they are not cited (anywhere that I can find), they can't be confirmed or disconfirmed, or even put into context. The gist of the report are completely subjective charactorizations about various horrible things being "likely" or "very likely" to increase, or to be attributable to human actions. In other words the gist of the report is handwaving nonsense. Scientists don't have Special Knowledge not available to the rest of us. They are not soothsayers, priests or magicians. Even if they were, there were more politicians working on this report than scientists.

One thing of note from the report, which I can independently confirm:

Global average sea level in the last interglacial period (about 125,000 years ago) was likely 4 to 6 m higher than during the 20th century, mainly due to the retreat of polar ice. Ice core data indicate that average polar temperatures at that time were 3 to 5C higher than present[...]

Since the last interglacial period peaked out at 4 to 6m higher seas, and 3 to 5 C higher temperatures, then in the absense of evidence suggesting we should peak elsewhere, we should assume that the global climate will max out at similar levels, apart from any human infulence. (After that happens, maybe the IPCC can tell the politicians how to make new laws to encourage greenhouse gasses emission, to somehow keep the next ice age from coming along and killing us all.)