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Climate Skeptic Funded By Oil and Coal Companies
Honken writes with a report from The Guardian that "'One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.' This somewhat contradicts that [Harvard researcher Willie] Soon in a 2003 US senate hearing said that he had 'not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organisation that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.'"
Lying in these kinds of hearings is utterly amoral and can have drastic negative consequences for society.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Most climatologists who support global warming are employed by public sector or non-profit universities and rely on research grants from the federal government. How is this in any way equivalent to taking money from Big Oil and Coal?
Yep.. on one side are the people who want to keep making $$$ profits. And on the other side are people who'd like to avoid massive coastal flooding and ecological destruction in the next several centuries. We all have our biases, I guess.
The news here is that he lied about it.
Other than the fact that that is a lie promulgated by conservative talk radio hosts, it would be a good point.
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Al Gore isn't a climate scientist.
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many climatologist on both sides of the discussion are employed by people who take a particular interest in one outcome or another.
What do you mean by "both sides"? Really? What funding source were you thinking of that has a financial interest comparable to the trillion dollar profits of the fossil-fuel companies?
That's the party line of the climate-change deniers: "Oh, it doesn't matter that the so-called skeptics are all funded by fossil-fuel companies, because both sides are funded by dirty money."
But, oddly, when there is even a rumor that a climate scientist has received as much as a lunch paid for by a source that is not absolutely spotlessly apolitical, isn't it amazing how the blogosphere lights up with accusations of how climate change is "bought and paid for." (Even when the rumor turns out to be unrelated to actual fact.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is not just a person who happens to get money from somewhere. This is a person who lied to the US senate about where they were getting money. There is a big difference here and trying to make the two issues equivalent just makes me think you are pushing an agenda.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
But it isn't a lie. It's a fact. Billions of dollars are being poured into climate research by tax-payers. That is an order of magnitude more than corporations are spending on the sceptical viewpoint. None of that money would be available to these institutions and researchers if the conclusion was, "climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is ~1C and in other news, increasing CO2 makes plants grow more vigorously". Al Gore has made millions from this fraud. But you people are completely blind to these things.
Research does not equal support for global warming.
Research finds support but it also finds things such as weather satilites. Climate trends. Water tables. Pollution and air quality surveys. Storm prediction. I could go on.
There are many reasons to pour money into researching the climate and weather other than just to "support" global warming. The research just happens to be supporting it.
Here's a hint: the universities and research agencies that employ most normal scientists get the same amount of money regardless of the findings on anthropogenic climate change. The oil companies who employ all of the prominent ACC skeptics stand to lose billions of dollars if the findings are not a certain way.
Let's put it another way. Acme Pharmaceuticals wants to start selling a new drug. Scientists from universities find that the drug is not safe. Scientists employed by Acme Pharmaceuticals find that the drug is perfectly safe. Given these two pieces of information, would you give this new drug to your children?
This constant "the other side is exactly as bad" argument from conservatives and libertarians is laughable in almost every instance it is used.
It isn't news.
You won't hear about it in the media.
If he was a supporter of Global Warming we'd hear about it for a couple of weeks as one of the top stories.
What *is it* with fuckwits like you?
Greenpeace global revenues in 2010: about 56m euros. Exxon just about pipped Greenpeace there, with an income of 311bn dollars in the same year. So clearly it is Greenpeace who is able to throw money around like billy-o and has an enormous financial stake in the outcome of this debate. Yes, that's absolutely clear.
I'm reminded of when all the government and educational-funded scientists were doing studies that showed smoking tobacco is bad for you and leads to cancer... and the tobacco companies all had their "scientists", many of whom later testified to Congress about the fact that they'd falsified their "studies" to suit those who were paying them.
Eerily familiar isn't it?
Please stop refering to these people as climate 'skeptics'. They are climate 'deniers' - just like holocaust deniers and round earth deniers.
Researchers who are subsidized by public concerns are paid to provide results that may be useful to the public. The grant process is transparent.
Researchers who are subsidized by private concerns are paid to provide results that are useful to the owners. The grant process is opaque.
The perceived interests of active shareholders and executives often do not coincide with the perceived interests of the public at large, ergo private concerns often attempt to hide their role in certain kinds of "research", because the degree of self interest in controlling the results is all too apparent.
Luke, help me take this mask off
There is no need to spend a lot on the skeptical viewpoint since there is no research to be done on that front. Billions will buy research, millions will buy people.
As for government interference, it's pretty obvious that conservatives (at least republicans and Canadian conservatives) are trying to push the skeptical point of view. I'm not sure how a government conspiracy to shove climate alarmism down our throats could survive eight years of Bush presidency and the staunch opposition of roughly half of the political spectrum. There has been intimidation, partisan appointments and attempts at censorship from the government *against* the theory of anthropogenic climate change, so at best I would say scientists have been getting a pretty damn mixed signal from big government.
Of course I guess you could just say these valiant heroes are putting their careers on the line saving us from the green apocalypse. But of course, they are nearly powerless in the face of the gargantuan amounts of money Al Gore has been personally channeling into universities with the help of the dark cabal with which he has deeply infiltrated all levels of government and acts in spite of whatever party is supposed to control it.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
As for carbon-taxes, you can still believe Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening and disagree with the carbon-tax solution. In fact, I've seen experiment that show that, if you present people with arguments that global warming is real and carbon-tax is the solution, and then show a second group of people an argument that global warming is real and nuclear power is the solution, people are more likely to accept the idea of global warming+nuclear power solution. What this says to me is that people aren't making up their minds from the facts of global warming, but they're making decisions about the reality of global warming based on their fears of what happens if they accept it.
As a previous poster said, the ones making the claim need to provide the proof. All we have it conjecture and computer models...basically guesses. Fancy guesses, but still nothing that approaches the level of "proof".
Any idiot knows, you can't prove a negative, which what you just claimed they have to do.
And heaven knows that researchers who advocate more government control to reduce AGW would never do anything like accept money from the government, which who also advocated more government control.
If anything, government funded reserarchers have more of a conflict of interest than do privately funded researchers.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You have no idea how egocentric and individualistic scientists are. There is no causal link here strong enough to override the "I'm smarter than my fellow scientists and I can humiliate them by showing how wrong and stupid they are" opportunity that all climatologists scientists have. Without an iron clad conspiracy, the situation in which all climatologists lie out of interest would be completely unstable: the first ones to tell the others climatologists are wrong would get multiple awards plus funding.