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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.