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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.'"
There are indeed such websites:
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Willie_Soon#Funding
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.
Not surprising; the main source of critiques that attempt to discredit climate science is the "Heartland Institute," which doesn't state its funding sources, except to say it's funded by "foundations and corporations"... but reading the budget information from Exxon Mobil shows those "foundations and corporations" tend to be fossil fuel companies, and fossil-fuel funded institutes like the American Petroleum Institute.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Support SETI@home
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.
Was there really any doubt that Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon were full of it?
Here's a thorough debunk of their most infamous paper.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXesBhYwdRo#t=2m00s
i.e. The one skeptics go crazy about how in emails, how other climate scientists said it shouldn't have even been published in the first place.
Lying to Congress is not a crime if you are not under oath. Typically, witnesses do not give oral testimony under oath except in confirmation hearings and investigations. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/98-392.pdf
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.
Other than the fact that that is a lie promulgated by conservative talk radio hosts, it would be a good point.
Either you don't work at a Univeristy or you are dishonest. The amount of grant money one can bring is a significant part of your evaluations and status within the University and the science community as a whole. When a University looks at hiring someone for the faculty, one of the things they look at is grant history and existing grant money that the new hire will bring with him. (Not the only thing, but one of them.) If you want to move up the ladder you need to have grants.
Research faculty write their salaries into those grants. If they don't get grants, they either don't get paid or they have to take University money which has teaching responsibilities attached. If you want to do research full time instead of being saddled with the 100 level undergrad courses, you pray for grants.
If they don't get grants, they don't get to buy the fancy new computers and pay for graduate students and research assistants. The larger your number of supported people, the higher your status.
The more students you have, the more conferences that you are likely to attend. If you are thinking about doing field work, the more students you have means the more likely you are to be able to do that field work. (If your grant is to do field work and you don't pull it off, your chances of getting another one drops significantly.) Those students will be busy doing research which will result in papers being published which will be added to your vitae, and when it comes time for tenure to be granted, your publication history is one of those things they look at. Lots of grants, lots of students, lots of papers, more likely to get tenure.
Now, when it comes time to write those grants, is someone going to write a grant that says "this isn't really much of a problem but it is an interesting science question", or will they be likely to write "DANGER DANGER this could kill us all if we don't study it!"? Yes, that was hyperbole, but the impetus to be more like the latter than the former is still there. Funding agencies have limited amounts of money and are often tasked with supporting research to find practical answers to pressing issues. They're more likely to fund something that is "DANGER kill us all!" than "yawn, why is the sky blue?" kinds of things.
So, no, it isn't a lie propogated by talk radio hosts. Quite the opposite. And anyone who works in a University knows it and has seen it first hand. Other than maybe the janitors. Anyone whose job involves being paid by grants know this.
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?
I have heard this idea before. It assumes that all the climate researchers are somehow in collusion on a vast conspiracy. The problem with your idea is that the top tier universities are full of egotistical bastards who would gladly screw their peers in order to demonstrate that they are smarter than everyone else. These professors tend to do pretty well with grant money and anything that enhances their fame just ensures that the money keeps coming, even though this may be at the expense of others.
Please stop refering to these people as climate 'skeptics'. They are climate 'deniers' - just like holocaust deniers and round earth deniers.
Oil companies have been getting billions in corporate welfare for a long time. Why is this necessary? BP, despite spending over $20 billion on the DeepWater Horizon spill, have already returned to profitability. Gore's supposed "millions" pale in comparison to the clout and resources of just the oil and coal industries.
While most plants grow more quickly as CO2 increases, it's not a slam dunk. Researchers have discovered that soybean crops grown in higher levels of CO2 are more susceptible to attack by insects. Bigger and faster doesn't necessarily mean better and healthier.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Ah the out-of-context quote, an outdated weapon from the age when it took effort to find the context, like throwing a spear at a tank.
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
He was saying that environmental policy affects economic policy, and that economic policy has become the sticking point to environmental policy change:
http://www.environmentaltrends.org/single/article/un-climate-talks-and-power-politics-its-not-about-the-temperature.html
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.
Source, 2007.
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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.
You'll find the same basic tactics in all branches of pseudo-science. I spent years debating IDers and Creationists and it strikes me that pretty much every tactic used by the pseudo-skeptics in that debate have been used against science in this one.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Doing this sort of thing is called "the Tabbaco Strategy". Read "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" Naomi Oreskes (Author), Erik M. M. Conway (Author) http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309463389&sr=8-1
D. E. (Steve) Stevenson, Ph.D. Emeritus Associate Professor,School of Computing,Clemson University.
I agree. We're definitely not spending enough money on our military here in the US...
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
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're quite wrong, and all the people around me who are paid by grants agree.
A research scientist can make ten times as much money if s/he can make a potentially valid claim that pollution isn't hurting the environment. That's been true ever since Reagan took office, OK?
Politicians pay for what they want to hear, polluters pay (even more!) for what they want to hear, but nobody else wants to pay squat for research that makes no new claims or discoveries.
And yes, I have spent years working in an academic research institution funded by both private and public grants. My spouse and many of my friends still do; half our family income is based on grants.
What you are saying is simply not true. There is far, far more money available to scientists willing to deny so-called "global warming" (which is merely one symptom of excessive pollution, really) than to scientists who are not.
As my friend the historian once told me, "I can't make name for myself by saying Tacitus's histories are just fine, but I can get grants and book deals by claiming he dressed in women's underwear". In real life, you simply don't get grants by knuckling under to some other person's ideas. You get grants by challenging conventional wisdom, and proposing a means of validating your challenge.