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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.
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.
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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.
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
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?
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
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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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.
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.
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.