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.'"

Comments

Re:and in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:and in other news

[chemicaldave]

The news here is that he lied about it.

Funded by Exxon

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:and in other news

[SETIGuy]

Al Gore isn't a climate scientist.

Was there really any doubt?

[GreyFlcn]

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.

Re:Should result in a prison sentence

[RatPh!nk]

But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.

Take "Greenpeace" with a grain of salt but that clearly says 2001 and 2002 which is before 2003 testimony, no?

Re:and in other news

[Moryath]

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?

Not climate 'skeptics'

[TallGuyRacer]

Please stop refering to these people as climate 'skeptics'. They are climate 'deniers' - just like holocaust deniers and round earth deniers.

Re:Not climate 'skeptics'

[BCGlorfindel]

So, because I don't reject the crushing scientific consensus because you have linked to one paper (that doesn't contradict the consensus that much if you read it), I'm some kind of zealot? Simply because I require a bit more evidence from you, you throw a strop?

Here is a more appropriate paper for someone like you to read: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/363/204

Close, but you missed the point. Sadly, it doesn't appear that science is well understood on Slashdot anymore.

I provided direct scientific evidence that warming since 1850 is NOT anomalous within the last 2,000 years of history, and that similar warming to it has occurred multiple times previously. You dismissed the evidence by appealing to SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS!

You see, the scientific method and process doesn't care if 99 people in 100 believe the earth is flat, what matters is the one person with a space shuttle that flies around the earth taking pictures of the fact it is a sphere.

I am NOT misquoting Mann's paper what so ever. He reanalyzed his data with a different and by his own words more accurate statistical method, and his graphs of the results clearly show that the warming since 1850 has been exceeded multiple times before. My CORRECT reading of this very simple graph is further, and irrefutably evidenced by the fact Mann's own conclusion at the end of this paper is to observe that only the last decade is an anomaly, a far step down from his conclusion in his prior paper observing that the last century was the anomaly.

Please, demonstrate that I am wrong in my interpretation or that my source is biased and wrong. Just don't pretend like declaring CONSENSUS in any way trumps hard scientific evidence to the contrary, that's the work of zealots and ludites.

In context:

[GameboyRMH]

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