So don't you think they have a greater incentive to spread misinformation than academics
No, academics are funded by govt and at the mercy of politicians. Besides the facts show that the biggest oil companies have been bullied into standing down on the GW issue. So much for their being all powerful.
In this case, the deep pockets have always been the oil and coal companies.
Compared to governments? No,govt is the ultimate deep pocket. It can take money from every citizen. Oil and coal companies use their money to invest, they don't have money to play with.
That is the only reason why there is still a big debate out there. They have seeded enough misinformation and doubt, that honest lay people have a tough time figuring out what is going on. So at the very least, you should acknowledge that he oil and coal companies may also be engaged in some self-serving activity, that may not be the same thing as putting out credible science papers.
No its not. The fact is the biggest oil companies HAVE BEEN bullied into acquiescence. They're not involved in the debate. Its little people, bloggers and independent scientists who are running the skeptical community, not some oil barons.
Look at Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Chris Landsea, Lord Monckton, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Freeman Dyson, Fred Singer, etc.
Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence. by RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 A.M. EDT
opinionjournal.com
...Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
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So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.
All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.
Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.
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aim.org
Once in power, Al Gore, a strident environmentalist, began to remake the government bureaucracy in his image. His life experience in Washington had taught him the value of the old Washington truism, "personnel is policy." He established a White House Climate Change Task Force and placed his former legislative aide, 29-year old Kathleen McGinty, in charge of a new White House Office on Environmental Policy. He put her on the National Security Council, the new National Economic Council, and the Domestic Policy Council as a symbol of the importance of environmental policy in the Clinton White House. McGinty would be in charge of seeding the government bureaucracies with "greens" and was reputed to have an enemies list of Bush holdovers. Former NASA chief scientist Robert Watson, a Gore favorite, became associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP). Gore brought in other "green" lawyers and lobbyists to populate the new White House positions.
He installed his former legislative director, Carol Browner, as the new EPA administrator in 1993. Under Browner, EPA became the central coordinator of the federal global warming campaign, dispensing funds through a variety of inter-agency committees and programs. At the Defense Department, the position of Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security was established, and the CIA established a task force to apply national technical means (satellite collection platforms) to monitor world environmental issues. Tim Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, became Undersecretary for Global Affairs at the State Department. He led all U.S. negotiations on climate change. As a senator, Wirth had proclaimed that it didn't matter if the science of global warming was right or wrong, the economic and environmental policies would be right for America.
Naysayers Not Wanted
The fate of Bush appointee William Happer, a highly respected Princeton physicist, is symptomatic of Gore's remaking of the bureaucracy. Happer had been asked to stay over until a new Assistant Secretary of Energy could be appointed, but he quickly ran afoul of Gore and his climate control group in the White House. Happer had initiated a research program to test the various ozone depletion theories then in vogue and had found that the empirical results were not matching the theory's predictions. When he told a House committee that "there probably has been some exaggeration of the dangers of ozone and global climate change," White House officials promptly fired him. Gore had already decided that ozone depletion would damage crops and increase the rate of skin cancer.
Robert Watson had predicted that an ozone hole would open up over Kennebunkport, ME, President Bush's vacation home. Happer had publicly ridiculed Watson's suggestion and so Happer was almost certainly on McGinty's enemies list. Happer, in a later interview, correctly identified the Clinton/Gore approach as "politically correct science." The huge amounts of funding made available by Clinton/Gore ensured that the new administration would get the "answers" on global warming it was seeking. Happer said that science was being turned on its head. Instead of science driving policy, policy now determined the results it wanted and then paid scientists to come up with them.
Also, at the Energy Department, a staff lawyer from the Natural Resources Defense Council, another Washington-based environmental advocacy group, became Secretary Hazel O'Leary's chief of staff and then went on to become an assistant secretary, with control of over $1.3 billion annually in climate-change funding. The Energy Department doled out billions of dollars in global warming funding to its National Laboratories, which had convinced the department that many of its computer models used to develop nuclear weapons were applicable to climate modeling. In addition, the Department funded university research grants and scholarships in the various climate-change academic disciplines.
The largest Energy project is the Atmosphere Radiation Measurement (ARM) project, run by Sandia National Laboratory along with the other nuclear weapons design laboratories. The ARM program even has its own air force; it uses a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and propeller-driven aircraft to collect cloud data at three sites: Oklahoma, the western Pacific Ocean, and Alaska's North Shore. The Department recently signed an agreement with Australia to begin data collection at Darwin. Congressional skeptics have wondered what, if anything, these programs have to do with nuclear weapons, but they continue to fund them nonetheless.
Over its two terms, the Clinton administration pumped nearly $20 billion into global warming science and technology initiatives. By 2002, the EPA website advertised that more than a billion dollars was still available for grants for the purpose of reducing greenhouse emissions.
Scaring The Public
As part of its campaign to mold public opinion, the EPA sponsored regional conferences throughout the United States to dramatize the potential impacts of climate change. In May 1999, for example, the EPA visited South Florida and the Florida Keys to warn local residents of the potential impacts for their region of global warming. Local EPA officials, area activists and outside speakers told attendees that global warming is real and that their area would be particularly hard hit. One local activist told the conference that global warming represents "the largest single threat to our planet that we know of, including a nuclear holocaust." A professor of environmental health from Columbia University predicted an outbreak of water-borne diseases like malaria as the sea level rises in the wake of global warming. A "hurricane expert" predicted a 50% increase in hurricanes in that year alone. (In fact, the number of hurricanes decreased in 1999 in comparison with past years.) Others predicted that the Everglades would disappear, as would safe drinking water and clean air.
Global warming advocates also had a reliable ally in the mainstream media. In most cases, the media simply report research findings and results handed to reporters in government news releases and interviews. The more provocative and alarming the reports, the more likely they are to find their way onto the front page. The Alaska report on the dramatic impact of warming was funded by NOAA, Department of Interior and National Science Foundation grants. Rarely do reporters challenge the "science," and rarer still do they present global warming as anything other than an accepted fact among scientists.
The media have helped create the false impression that the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is a serious threat that calls for drastic action. Agreement with this seems to be a litmus tests for Times reporters covering science. One such reporter, Kenneth Chang, answered a question on the Times Internet site about global warming by saying that it's a complicated subject, but 97% of all scientists think it is real and is caused by CO2 emissions.
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