We recently had a story about the UK Met Office putting out a petition amongst scientists (even non-climatologists) to prop up the image of the CRU. Some scientists said they felt “pressured” to sign.
This story explains how they might feel that way.
WUWT reader Norris Hall commented on this thread: Americans belief of global warming sinking – below 50% for the first time in 2 years
… it is possible that this is just a big conspiracy by climate scientist around the world to boost their cause and make themselves more important. Though I find it hard to believe that thousands of scientists…all agreed to promote bogus science …Pretty hard to do without being discovered.
To which Paul Vaughan responded as follows:
Actually not so hard.
Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:
Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.
Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.
Opposing toxic pollution is not synonymous with supporting AGW.
From Planet Gore: This confirms the stories that I’ve been hearing over the last few years.
New maxim: The Carrot Train
h/t to Planet Gore, who got it from Bishop Hill, who got it from comments here on WUWT
Sometimes there’s so much happening on WUWT, it is impossible to take it all in.
Thanks guys!
What is needed is actual pdfs of these funding application forms. Otherwise it’s just hearsay.
Nothing like having the answer for which you are assigned to develop proof. Now that’s AGW Science … unlike real science!
While I have absolutely no doubt about the veracity of Paul Vaughn’s comment, it would be nice if people here would supply actual rfp announcements or funding application instructions that specify that researchers provide evidence for global warming or address the reality of it. I think I deleted one from my in-box the other day, and will scout around for it. Nice post explaining the “roots” of the “conspiracy”.
I remember that comment, VERY disturbing but at the same time it explains all the scientists running around making amazingly dodgy connections between all sorts of things and AGW/CAGW/CC/whatever-heck-their-title-the-week-is
Are these applications publically available? I think a survey would be interesting from an ethics, sociology and maybe even economics (my area of study) POV
Depressingly true of human behaviour – the ‘follow the money’ meme is almost always correct when it comes to motivation/vested interests.
According to East Anglia CRU’s Professor Tom Wigley, in 1990, “My organization has only one permanent university funded scientist — and that’s me. I have about a dozen research workers with PhDs who are working in the Climatic Research Unit and they’re all funded on so called soft money. Their existence requires me or us jointly to get external support.”
It’s in the fifth segment of a 1990 Australian documentary posted on The Dog Ate My Data
I wonder where this movement comes from. Is it just the Baby Boomer generation trying to find something meaningful in saving the world? Or is there something being driven by some key players? Perhaps it is both. But the culture is what gives it the broad appeal.
I will probably keep saying this; you don’t need “conspiracy” where you have “culture”. People have a psychology and blind spots, and cultures have psychologies and blind spots. I lived in South Africa for a few years, when Apartheid was still on, and it gave me a sense of how so many groups of otherwise smart, educated people, could all carry around a massive blind spot when it came to racism.
The warmists accuse everyone else of having a massive blind spot—they claim we find it too “inconvenient” to accept the “reality”. Well I’ve never seen a warmist doing any soul searching into their own motivations.
There is a quotation I’d like to post in a bit.
In Czechoslovakia 1977, some dissenters put together an announcement called “Charta 77”, asking our communist government to follow the human rights declaration, which we just signed in OSCE. Reaction of government was overly hysterical: newspapers churned hate against it, people at work were forced to sign the “Anticharta” which denounced Charta authors like traitors, imperialistic agents funded by West etc. Of course, nobody was allowed to read it.
but:
“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.” — R. Reagan, First Inaugural Speech
Can Paul Vaughan post the applications provide a link?
The same instructions were given to peer reviewers?
That’s right. There is no conspiracy, there is well fed “consensus”. There was consensus against heliocentric model, against wave theory of light, against “jewish” science, against “genetics and cybernetics serving imperialism” and many other smaller scale “consensus…es”. But how in our time and our first world countries such “consensus” is possible?! May I suggest: the centralized government funding of science is the culprit. What’s instead?
Reminds me of”no bucks no Buck Rodgers…” From the “Right Stuff”
but that was the days when we funded to ‘Go Boldly” not to see if our
navel lint was toxic…
It would be interesting to see some samples of those funding applications.
Paul always has valid and poignant commentary. His comment here is indicative of the primary reason science in general finds itself embroiled in this CRU controversy. Unless and until science rids itself of all traces of advocacy, it will merely be another branch of the body politic. We are indeed slipping into a very dark and unenlightened age.
If we are currently charmed by calls to recover our humanism, sounded in various intellectual quarters championing our “courage” and our capacity for “caring”, we might do well to remember that courage and caring, by themselves, can be as life-stealing as life-giving, that every tyrant and tyrannical movement in human history draws energy not from fear alone but from the courage and caring of its adherents.
— Robert Kegan, “In Over Our Heads, The Mental Demands of Modern Life”, 1994
It’s upsetting when the deluded puppets in the media ask persons skeptical of the ‘concensus’ to prove their position.
To do so proves they clearly understand so little.
Most of us with a smidgen of integrity knows that when we put forward a theory it is incumbent on US to prove it and not on others to disprove it.
Part of the wall of noise thrown up at the moment is to indirectly question the sanity of a skeptic by suggesting that for this ‘concensus’ to be ‘untrue’ there would need to be a global conspiracy!
And how absurd that would be!!
Commit this Tolstoi quote to mind and use it against all those fools who suggest such a thing.
Its not a conspiracy, it’s just human nature!
There is NOTHING new under the sun.
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives”.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Reminds you of anyone?
Perhaps Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, Jones etc?
Paul should show us the emails/letters/memos that back up his accusations.
“Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.”
Why does that not surprise me at all? Those with agendas and deep pockets will use money as their tool of choice.
Or… “Follow the Grant Money”
Distract and discredit. The mantra for proponents of agw. Just watch the arguments put forth on these very threads by promoters of the false theory. If looked at from this perspective it becomes patently clear what they are doing. Conspiracy theorist is just the latest. Unfortunately, it seems that they are successfully minimizing the damage that the e-mail leak should be causing by saying they are being taken out of context. That they are just e-mails amongst colleagues. Those of us that understand EXACTLY what is being said in those e-mails are not being heard by the public at large. Again they are praying upon “joe publics” lack of knowledge in this arena.
I saw that comment in the original post comments too, and it it indeed jumped out at me. It’s what O’Reilly would call a “pithy comment”. 🙂
Glad you highlighted it.
Er… Wattsup Doc?
Blood and sex create newspaper headlines. This AGW has neither.
Fear creates a foundation for obtaining grants. With money scarce for research, any study taht includes drama in applying for research that can use or peredict dangerous outcomes for der Planette will have a small chance of success.
Sorry I am skeptical of this being on the funding papers or whatever they are. While I can understand getting defunded if you do not tow the line I highly doubt you would not get funding to start the science. Please feel free to show me evidence otherwise but my skeptical nature kicks in when someone simply says this is what happened.
I was at one point in time a telemarketer and would record calls all the time to help my staff. As their manager I would get complaints all the time that such and such an agent lied or swore or whatever. None of my agents ever did any of these things but people in their minds would actually argue with me about it. I had the recordings I listened to them not once was it true.
It is part of the problem with communication. People hear what they want to hear. Or what they expect to hear even when you are saying the same thing OVER and OVER again and never deviate.
I will not accept fault finding without evidence, regardless of my personal opinion on the the matter of AGW. Innocent until proven guilty. I am sad such an anecdotal story made it on WUWT. While it may be true it needs evidence before being posted on here.
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Ghandi.