UPDATE: About an hour after this story was posted, Monbiot backs down, see below. – Anthony
===========================================
Sheesh, can’t these people read? I find the timing of this more than coincidental.
George Monbiot tweets:
Secret funding of climate change deniers exposed again: bit.ly/m6Yjlp. Key issue here is that interests never declared.
Soon and Balliunas 2003:
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by funds from the American Petroleum Institute (01-0000-4579),…
Paper here (PDF)
here’s the full acknowledgment:
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by funds from
the American Petroleum Institute (01-0000-4579), the Air
Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant AF49620-02-1-
0194) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(Grant NAG5-7635). The views expressed herein are those of
the authors and are independent of the sponsoring agencies.
We have benefitted greatly from the true and kind spirit of
research communications (including a preview of their
thoughts) with the late Jean Grove (who passed away on January
18, 2001), Dave Evans, Shaopeng Huang, Jim Kennett,
Yoshio Tagami and Referee #3. We thank John Daly, Diane
Douglas-Dalziel, Craig and Keith Idso for their unselfish contributions
to the references. We also thank the Editor, Chris
de Freitas, for very helpful editorial changes that improved
the manuscript. We are very grateful to Maria McEachern,
Melissa Hilbert, Barbara Palmer and Will Graves for invaluable
library help, and both Philip Gonzalez and Lisa Linarte
for crucial all-around help.
There’s been a swarm of such news items happening this week in an attempt to discredit climate skeptics. ICCC6 is getting some press, and in response these claims of “secret” get circulated. How transparent. The other LOL is from washed up science writer David Appell (who runs an angry blog called Quarksoup) expressing “being stunned” that WUWT readers haven’t denounced a supposed recent death threat that occurred in Australia 5 years ago that was “repackaged” for the present. Trouble is, the press is onto the scam.
Monbiot also tweets:
Is there a single prominent denier who won’t turn out to have been funded by an oil or coal company, or by the Koch brothers?
Well I once had a Shell Oil credit card for which I got cashback credits on purchases, so I guess that makes me guilty.
Bishop Hill quips:
Now obviously there’s a bit of Monbiot “puff” going on here, but I think we should look on this enthusiasm for disclosure of conflicts of interest as an area in which widespread agreement should be possible.
Perhaps George would like to consider a joint call (a) for the IPCC to activate its COI policy for all AR5 working groups with immediate effect and (b) for climate journals to require disclosure of conflicts of interest in the way that medical journals do. I’ll write and ask him.
How about it Monbiot? Goose, gander, and all that.
h/t to reader PaulM
================================================================
UPDATE: About an hour after this story was posted, on his Twitter feed, Monbiot recognizes his error.
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Thanks George Monbiot, for the increase in our electricity prices. You W*anker.
So to sum up. The Koch brothers are pure evil. But George Soros, who makes billions from oil, is a saint. What hypocrisy. Both the right-wingers and left-wingers are such hypocrites that it is sickening.
This article is very clear to me, a new meme is emerging, a summer offensive once again attacking skeptics, oil companies and the like. And they will coordinate in a way that dwarfs the climategate communications.
The reality is that they are never going to stop even if we get 30 epic winters in a row and glaciers roll into NYC again. They are already shoveling the last 2 winters down the memory hole and had the audacity to investigate themselves over climategate and pronounce themselves clean. They are cozy in their parasitic lives and unless there is some dramatic event like perp walks and prison for stealing from the taxpayer, nothing will cause them to change at all.
You know what, that is a diabolically brilliant point. We may have be missing the obvious all along, a classic trees vs forest scenario from being dragged down all the endless rabbit holes. Worldwide, we should have a simple goal now, ahead of all others. That goal is …
Eliminate taxpayer funding of all climatology. Period.
Just like cockroaches and parasites, they will always be among us, but the workable solution is to cut off their food supply. Zero the budgets. The taxpayers can do this in all places except perhaps China. It might not be easy but it can be done. In fact the timing may be perfect with fiscal collapse looming everywhere. It would be foolish to not bankrupt them while we ourselves are on the verge of bankruptcy.
I suppose we could also ask George why in the Uk the energy companies pay for electricity from the wind and solar providers at 40p a unit whilst they normally sell electricity at 10p a unit?
The Trotsky of watermelon environmentalism
George Monbiot seems to be a communist based on his actions and words. The communist is the ultimate materialist. So, of course, funding sources is very important to him. He probably doesn’t even realize his own hypocrisy. Funny that he has a shirt that says, “Fight Poverty Not War.” In order to do what he wants to do regarding his belief in climate change, he’d make everyone poor and need war in order to accomplish his preferred austerity measures (that would be okay because it would reduce the population). He’d call the fulfillment of his vision the “promised land.” Just be careful that you don’t use up your carbon ration card in his promised land. You might have to stop breathing. Moon bat, indeed.
Special relativity was apparently funded by Swiss taxpayers through the salary of a certain clerk working on the subject at the Bern patent office (possibly pondering the matter also during working hours). Said clerk was an anarchist-pacifist with left wing inclinations, so (if one shares those inclinations) special relativity should be right. Antimatter, on the other hand, was the idea of a right-wing warmonger called Edward Teller who wanted to unilaterally hydrogen-bomb the USSR. Since we do not like right-wing warmongers (I, for one, don’t), antimatter must not be trusted to exist at all. It must only be a right-wing concoction to fool honest folks into funding the military.
Copernicus, then, was a parish priest, funded by the Catholic church. He was surely a Papist propaganda puppet, not to be trusted. And Aristotle was totally supported by the slave economy of ancient Athens, just as many of the US founding fathers were slave owners: all the logic in Aristotle’s Organon, and all the politics in his Politics, as well as all the claims about liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the US constitution, should be dismissed as merely the fruit of slave exploitation.
I doubt whether there is some bit of knowledge somewhere that can be trusted after all. Gosh.
FYI: George Monbiot : State infiltrator
“Monbiot is the public-school son of two active ultra-right wing Tory extremists, and he has done his Nazi parents proud. He has subverted the environmental movement in the UK more than any other state infiltrator. He is the personification of green-washing, and anyone who still admires this obvious shit should be excluded from any genuinely progressive movement.”
Of course. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.
Enron loved Carbon credits too. Big oil loves it, as it makes their product more expensive!
Big oil and big environment/government are one and the same group. This is just a game they play to keep people arguing and uninformed.
The original report was by Greenpeace US
If you are stupid enough to rely on Greenpeace reports and press releases, what can you expect?
Re the Oz death threats, even if the most recent was 12 months ago, I had to do a double-take on the description. . . “an offhand remark made in person”.
Describing a death threat as an “offhand remark” when it is made “in person”?! My goodness, remarkably phlegmatic types, those Aussies. Me, I tend to get uncomfortable when the fellow threatening to kill me is standing right in front of me. . .
Ah yes, another day, another thread at WUWT whining incessantly about accusations regarding the influence of funding on “anti-consensus” scientists – from people who whine incessantly about the influence of funding on “consensus” scientists.
If you didn’t have hypocrisy – what would you have left?
Wait – you forgot to add the bit about Saul Alinsky.
Oh, and you forgot to add the bit about Nazis and Eugenicists.
You guys are starting to slip.
I don’t know why twitter is so popular, it’s mostly noise and gossip from narcissists. The only practical use for it is real-time reporting.
I suspect that this smear campaign may backfire by causing folks to read Soon and Balliunas 2003. The Hockey Team was quite successful in strawmanning the paper, to the extent that it pretty much disappeared from the conversation. If you read what Mann wrote about it, you would think that S&B 2003 was an attack on AGW theory. The paper was actually a reasonable meta-analysis attempt to contextualize the “catastrophe” part of CAGW by showing that paleoclimate researchers unaffiliated with the team were not finding evidence of impending catastrophe.
The funding of research by big oil is only a problem if they interfere in the doing of the science they’ve funded. If the science is done well, and the results are transparent, and can be replicated, then the science increases human knowledge. And it is immaterial where the funding to do it comes from.
I don’t want to be the devil’s advocate here. But it seems like, on the subject of research funding, the big oil companies are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they weren’t funding any research at all, they’d be accused of not giving anything back. And they’d really catch hell. If they didn’t fund those research programs, and organizations, who would?
Personally, as an independent researcher, struggling to come up with the funds to do field work, I am completely shameless. As long as I don’t have to commit a crime, or sell myself, I don’t give a rip where the money comes from.
There ain’t no such thing as free lunch. And there ain’t no such thing as ‘clean’ money. If researchers are to eschew the tainted moneys of ‘Big Oil’, who else has pockets so deep?
So called “skeptics” go out of their way, to avoid being associated with oil money.
From personal experience, I had offered to fund the page charge for one group of authors. After some discussion, they decided against my funding, as even the appearance of oil money would hurt the message (which was the data itself, not the political message).
This, in spite of the “oil money” being second hand. I am employed by “oil”. The money is my own, but the authors declined.
It should be noted that I am also involved in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Wiglaf says July 1, 2011 at 6:24 am
You can read all about it here. Probably better to spend the cash on a decent cup of coffee and an iced bun though.
How the guardian can allow for this clown to be spewing his nonsense about in their paper is beyond my comprehension. It is not his beliefs, but his childish rhetoric and mindless reasoning that puts guardian in the little leagues when it comes to climate debate.
Well done George. Wrong again.
You got cash back from your Shell card????? Damn! You are in bed with big oil! All I got from my Amoco card was a T-Shirt!
D Holliday, “Is there a single prominent AGW supporter that isn’t funded by the Government, an Environmental Organization, or some save the world foundation?”
Yes several of them are funded by oil companies…. No really! Shell, BP, Texaco all have extensive environmental research grants which end up funding the natural climate change deniers. Not that these climate alarmists would ever dare admit to such funding.
Messages from Twitter should not be called “tweets”, they should be called “twits”, because that’s about all they’re worth. I refuse to be moved by someone’s 140 characters.
Monbiot sent out a twit today, Palin sent out a twit today, Tracy Morgan sent out a twit today, Paris Hilton sent out a twit today…
See? It works.
“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.”
My company gives me a free lunch once in a while.