Climate Science--Follow the money
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2835581.htm
Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the "deniers", the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the
true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times
have changed.
Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil
influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those
taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.
The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they
write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the
money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need
to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are
unwittingly helping giant finance houses.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and
found $23 million paid by Exxon over 10 years (which has stopped).
Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but
you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate
Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a
larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded,
but it's not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect
"taxed", consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in
crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits
won't actually fall that much.
But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics-- even Exxon: (how
about $100 million for Stanford's Global Climate and
Energy Project, and $600
million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is
massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but
the point is, what they spent on sceptics was even less.
Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on
climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding
paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as
much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a
repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of
institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the
Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not
include money from other western governments, private industry, and is
not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger.
For direct PR comparisons though, just look at "Think Climate Think
Change": the Australian Government put $13.9
million into just one quick advertising campaign. There is no
question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who
promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws
in the theory.
Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect.
There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are
devoted to UnNatural Forces.
It's a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status
(though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no
group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws.
The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia
CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It's possible that honest scientists have
dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one
thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or
errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because
everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the
auditors who volunteered — like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts — are
retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and
the expertise to do the hard work. (Anyone fancy analysing statistical
techniques in dendroclimatology or thermometer siting instead of playing
a round of golf?)
Money for the Finance Houses: What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in
comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of
carbon trading reached $126
billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130
billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year
the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years.
Money Talks. Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a
paper trade. It doesn't matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take
a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make
shifting paper.
BANKS WANT US TO TRADE MONEY...
Not surprisingly banks
are doing what banks should do (for their shareholders): they're
following the promise of profits, and urging governments to adopt carbon
trading. Banks are keen to be seen as good corporate citizens (look,
there's an environmental banker!), but somehow they don't find the idea
of a non-tradable carbon tax as appealing as a trading scheme
where financial middlemen can take a cut. (For banks that believe in the
carbon crisis, taxes may well "help the planet," but they don't pay
dividends.)
The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on
carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders,
advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2,000 lobbyists in Washington
in 2008.
Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they
also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP
Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other
financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the
Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon,
IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government
bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change.
There's no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or
power grabs.
Tony Abbot's new policy removes the benefits for bankers. Labor and the Greens don't appear to notice that they fight
tooth and nail for a market in a "commodity" which isn't a commodity and
that guarantees profits for big bankers. The public though are figuring
it out.
THE LARGEST TRADEABLE "COMMODITY" IN THE WORLD?
Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory
committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has
predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the
markets his agency currently regulates: "I can see carbon trading being a
$2
trillion market." "The largest
commodity market in the world." He ought to know.
It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat,
copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than
oil.
Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10
trillion a year." That's 10 thousand billion dollars.
ONLY THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE MATTERS
Ultimately the atmosphere is what it is regardless of fiat currency movements. Some people will accuse me
of smearing climate scientists and making the same ad hominem attacks I
detest and protest about. So note carefully: I haven't said that the
massive amount of funding received by promoters of the Carbon
Catastrophe proves that they are wrong, just as the grassroots unpaid
dedication of sceptics doesn't prove them right either. But the starkly
lop-sided nature of the funding means we'd be fools not to pay very
close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are
from those who try to smear sceptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem
arguments are worth making.
And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the
planet. But few realise that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like
humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2
effect and that this amplification simply isn't there.
Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of
upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer
2008 with his expanding "uncertainties" nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind
gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations
indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the
atmosphere, not amplified.[Spencer 2007, Lindzen
2009, see also Spencer 2008]
Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous "3.5 degrees of warming" collapses to
just a half a degree — most of which has happened.
Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into
lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is Stone Age reasoning, and
the "money" insult they throw, bounces right back at them — a
thousand-fold.
Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the "deniers", the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the
true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times
have changed.
Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil
influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those
taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.
The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they
write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the
money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need
to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are
unwittingly helping giant finance houses.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and
found $23 million paid by Exxon over 10 years (which has stopped).
Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but
you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate
Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a
larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded,
but it's not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect
"taxed", consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in
crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits
won't actually fall that much.
But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics-- even Exxon: (how
about $100 million for Stanford's Global Climate and
Energy Project, and $600
million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is
massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but
the point is, what they spent on sceptics was even less.
Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on
climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding
paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as
much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a
repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of
institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the
Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not
include money from other western governments, private industry, and is
not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger.
For direct PR comparisons though, just look at "Think Climate Think
Change": the Australian Government put $13.9
million into just one quick advertising campaign. There is no
question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who
promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws
in the theory.
Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect.
There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are
devoted to UnNatural Forces.
It's a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status
(though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no
group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws.
The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia
CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It's possible that honest scientists have
dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one
thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or
errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because
everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the
auditors who volunteered — like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts — are
retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and
the expertise to do the hard work. (Anyone fancy analysing statistical
techniques in dendroclimatology or thermometer siting instead of playing
a round of golf?)
Money for the Finance Houses: What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in
comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of
carbon trading reached $126
billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130
billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year
the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years.
Money Talks. Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a
paper trade. It doesn't matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take
a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make
shifting paper.
BANKS WANT US TO TRADE MONEY...
Not surprisingly banks
are doing what banks should do (for their shareholders): they're
following the promise of profits, and urging governments to adopt carbon
trading. Banks are keen to be seen as good corporate citizens (look,
there's an environmental banker!), but somehow they don't find the idea
of a non-tradable carbon tax as appealing as a trading scheme
where financial middlemen can take a cut. (For banks that believe in the
carbon crisis, taxes may well "help the planet," but they don't pay
dividends.)
The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on
carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders,
advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2,000 lobbyists in Washington
in 2008.
Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they
also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP
Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other
financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the
Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon,
IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government
bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change.
There's no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or
power grabs.
Tony Abbot's new policy removes the benefits for bankers. Labor and the Greens don't appear to notice that they fight
tooth and nail for a market in a "commodity" which isn't a commodity and
that guarantees profits for big bankers. The public though are figuring
it out.
THE LARGEST TRADEABLE "COMMODITY" IN THE WORLD?
Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory
committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has
predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the
markets his agency currently regulates: "I can see carbon trading being a
$2
trillion market." "The largest
commodity market in the world." He ought to know.
It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat,
copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than
oil.
Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10
trillion a year." That's 10 thousand billion dollars.
ONLY THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE MATTERS
Ultimately the atmosphere is what it is regardless of fiat currency movements. Some people will accuse me
of smearing climate scientists and making the same ad hominem attacks I
detest and protest about. So note carefully: I haven't said that the
massive amount of funding received by promoters of the Carbon
Catastrophe proves that they are wrong, just as the grassroots unpaid
dedication of sceptics doesn't prove them right either. But the starkly
lop-sided nature of the funding means we'd be fools not to pay very
close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are
from those who try to smear sceptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem
arguments are worth making.
And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the
planet. But few realise that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like
humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2
effect and that this amplification simply isn't there.
Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of
upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer
2008 with his expanding "uncertainties" nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind
gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations
indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the
atmosphere, not amplified.[Spencer 2007, Lindzen
2009, see also Spencer 2008]
Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous "3.5 degrees of warming" collapses to
just a half a degree — most of which has happened.
Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into
lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is Stone Age reasoning, and
the "money" insult they throw, bounces right back at them — a
thousand-fold.
Views: 3
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on -
Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on
climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding
paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as
much as anything offered to sceptics.
Omigod, they spent money on actual research! What a wild, far-out thing to do!
-
Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on -
I still say tax people who own expensive motorcycles that are not primary vehicles. You know a "luxury tax".
-
Permalink Reply by GodHatesTrash on -
Lucky for you they don't tax stupid.
-
Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on
-
Lucky for you they have cure for anthrax.
-
Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on
-
They do tax motorcycles, and having a bike lets me use the car less. There's nothing luxurious about a little cruiser like mine.
Some of those big Harleys get worse gas mileage than a compact car. That ought to be taxed.
-
Permalink Reply by Van on -
The reason they don't fund skeptics is that they aren't doing real science. There's only a few skeptical climate scientist like Lindzen and for the most part they don't publish because what they are peddling is junk science. From your point of view the Government should fund Astrologers, people who believe the earth is flat, and creationists. Here's the thing.It's basic physics. It's like adding insulation to your house, or turning up the heat on a pot of water on your stove. Scientists know that CO2 and other greenhouse gas's hold heat in the atmosphere. If you add more, they hold more heat. Something has to happen to that heat. You can't get around it. Lindzen's "iris hypothesis" which states the earth has a self-correcting mechanism where the heat escapes at the equator at least acknowledges that heat. That's real science so scientist ( although most think it's implausible) are testing it. Meanwhile there are no other real scientific explanations for why global warming won't happen. So the skeptics resort to disinformation to confuse the public. They cherry-pick data, or statements by scientist, and have their paid propagandists go about claiming it's a socialist plot, or that the scientist are just a bunch of hippie-environmentalists. Meanwhile the earth keeps getting warmer.
-
Permalink Reply by Van on
-
Here's a debunking of Joanne Nova's bullshit:
http://www.desmogblog.com/skeptics-handbook-carbon-dioxide-climate-...
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Permalink Reply by Van on
-
And here's a debunking of the "lists" of skeptical scientists that deniers keep putting out. It appears that the only credentials one needs to get on such lists are any kind of science background. I would qualify since I have a BS in chemistry. Oh and many of the people on these lists have asked to be taken off because they do believe in man-made global warming. But guess what? They never take them off the lists.
http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-busting-the-consensus-b...
http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day2/
http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/
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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on
-
Lindzen has taken big money from the oil companies.
He also goes around being skeptical about the link between tobacco and cancer.
He's a professional crank--which can be very profitable.
-
Permalink Reply by Van on
-
Yeah, left out of this argument is all the money deniers get for denying from right-wing groups. Glenn Beck for example gets 23 million a year for among other things denying GWT. A lot of these guys make money for going on Fox and other shows and spreading their bs. Then their are book sales for people like Joanne Nova. While some climate scientist may make money from similar sources, they're also doing actual research.
-
Permalink Reply by Kooch on -
Beck believes in AGW. http://www.usaweekend.com/article/20100219/ENTERTAINMENT01/10021800...
He's a tool all the way.
And I personally don't think it's not happening--I just think the panic is overblown. It's more politics driven by fear.
Plus, creating a new derivatives market is no way to address the issue. Goldman Sachs has enough money, don't you think?
BTW--many signatories to the 2007 IPCC report have asked to be removed for years. Not all because they don't believe--they just think the IPCC cherry-picked reports to present the bleakest possible outlook.
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Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on
-
So the media new the data was wrong 3 years ago...http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/03/junk-science-bombshell...
NASA and the state-run media knew about temperature data issues nearly three years ago…But pushed global warming junk science despite of this.
Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.
These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.
Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.
The reporter never published it.
There are only four climate datasets available. All global warming study, such as the reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), must be based on these four.
They are: the NASA GISS dataset, the NCDC GHCN dataset, the CRU dataset, and the Japan Meteorological Agency dataset.
Following Climategate, when it became known that raw temperature data for CRU’s “HADCRU3″ climate dataset had been destroyed, Phil Jones, CRU’s former director, said the data loss was not important — because there were other independent climate datasets available.
But the emails reveal that at least three of the four datasets were not independent, that NASA GISS was not considered to be accurate, and that these quality issues were known to both top climate scientists and to the mainstream press.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-heads-knew-na...
In a response to reporter Doyle Rice of USA Today, Dr. Reto Ruedy — a senior scientist at NASA — recommended the following:
Continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and Phil Jones’ [HADCRU3] data for the global means. …
We are basically a modeling group and were forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data in the 70s and early 80s. …
Now we happily combine NCDC’s and Hadley Center data to … evaluate our model results.
This response was extended later the same day by Dr. James Hansen — the head of NASA GISS:
[For] example, we extrapolate station measurements as much as 1200 km. This allows us to include results for the full Arctic. In 2005 this turned out to be important, as the Arctic had a large positive temperature anomaly. We thus found 2005 to be the warmest year in the record, while the British did not and initially NOAA also did not. …
It should be noted that the different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise.
Two implications of these emails: The data to which Phil Jones referred to as “independent” was not — it was being “corrected” and reused among various climate science groups, and the independence of the results was no longer assured; and the NASA GISS data was of lower quality than Jones’ embattled CRU data.
The NCDC GHCN dataset mentioned in the Ruedy email has also been called into question by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. D’Aleo and Watts showed in a January 2010 report that changes in available measurement sites and the selection criteria involved in “homogenizing” the GHCN climate data raised serious questions about the usefulness of that dataset as well.
These three datasets — from NASA GISS, NCDC GHCN, and CRU — are the basis of essentially all climate study supporting anthropogenic global warming.
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