AGW Theory - Discussion

Are you under the impression that grant money comes out of ATMs or something?

The most obnoxious thing about these statements aren't that they're blatantly wrong. No, it's that people fully believe they know what the hell they're talking about when statements like that really sound the alarm they most certainly do not.

Actually, you are taking people out of context. Unless you really mean that 97% of climate scientists are out to defraud the government. Because, you just basically said that. Read what you quoted me and your 97% comment.

You need to explain why 97% of climate scientist are pro-AGW when you claim it's only a 'few' are engaging in fraud.

What about the rest of the climatologist who supposedly aren't engaging in fraud that are pro-AGW.

But fraud is happening, that much is certain.

Maybe because I don't think that they are all fraudsters?

I'm hoping that only a handful are doing it, I could be wrong and it could be dozens. But fraud is happening, that much is certain.

I know I'm going to be shunned for daring to ask this, but do you have any source for that? It's too easy to throw statements like this out because they sound good. Some actual factual evidence would be a really nice change.

....
Your forgetting the most important part:

Tell the money givers what they want to hear.

Something I read a while back

Although I don't think the amount is actually correct, fraud itself is hard to quantify without all the facts.

This document, you soon find out, contains damning evidence that a network of politicians, corporations, and scientists have conspired together to promote the fear of “global warming” . . . despite evidence clearly stating no such “global warming” exists.

That's a joke right?

Do you know how big the pro AGW industry is?

Billions bruh!

Okay, are people seriously claiming that grant money is easy to get

....
So stop throwing out *** about how pro-AGW is all you need to get a blank check. It's not even remotely grounded in fact, and just exposes real ignorance as to how research actually gets funded.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

Though Dr. Soon did not respond to questions about the documents, he has long stated that his corporate funding has not influenced his scientific findings.

The documents were obtained by Greenpeace, the environmental group, under the Freedom of Information Act. Greenpeace and an allied group, the Climate Investigations Center, shared them with several news organizations last week.

The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

“The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book about such campaigns. “Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.”

Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon’s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing.

“What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.

Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals.

“I think that’s inappropriate behavior,” Dr. Alcock said. “This frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.”

Dr. Soon is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, which jointly sponsors the astrophysics center with Harvard.

“I am aware of the situation with Willie Soon, and I’m very concerned about it,” W. John Kress, interim under secretary for science at the Smithsonian in Washington, said on Friday. “We are checking into this ourselves.”

Dr. Soon rarely grants interviews to reporters, and he did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls last week; nor did he respond to an interview request conveyed to him by his employer. In past public appearances, he has reacted angrily to questions about his funding sources, but then acknowledged some corporate ties and said that they had not altered his scientific findings.

“I write proposals; I let them decide whether to fund me or not,” he said at an event in Madison, Wis., in 2013. “If they choose to fund me, I’m happy to receive it.” A moment later, he added, “I would never be motivated by money for anything.”

The newly disclosed documents, plus additional documents compiled by Greenpeace over the last four years, show that at least $409,000 of Dr. Soon’s funding in the past decade came from Southern Company Services, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, based in Atlanta.

Southern is one of the largest utility holding companies in the country, with huge investments in coal-burning power plants. The company has spent heavily over many years to lobby against greenhouse-gas regulations in Washington. More recently, it has spent significant money to research ways to limit emissions.

“Southern Company funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public-policy implications for our business,” said Jeannice M. Hall, a spokeswoman. The company declined to answer detailed questions about its funding of Dr. Soon’s research.

Dr. Soon also received at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. (Mr. Koch’s fortune derives partly from oil refining.) However, other companies and industry groups that once supported Dr. Soon, including Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute, appear to have eliminated their grants to him in recent years.

As the oil-industry contributions fell, Dr. Soon started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through DonorsTrust, an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that accepts money from donors who wish to remain anonymous, then funnels it to various conservative causes.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Mass., is a joint venture between Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution, housing some 300 scientists from both institutions. Because the Smithsonian is a government agency, Greenpeace was able to request that Dr. Soon’s correspondence and grant agreements be released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.

Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.

Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.

Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it.

“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose scientists focus largely on understanding distant stars and galaxies, routinely distances itself from Dr. Soon’s findings. The Smithsonian has also published a statement accepting the scientific consensus on climate change.

Dr. Alcock said that, aside from the disclosure issue, he thought it was important to protect Dr. Soon’s academic freedom, even if most of his colleagues disagreed with his findings.

Dr. Soon has found a warm welcome among politicians in Washington and state capitals who try to block climate action. United States Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who claims that climate change is a global scientific hoax, has repeatedly cited Dr. Soon’s work over the years.

In a Senate debate last month, Mr. Inhofe pointed to a poster with photos of scientists questioning the climate-change consensus, including Dr. Soon. “These are scientists that cannot be challenged,” the senator said. A spokeswoman for the senator said Friday that he was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

As of late last week, most of the journals in which Dr. Soon’s work had appeared were not aware of the newly disclosed documents. The Climate Investigations Center is planning to notify them over the coming week. Several journals advised of the situation by The New York Times said they would look into the matter.

Robert J. Strangeway, the editor of a journal that published three of Dr. Soon’s papers, said that editors relied on authors to be candid about any conflicts of interest. “We assume that when people put stuff in a paper, or anywhere else, they’re basically being honest,” said Dr. Strangeway, editor of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.

Dr. Oreskes, the Harvard science historian, said that academic institutions and scientific journals had been too lax in recent decades in ferreting out dubious research created to serve a corporate agenda.

“I think universities desperately need to look more closely at this issue,” Dr. Oreskes said. She added that Dr. Soon’s papers omitting disclosure of his corporate funding should be retracted by the journals that published them.

Okay, are people seriously claiming that grant money is easy to get

I don't know where you got that information, but you done been lied to. Grant money - government or non-profit - is obnoxious as ***to get. The only "easy" money in science is private money, and that's pretty much ALL 1) pharmaceutical and 2) cancer and/or *** related.

Spend like ten minutes with a scientist and ask them about writing grant proposals, see how many shades of purple they turn. The wife was passed around departments at her institution for a while because she was so good at writing grant proposals, and it was literally more valuable to them than any research she could have possibly been doing (she works in public health, which we as a nation devalue anyway, so that doesn't help).

So stop throwing out *** about how pro-AGW is all you need to get a blank check. It's not even remotely grounded in fact, and just exposes real ignorance as to how research actually gets funded.

Okay, are people seriously claiming that grant money is easy to get

I don't know where you got that information, but you done been lied to. Grant money - government or non-profit - is obnoxious as ***to get. The only "easy" money in science is private money, and that's pretty much ALL 1) pharmaceutical and 2) cancer and/or *** related.

Spend like ten minutes with a scientist and ask them about writing grant proposals, see how many shades of purple they turn. The wife was passed around departments at her institution for a while because she was so good at writing grant proposals, and it was literally more valuable to them than any research she could have possibly been doing (she works in public health, which we as a nation devalue anyway, so that doesn't help).

So stop throwing out *** about how pro-AGW is all you need to get a blank check. It's not even remotely grounded in fact, and just exposes real ignorance as to how research actually gets funded.

Not nearly as big as competitive interests yet substantiated evidence against AGW is paltry. Go figure.

The point isn't that it's easy to get government money, but that it's EASIER to get it when you tie it to the party ideology (global warming is badz).

Something I read a while back

Although I don't think the amount is actually correct, fraud itself is hard to quantify without all the facts.

There's this too

Fantasy.

False. it is a committed belief there is not God. How many choices and beliefs grow from that one central one?

What does it mean for the state of morality? The value of Human Life?

It is a system.

Except she is most certainly correct while you are most certainly wrong on every aspect.

again.

vaccines debacle

Hope your happy with yourself. You've just literally killed people. When will it end.

Are you under the impression that grant money comes out of ATMs or something?