Follow the money
Dec 9, 2009 Climate This is stolen from the comments at WUWT:
A reader commented as follows:
... 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 another reader, a scientist named 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.
This confirms the stories that I've been hearing over the last few years.
Reader Comments (51)
Some time ago (15 - 20 years ?) UK university departments stopped getting full government funding for pure blue sky research and thinking.
They have been encouraged to attract outside/industrial fuinding, in fact this has become a major part of running any sort of research these days.
Having the IPCC or UK government on side is a big incentive for climate researchers to get the 'right' results.
Wasn't it £13 million Jones received over a number of years?
Isn't that the one great lesson of Economics: "incentives matter"?
Further to my previous posts (Darwin thread) on "has any UK analysis been done on raw UK data, and how much as CET (Central England stats) been manipulated and why?"
Just seen an article on "Englishman Castle" dated December 8th entitled Willis Escenbach debates with Parker on CET adjustments! Looks interesting.
Regarding real UK ( esp. Scottish) raw data from the GHCN online series I can only access graph output not data behind the graphs. Is there another way?
Lastly thanks to Cumbrian Lad for his link to the work he's done on CET in the Darwin thread.
If Paul can produce the (one or several) funding application(s) so desribed, that would be rather meaningful. Until then, I'm afraid its hearsay.
Mark, for the raw data go to the page you were on with the graph, now look carefully underneath and you will find a heading DOWNLOADS. You can download monthly data as text and then open say excel and open the file and excel will try to import it into cells. Save as xls and away you go. (I'm assuming you are going to review it in excel so ignore that bit if you are not).
Would anyone even be offered a role in a "Climate Science" department or research project if their view did not accept the existing "groupthink". This seems to confirm it from another angle.
A similar anecdote:
A friend is a lecturer in a Higher Education establishment (an agricultural college in fact; I won't say more because there are not many and he won't want to be identified).
He showed me their prospectus for next year's courses. It is entirely stuffed with wibble about "green farming", "environmental" this that and the next thing, "low-carbon" so-and-so, and is suffused with the underlying assumption that the AGW hypothesis is completely true and unchallengeable.
I commented on this.
He agreed, and pointed out that "if you don't do this stuff, you won't get any funding".
Q.E.D.
Slightly OT; a farming friend was advised that if he didn't go into a "Stewardship scheme" he would be targetted for an endless stream of inspections and petty prosecutions until he submitted.
Apologies for pseudonym (bishop, the email is real), but the number of bulls**t prosecutions the poor guy has received so far mean that he'd soon be looking at a stay in prison if he got more.
I fear that this comment is only too true. HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) want to base 25% of research assessment on the economic value of research and it's societal impact. What do they mean by societal impact. They mean research that makes major changes to the way society responds to issues. It's all part of post-modern science.
As an interesting comment a few months back I reviewed a short technical paper on gas diffucion through butyl rubber septa that are used to seal sampling vials (vacutainers etc.) The opening sentence in the introduction was 'With the onset of global warming.....'
With all this discussion of CET, no one seems to have recommended the web site of Dr Wilson Flood who has made an extensive study: http://mclean.ch/climate/England_Scotland.htm
Or as others have noted, maybe the most damning email from the CRU circle is this July 2005 message from Phil Jones to climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”
In other words, he — like a lot of other climate scientists around the world — has a vested interest in the issue.
The world needs more sober, dispassionate analyses of the data by experts outside the field — statisticians and economists especially.
Here we go. The UK's Natural Environment Research Council has a Funding News page
This is where your taxes are going:
8 Dec: Climate Geo-engineering
4 Dec: Ocean Acidification
4 Dec: Ecosystems Services for Poverty Alleviation
1 Dec: Postgrad skills needs
1 Dec: Technology Proof of Concept
27 Nov: Reducing uncertainty in models for environmental decision-making
And so on... (these are just the top ones)
It's a mixture of eco-babble and solipsism - some include both.
If someone could compile evidence of these funding incentives for AGW, that would be very helpful. It's not that I don't believe Mr. (Dr?) Vaughan, but proof is always stronger than belief. Scanned copies of applications, or screen shots of applications on webpages, would be strong evidence of this bias in funding.
How scientists arrive at a consensus:
From Email from the Climate Research Unit - 1254832684.txt - October 2009
Hi Phil,
...
(I'm in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurments here in the UK - looking promising, so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases
...
Kind regards,
Andrew
I always reply to the "conspiracy" question that "It doesn't take a conspiracy to get the lemmings off the cliff, just a follow-the-leader mentality."
Quite often many people bring up the Eisenhower quote about the military-industrial complex. What is quite often left out is another part of that same thought. He stated that it was not a good idea for the Federal Government to become heavily involved in research.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/the_scientific_technological_e.html
And that is where we are with this AGW nonsense.
We are seeing the corruption of higher education and research by the Government to produce post-modern science.
in the uk, there have been several recent initiatives from the research councils on how to deal with and how to estimate the consequences of global warming.
by comparison, i think there is little on actually determining whether global warming is real.
Poor Paul! Unless he used a fake name, he's definately out of the funding loop now.
kdk33, on the same basis, until CRU (and others) shows the original data and their (intelligible) workings, their "value added data" are just anecdotes with no scientific value.
Well looking at the fringe benefits like the $300 million dollar Copenhagen junket, as well as various other lavish climate conferences as well as better funding, easier peer review, easier acceptance of publication of material - any career scientist would only have 1 choice - well that is if he/she has no conscience.
"He stated that it was not a good idea for the Federal Government to become heavily involved in research."
Power corrupts and the power of Government monies raining down from politically motivated elites corrupts absolutely.
http://www.epa.gov/region09/climatechange/grants.html
http://southwestfarmpress.com/energy/renewable-energy-research-1029/
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/stim09c.htm
"The final bill provides $3.5 billion for energy R&D at the Department of Energy (DOE) and would fund climate change-related projects in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)"
$3.5 BILLION!
Many years ago in the UK there were two presenters of "nature" programmes on TV. One was David Bellamy and the other was David Attenborough.
We do not see David Bellamy now and this has been the case for many years. Here is a link to his story http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6598056/Eco-hero-David-Bellamy-botanist-and-campaigner.html.
David Attenborough has just been on BBC2 frightening the viewers about world population. I have had to stop watching because it is full of contradictions and misinformation. He is also on BBC1 in about an hour talking about global warming. I shall give it a go but I suspect that it will be the usual guff.
There may be conspiratorial elements, but overall it is a confederacy, not conspiracy. A "perfect storm" of separate interests, in increasing order-- universities and profs who want fundings, government bureaucracies addicted to special AGW funding, European neo-imperialists with passions to control humanity, politicians looking for tax revenues to bless on friends' programs, and most of all, the carbon instrument trading interest, private and governmental (the latter, UK, Norway, so on.)
Way OT, I know but... BBC1 showing "Hot Planet" at 10:45pm (9/12/09). I hope it doesn't suffer the same number of complaints to Ofcom, as "The Great Global Warming Swindel" did in 2007 according to Wikipedia (a fine example of peer reviewed work if ever there was one !)
Mr/Dr Vaughn wasn't an employee at the CRU was he ?
@Ed Snack
I agree (100%).
Its not that I don't believe Paul, but a scanned posted copy of one of those funding applications would make a powerful statement. Until then, its hearsay,hence less powerful.
Didn't mean to be rude, just candid.
This may seem off-topic, but bear with me please:
I'm currently reading a book called "Bad Science: The short life and wierd times of Cold Fusion" by Gary Taubes (1993).
Anyone remember Cold Fusion? Two chemists, Pons and Fleischmann, in 1989 announced that they had discovered a way to induce cold (room-temperature) nuclear fusion using relatively simple and cheap lab desktop equipment. Amid the furore surrounding this announcement it turned out that a guy called Steve Jones had also been working on something very similar, and he also made an announcement.
Physicists who knew about fusion were sceptical from the start, but many other people, including more generalist scientists were very interested, and many firms, state and national governments even more so, to the point of being prepared to throw millions of dollars into continuing the research.
Well, of course, it didn't come to anything, but for a while, it looked like it might. At the time I was working in a UK publicly-funded lab that had a very tangential role in trying to reproduce the the results (almost no-one could, although some fairly prominent labs thought they had for a while). Although I wasn't a physicist, I'd always been interested in Physics, and these were heady days indeed. Excitement was in the air.
Well, it seems to me that the case of MMGW and Cold Fusion have some things in common, although they also differ considerably.
In Common: A group of scientists were convinced of something although they were not able to realistically prove it, and they went on believing it long after the evidence for it stopped being convincing.
Large amounts of money were thrown at the idea, in spite of very little real evidence being presented.
Where they differ: In the case of Cold fusion, the scientific establishment, at least the physicists, were sceptical and mostly remained so. This was less true of the chemists who thought they'd got one over on the smartass physicists.
Well of course, in the case of Climate Change, the establishment was also initially sceptical, but at some point seems to have lost its scepticism. Some of the reason for this may have been financial; money was prepared to be thrown at any study, so long as it proved what had somehow become the received wisdom. That never quite happened with Cold Fusion, perhaps because people had been studying fusion in general for a long time at quite a detailed level, and although the problems of maintaining a continuous fusion reaction for a long time were difficult, the basic physics was pretty well understood. The science of climate change is still not really well understood, although some people try to tell us that it is.
One of the things that Taubes (who is essentially a journalist, although he is a science graduate and postgrad) tells us over and over in this book is that scepticism is essential to science. Pons, Fleischmann, and perhaps Jones allowed their optimism to overcome their scepticism and basically they fooled themselves.
When I've finished the book, I'll try to add some choice quotes from it where they seem appropriate.
Thought you might be interested in this.........
http://www.cefas.co.uk/data/sea-temperature-and-salinity-trends/presentation-of-results/station-18-dover.aspx
Because I enjoy swimming in the area last year I requested an update to see how temperatures had changed since 2004 which is when the final date on the graph. I was sent an xls file which took the data up to 2006. If you would like me to send this attachment to you don't hesitate to email me.
Keep up the good work.
I disagree on Cold Fusion, as I recall it. Fleischmann and Pons thought they had discovered an effect, and it was widely published. Others tried to reproduce it and couldn't, although some thought they had, at first. Most physicists thought it was probably nonsense, but thinking it's probably nonsense and dismissing it out of hand, and attempting to reproduce the work and failing, are different things. It's the way science should work.
Some money may have been spent looking into cold fusion, but nothing like the amount spent on AGW research. Don't forget the way that AGW has flowed over into and distorted other research areas. It's not as if we were spending billions on coldfusion power stations.
Science is littered with amazing discoveries which turned out to be self-delusion or mistakes. Look up the story of N rays. It was debunked by a reporter from Nature quietly removing an aluminium prism, key to the demonstration, from the apparatus and finding that the discoverer still detected N rays.
http://www.skepdic.com/blondlot.html
In those days, Nature was a critical scientific journal.
At about the same time as cold fusion, high temperature superconductivity was announced. This was reproduced and explained. When that was announced there were all sorts of speculations about how it was going to transform all our lives with faster computers and so on. I'm not sure that high temperature superconductivity has had any significant practical applications.
Where the comparison between cold fusion and AGW breaks down, is that the claims of AGW are much harder to pin down and haven't been subjected to proper scrutiny as they bloody well should have been.
Was it follow the money and/ or Follow the flock?
There is a long history of bureaucracy after bureaucracy blindly following an idea which looks promising, but which turns into a disaster.
It happens in private and state sectors, Just look at the endless management fads
There is a self cleansing mechanism in the private sector - stupid behaviour leads to bankruptcy (unless the greater stupidity of a tax payer funded bail-out is used).
Unfortunately with the state sector controlling such a large proportion of the economy, and senior state sector employees being virtually fireproof... idiocy isn't cleaned out quite as quickly.
Following on from mikeE's cold fusion example:
The ABC Dragonfly (the aero engine the British establishment hoped would win WW1, it had been sold so well that all eggs were put in its basket, it turned out to have almost every fault possible in an engine, and left Britain without a suitable successor to the 130HP engines which were being out classed by German developments.
Canada, pre WW1 adopting then clinging to the Ross rifle (Wise Canadians picked up dropped SMLEs in the trenches)
The Saga of the British Army's SA80 rifle
Britain's (and the Commonwealth's) continuing (79 year old) idea of keeping the law-abiding citizens defenceless, while crimminals simply don't obey the laws and arm themselves, certain in the knowledge that their prey can't fight back.
Meant to say;
I can't get two tunes from my childhood out of my brain, Danny Kaye singing "The King is in the altogether" and "Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen"
Both from Hans Andersen's Fairy tales.
Please publish that funding request document on-line. That document alone will completely change the tenor of the publich discussions.
The band wagon chasing the gravy train.
Cosmic: I don't really disagree with you. My main point was I suppose, about certain scientists losing objectivity, and self-scepticism. Fortunately the band-wagon stopped before millions became billions, which of course was not the case with MMGW. On a small point of detail, I think high-temperature superconductivity preceded cold fusion. Taubes cites this as an example of scientists being rightly sceptical, although in that case it turned out to be good science (even if it may have had few real-world applications at the end of the day).
BTW, I think Taubes could write a great book on MMGW/CC if he chose to, although I think he is pretty well occupied with other things; plus it's a rather crowded field these days.
Paul Vaughan presents some potentially lethal evidence against the science-funding establishment. However, he would be more effective if he provided details on the funding source making these damning demands on the research to be funded. This kind of stuff needs maximum public exposure complete with a list of those individuals behind the demands for potential researcher bias.
Heres some more sums the global warming alarmists are interested in;
www.twawki.com
"a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice." Beautiful !
Paul Vaughan - the insightful quote of our times.
" If someone could compile evidence of these funding incentives for AGW, that would be very helpful. It's not that I don't believe Mr. (Dr?) Vaughan, but proof is always stronger than belief. Scanned copies of applications, or screen shots of applications on webpages, would be strong evidence of this bias in funding.
December 9, 2009 | Robert Arthur"
Quite agree. I was just about to post something to the same effect. Yes, but this needs to be a concerted effort that will keep climategate in the spotlight and avoid it being swept under the carpet. - Very important, that.
I have also copied some of Paul Vaughan's other comments (mostly on WUWT) which I find particularly penetrating).
Saw the Attenborough prog (Horizon?)
He slalommed from one fallacy to another. Does he really think in this medieval way himself?