The green blob and its double standards
Mar 26, 2015
Bishop Hill in Green Blob, Journals

I'm grateful to Ben Pile and Barry Woods for these observations about the latest edition of Nature Climate Change, a special with a focus on climate change and the media.

Barry noted that it featured articles by Leo Hickman, now of Carbon Brief, and Richard Black, now of the Energy and Climate Change Information Unit. By strange coincidence, both of these organisations are funded by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a conduit for funding sent by green billionaires.

Ben then pointed out that the author of another article - James Painter of the Reuters School of Journalism - was not only the son in law of Crispin Tickell but also the beneficiary of considerable funding from the self-same ECF. Another coincidence, no doubt, but one that meant that no fewer than three of the five articles in the special feature were written by ECF-funded authors.

(It was also noted that one of the editors at Nature Climate Change is Mat Hope, formerly of the Carbon Brief, and thus another beneficiary of ECF funding, but Mat has said that the papers were processed prior to his appointment at Nature.)

Anyway, it's a small world, the green blob, and one in which it seems it is not considered necessary to disclose all this environmentalist largesse as a potential conflict of interest. Which is strange when one recalls Richard Black's comments on Willie Soon:

_richardblack Latest news on #climate scientist Willie Soon both devastating and sad nyti.ms/17Ml8kV; how are @Harvard & @Smithsonian ok with this?

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