Competing interest?

Dec 1, 2010
Bishop Hill in Climate: WG3, Ethics, Journals

There has been quite a degree of interest in the Louise Gray article in the Telegraph the other day - the one in which we were led to believe that a variety of scientists were calling for a halt to economic growth and the introduction of rationing.

Donna Laframboise is one person who has been taking a look at this story. She notes that Louise Gray is not presenting an accurate picture to her readers:

Gray, who appears to have interviewed Anderson, fails to make it clear that the bit about rationing represents Anderson’s personal opinion. It is highly misleading to suggest, as her article does, that this measure enjoys the support of “physicists and chemists from some of world’s most respected scientific institutions.”

As others have observed, Anderson is not only a director of the Tyndall Institute for Climate Change, but, more remarkably, is a non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management, a company that works " in partnership with commercial and public sector organisations to enable them to measure, manage and report their carbon emissions".

Now this looks to me like a fairly clear competing interest, one that one would have expected Prof Anderson to declare in his new paper in Phil Trans A. The code of practice for UK researchers published by the UK Research Integrity Office says that:

3.15.6 ... All funders and sponsors of research should be clearly acknowledged and any competing interests listed.

Unfortunately, Prof Anderson appears to have forgotten to mention his interests in the paper in question.

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).