CRU Files Betray Climate Alarmists' Funding Hypocrisy

November 22, 2009
CRU Files Betray Climate Alarmists' Funding Hypocrisy
By Marc Sheppard
It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.


Amid the thousands of files apparently lifted from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief P.D. Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.


But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of "energy agencies" they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust -- are U.K.-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting "new energy" technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.


Needless to say, all four of these CRU "potential funding sources" have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on demand. And equally obvious, Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.


And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp.


For instance, when MIT’s Richard Lindzen delivers one of his trademark brilliant presentations leading to the conclusion that climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is about 0.5°C, not the 1.5°-5°C predicted by IPCC models, all we hear from alarmists and complicit media types is that the professor once charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services and is therefore an unreliable big-oil hack.


Or when S. Fred Singer challenges the IPCC to explain whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback, or stands before a graph depicting temperatures decreasing over the past ten years while CO2 climbed and declares that “the relationship is meaningless,” his words are similarly dismissed based solely on the fact that he has received funding from ExxonMobil.


Let’s set aside the fact that Lindzen had actually accepted a total of $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from such interests on the day he ceased such activities two decades ago. And that Singer has received only $20,000 from ExxonMobil. And that alarmists outfund climate by several orders of magnitude, which leads to the artificial expansion of the number of scientists who appear to support alarmist views. And even that monies paid to either side of the debate have zero impact on the science of whether or not 20th-century warming was caused or is exacerbated by man-made CO2 emissions. And don’t get me started on carbon-millionaire Al Gore.


The issue is this: Just how is it that funding from renewable energy interests evades charges of bias, yet subsidies from traditional power entities scream bloody conflict when each is equally friendly to the recipient’s cause?


As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw canard that the science is settled but for a few outliers in the fossil fuel industry's pockets is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had. And the scientific subterfuge exposed last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax that has been perpetrated upon them.


In the broader scheme, the credibility blow the IPCC will likely suffer from its top acolytes -- senior authors and editors -- bandying data-manipulation-revealing e-mails will weaken and perhaps ultimately break the AGW orthodoxy spine erected by its politically-charged assessments. And that can only serve to further declaw their fellow alarmists and media minions -- which of course would be nothing short of stupendous.


For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March:
There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.
And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who were the liers. Or the cheaters.


Or the bought-and-paid-for hypocrites.