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Important part: " Lindzen recieved $2500 a day from oil and coal interests for his services.1,2, 3 His article "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alle

by pavs 17y ago

Important part: " Lindzen recieved $2500 a day from oil and coal interests for his services.1,2, 3 His article "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.1 Lindzen has lectured at numerous Cooler Heads Coalition meetings. The Cooler Heads Coalition is funded by CEI which is in turn funded by Exxon Mobil. He has also given talks for the George C. Marshall Institute which is also funded by Exxon Mobil. His connections to the oil, coal, and even tobacco industry are apparently rather extensive. Here is one listof many that is worth exploring. Richard Lindzen claims he is currently not recieving any handouts from oil companies."

anamax 17y ago
If you're going to argue that he's been bought, you get to explain why AGW supporters aren't bought as well. After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger. Of course, the truth is that money isn't the most corrupting influence by a large margin - true belief is. You can often spot true believers by their insistence that money is the only reason why their position isn't universally accepted.
- dgabriel 17y ago
  All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent. Frankly, I think the connections to the oil industry, et al., are not as important as the veracity (or lack thereof) of his claims.
  - g2boojum 17y ago
    "All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent." Any evidence for that statement? My academic research was mostly funded by the US NSF, which doesn't really strike me as a "special interest". The NSF doesn't particularly care what the results are, just that the questions are worth answering and that the approach is reasonable.
    - hga 17y ago
      I'm not asking you to do this work, but to prove your point you'd need to list some research that the NSF has funded that "denies" global warming (assuming they fund the reverse).
      - cgranade 17y ago
        That's false equivalency. The NSF doesn't fund research to show that the earth is flat, because it isn't. Just because the well-tested AGW hypothesis exists doesn't mean that AGW denialism is on equal footing.
        anamax 17y ago
        The "earth is round" folks don't hide data. They show their work. Note that the NSF does fund things that seriously test special relativity. Do you really think that the temp measurements are as sound? You remember the temp measurements. The US ones come from stations in parking lots, and they're the good ones. A huge fraction of the foreign ones have been moved. We don't know how that was adjusted for. (The dog ate their homework.) Which reminds me, we have data showing that CO2 levels on earth have been several times higher than the projected disaster case. Care to guess what the "unbearable" temps were?
    - dgabriel 17y ago
      "To a certain extent," meaning that popular stuff gets funded at a much higher rate than unpopular research. I'm not suggesting your motives, or the motives of other hard-working scientists, are suspect. I'm just pointing out that most science is funded by outside organizations that have their own agendas, and can exercise those agendas by choosing what to fund. As an aside, this is true in scientific publications, as well. Just because your research is great, and your conclusions sound, doesn't mean Cell (or whatever journal) is going to print it.
- jellicle 17y ago
  "After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger." Citation? I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying people to issue opinions favorable to themselves. Perhaps you can point some out to me.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying Are you suggesting that corporations are the only parties that have interests? > opinions favorable to themselves Irrelevant. Do you believe that NSF or the Energy Department views research likely to be critical of AGW the same way that it views research that is likely to be supportive? I do appreciate that you're demonstrating my claim that many folks think that monetary self-interest is the only corrupting influence. Many folks don't after I point that out because they realize that it isn't, that it isn't even the big one.
hga 17y ago
Why is this important? He's not going to get any funding by the government, which has decided "the science is settled". By this standard, the funding of the members of "the consensus" is just as important and just as damning, if not more, since there's billions annually being funded on the other side.
- cgranade 17y ago
  As I said elsewhere, that's false equivalency. Just because AGW-denialism is not orthodox doesn't mean that it's on equal footing with AGW. By your argument, the government should fund intelligent design (or should I say evolution denialism) too!
  - hga 17y ago
    The "skeptics" and "deniers", with some important exceptions, do not deny outright and in total the validity of climate science, which would be necessary to draw a valid equivalency between them and the Intelligent Design crowd. Many, perhaps most, don't even have a serious alternative theory, they're just pointing out what they think is wrong with AGW. The important exceptions are: As far as I know, the computer models that predict serious AGW just don't work. They don't "predict the past", i.e. you feed them historical data and they don't then predict what actually happened, and now that we can test their predictions they aren't working either. E.g.: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&file... ESR comments (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473): "Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote. It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models. "But the second sentence is actually far more damning. “The data is surely wrong.” This is how and where most scientific fraud begins." And that brings us to the second big issue, how good is the data and based on that what can it be used for. The proxies are very iffy, especially when they get out of the historical period and can be compared to fairly solid actual temperature measurements ("hide the decline" of the tree ring proxies). Then there's the questions of older thermometers, where researchers are trying to tease fractional degrees out of instruments with hand painted lines. That goes many times over for the proxies. And the problem with badly situated ground monitoring stations, especially the urban heat island problem. Then there's the demonstrated poor to impossible quality of the CRU data and their loss of the original data; as the detailed in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file (http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt), they can't even reproduce their own massaging of the original data.... And as I understand it, the NASA satellite data has been calibrated against these poor ground station data sets, not e.g. weather balloons, but I could be wrong there. This is important since instruments can drift over time, and when they're in an inaccessible satellite.... This just hits the highlights of the problems with the data, before we get into a whole lot of what looks like at worst case outright fraud. These things including fraud don't throw climate science per se into doubt as a discipline, but they do engender skepticism and denial of AGW, which as noted is another thing altogether. Anyway, I'll repeat the call many people are making: open it up. Retrieve the original lost records, do the science in the open, publishing all methods, code and data, and let the chips fall where they may. When an author of a published "science" paper refuses to share his raw data, methods and code (and we're not talking about e.g. chemistry/chemical engineering where there's competitive advantage on the table for chemical companies), people legitimately wonder and discount what he says. When scientists give "the dog ate my homework" excuses, you might believe them about that (I think it's very possible WRT to the CRU ... but it says something that they didn't consider it important to archive it carefully), but I don't see how you're obliged to treat their unconfirmable results with any respect. Add the bad faith that's manifest in the CRU emails....
deanj 17y ago
I get it, attack the person, not what he's saying.
- cgranade 17y ago
  Actually, you'll find that we're doing both. It is perfectly valid to point out conflicts of interest (it's a favored denialist tactic to invent CoIs that don't even exist, so isn't it hypocritical to take umbrage when CoIs are brought up?), so long as the actual claims are also addressed. This is like the difference between making your argument rest upon an ad hominem and making a wonderful argument followed by "oh, and you're an idiot." You don't get to reject the mountains of well-understood science just because one guy dared raise questions about conflicts of interest.

by pavs 17y ago

anamax 17y ago

If you're going to argue that he's been bought, you get to explain why AGW supporters aren't bought as well. After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger. Of course, the truth is that money isn't the most corrupting influence by a large margin - true belief is. You can often spot true believers by their insistence that money is the only reason why their position isn't universally accepted.

dgabriel 17y ago
All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent. Frankly, I think the connections to the oil industry, et al., are not as important as the veracity (or lack thereof) of his claims.
- g2boojum 17y ago
  "All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent." Any evidence for that statement? My academic research was mostly funded by the US NSF, which doesn't really strike me as a "special interest". The NSF doesn't particularly care what the results are, just that the questions are worth answering and that the approach is reasonable.
  - hga 17y ago
    I'm not asking you to do this work, but to prove your point you'd need to list some research that the NSF has funded that "denies" global warming (assuming they fund the reverse).
    - cgranade 17y ago
      That's false equivalency. The NSF doesn't fund research to show that the earth is flat, because it isn't. Just because the well-tested AGW hypothesis exists doesn't mean that AGW denialism is on equal footing.
      - anamax 17y ago
        The "earth is round" folks don't hide data. They show their work. Note that the NSF does fund things that seriously test special relativity. Do you really think that the temp measurements are as sound? You remember the temp measurements. The US ones come from stations in parking lots, and they're the good ones. A huge fraction of the foreign ones have been moved. We don't know how that was adjusted for. (The dog ate their homework.) Which reminds me, we have data showing that CO2 levels on earth have been several times higher than the projected disaster case. Care to guess what the "unbearable" temps were?
  - dgabriel 17y ago
    "To a certain extent," meaning that popular stuff gets funded at a much higher rate than unpopular research. I'm not suggesting your motives, or the motives of other hard-working scientists, are suspect. I'm just pointing out that most science is funded by outside organizations that have their own agendas, and can exercise those agendas by choosing what to fund. As an aside, this is true in scientific publications, as well. Just because your research is great, and your conclusions sound, doesn't mean Cell (or whatever journal) is going to print it.
jellicle 17y ago
"After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger." Citation? I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying people to issue opinions favorable to themselves. Perhaps you can point some out to me.
- anamax 17y ago
  > I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying Are you suggesting that corporations are the only parties that have interests? > opinions favorable to themselves Irrelevant. Do you believe that NSF or the Energy Department views research likely to be critical of AGW the same way that it views research that is likely to be supportive? I do appreciate that you're demonstrating my claim that many folks think that monetary self-interest is the only corrupting influence. Many folks don't after I point that out because they realize that it isn't, that it isn't even the big one.

hga 17y ago

Why is this important? He's not going to get any funding by the government, which has decided "the science is settled". By this standard, the funding of the members of "the consensus" is just as important and just as damning, if not more, since there's billions annually being funded on the other side.

cgranade 17y ago
As I said elsewhere, that's false equivalency. Just because AGW-denialism is not orthodox doesn't mean that it's on equal footing with AGW. By your argument, the government should fund intelligent design (or should I say evolution denialism) too!
- hga 17y ago
  The "skeptics" and "deniers", with some important exceptions, do not deny outright and in total the validity of climate science, which would be necessary to draw a valid equivalency between them and the Intelligent Design crowd. Many, perhaps most, don't even have a serious alternative theory, they're just pointing out what they think is wrong with AGW. The important exceptions are: As far as I know, the computer models that predict serious AGW just don't work. They don't "predict the past", i.e. you feed them historical data and they don't then predict what actually happened, and now that we can test their predictions they aren't working either. E.g.: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&file... ESR comments (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473): "Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote. It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models. "But the second sentence is actually far more damning. “The data is surely wrong.” This is how and where most scientific fraud begins." And that brings us to the second big issue, how good is the data and based on that what can it be used for. The proxies are very iffy, especially when they get out of the historical period and can be compared to fairly solid actual temperature measurements ("hide the decline" of the tree ring proxies). Then there's the questions of older thermometers, where researchers are trying to tease fractional degrees out of instruments with hand painted lines. That goes many times over for the proxies. And the problem with badly situated ground monitoring stations, especially the urban heat island problem. Then there's the demonstrated poor to impossible quality of the CRU data and their loss of the original data; as the detailed in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file (http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt), they can't even reproduce their own massaging of the original data.... And as I understand it, the NASA satellite data has been calibrated against these poor ground station data sets, not e.g. weather balloons, but I could be wrong there. This is important since instruments can drift over time, and when they're in an inaccessible satellite.... This just hits the highlights of the problems with the data, before we get into a whole lot of what looks like at worst case outright fraud. These things including fraud don't throw climate science per se into doubt as a discipline, but they do engender skepticism and denial of AGW, which as noted is another thing altogether. Anyway, I'll repeat the call many people are making: open it up. Retrieve the original lost records, do the science in the open, publishing all methods, code and data, and let the chips fall where they may. When an author of a published "science" paper refuses to share his raw data, methods and code (and we're not talking about e.g. chemistry/chemical engineering where there's competitive advantage on the table for chemical companies), people legitimately wonder and discount what he says. When scientists give "the dog ate my homework" excuses, you might believe them about that (I think it's very possible WRT to the CRU ... but it says something that they didn't consider it important to archive it carefully), but I don't see how you're obliged to treat their unconfirmable results with any respect. Add the bad faith that's manifest in the CRU emails....

deanj 17y ago

I get it, attack the person, not what he's saying.

cgranade 17y ago
Actually, you'll find that we're doing both. It is perfectly valid to point out conflicts of interest (it's a favored denialist tactic to invent CoIs that don't even exist, so isn't it hypocritical to take umbrage when CoIs are brought up?), so long as the actual claims are also addressed. This is like the difference between making your argument rest upon an ad hominem and making a wonderful argument followed by "oh, and you're an idiot." You don't get to reject the mountains of well-understood science just because one guy dared raise questions about conflicts of interest.