Billion dollar climate-denial network exposed | Hacker News Reader

Billion dollar climate-denial network exposed

arstechnica.com

33 pointsswombat19 comments

Even though the underlying research is paywalled, the methodology is openly available and very interesting. It lists all the organisations in the study and their funding sources, plus the structure used for categorising their involvement. Look under Supplementary Material here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-013-1018-7

I find the methodology questionable. First, build a list of denier organizations based on anyone who has ever been remotely associated with known climate-deniers. This includes being labeled a conservative organization. Second, classify the organizations on a scale that categorizes anyone who neither remains totally silent nor actively encourages immediate government action as some form of denier. Third, pull all the publicly available funding data you can find on those organizations since 2003 and attribute it all to climate change denial.

Lots of these organizations are almost totally focused on non-climate change issues. There is no attempt made to figure out what fraction of their revenue might actually support climate change work, if any. (It would be difficult, given how little data 990s provide, but there are proxy measurements: number of staff working on climate change relative to total staff, number of climate change studies relative to total studies, etc.) Instead, if an organization so much as expresses some small doubt that immediate government action is the best solution to climate change problems, all of their revenues for years are considered to deny climate change.

This study is like the Glenn Beck chalkboard of climate change denial conspiracies.

Without seeing the actual paper I don't think it's fair to assume that no adjustment is made to an organisations funding to account for their level of involvement with climate change debate. The methodology paper appears to categorise them into 4 levels of involvement which could be used in the paper to weight the funding amounts.

Calling this a 'billion-dollar' network is misleading. Heritage and AEI are conservative policy think tanks with a variety of topics they write on, and counting their whole budgets is rather odd math.

Do they count their entire budgets? I wanted to get more details, and followed the link back to the original story on Wired UK (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/21/denial), which linked to the journal article in question at: http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-013-1018-7, which is sadly behind a paywall.

At any rate, I didn't read anything in the article that detailed their methodology well enough to see how you can conclude they are counting the entire AEI and Heritage budgets. They note the organizations get $7B USD in total donations, so if only 15% or so of their activity was climate denial related it would be an accurate title. Which seems completely plausible.

EDIT: why the downvote? Also, I thought it should go without saying, but they note that this isn't limited to AEI and Heritage, but that there are 91 groups they looked at.

Here's a link to the paper on the author's university's site: http://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionaliz...

Q: Does he test a null hypothesis.

How much money goes toward <promoting> climate change? That would actually be a far more intersting paper. Count all of the receipts and distribution of cash-flows down to the nickel on expensed taxis and expensive hotel-rooms, promotions, papers, professorships and other "self-interested" uses of what is almost always tax-payer money. There is nothing wrong at having a two-sided debate, I think the FISA courts are excellent examples on that front. People asking questions and taking opposing views is not, in the general sense any form of "conspiracy". Especially when what they are arguing over is just a proxy-war over other political topics that polite company doesn't always discuss in public--because it basically comes down to peoples sources of salary and their pay grade.

Seems kind of skewed. The groups called out by name in the article are think tanks that have large budgets and lobby for multiple and various causes, one of which might be climate change. Point understood but don't use funny data points to back up an "investigation."

The methodology accounts for varying degrees of involvement in climate change.

Climate change tends to be a small (if even existent) policy area addressed by most of these think tanks. It's highly misleading claim that all revenue over several years was used exclusively by these think tanks to deny climate change.

Last I checked those two organizations were also in favor of stronger Patriot Act-like laws, and other such things, probably because such laws favor their friends in the Military Industrial Complex.

This is a 300 word article, making a pretty big claim, that links to a $40 springer paper as it's source.

Not only can I not see what they're claiming is exposed, but the short article even mentions that most of the funding for these think tanks is routed through private trusts.

    However, Brulle admitted that tracing the funding back
    to its original sources was difficult, as around three
    quarters of the money has been routed through trusts that
    assure anonymity to their donors.

Ok...

'denying' climate change or just questioning the research?

If I were presented a very large pile of money, a large consensus and the task of changing that consensus (in order to stop changes that might cost me a very very large pile of money), I would fund both. The goal doesn't have to be changing everyone's minds.

The "moderate" voices actually hold a great swaying power in this situation. If you fund the extreme opposite to give them volume, you now have a base to provide "reasonable" voices (that you also fund) the power to say things like:

"lets not make rash decisions - lets study it more"

"Reactionary policy is awful - lets instead migrate to it slowly"

"Let's question the shady underworld of the consensus"

"Let's compromise"

The sad state of climate change debate is that we now have the vested interests of the fossil fuel economy pitted against the vested interests of the subsidised clean fuel economy, with their guaranteed feed-in tariffs. Not to mention the dozens of research facilities that are grant supported and would be closed down if the science and solutions were deemed to be entirely settled. All these players are fighting an existential war.

So, using the same methodology as this study, how many billions of dollars are involved in the climate-change network?

Well here's the numbers for the US only :

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...

I think it's pretty safe to say that money involved in the climate change network is at least 10 times the money being invested in denier networks.

And frankly the results are equally stupid. The IPCC has released 5 reports. Their predictions were wrong every single time. AR0, AR1, AR2, AR3, the world did not warm anywhere near their 95% predictions. So let's calculate. About one report every 5 years ... 95% "certainty" interval ... that means that if you believe the IPCC "certainty" they have made the mistakes they claim to make in 800000 (20^4 * 5) years, in 20 years.

Question for empiricists : why do you believe in climate change ? The predictions of climate change theory, as compiled by the IPCC, are falsified. It SHOULD be that simple.

Needless to say, color me in the "chaotic climate change" camp. I don't say it's not gotten warmer but I do say :

1) You cannot predict the effect of energy additions to a chaotic system. It may get colder as a result (and it has). Climate change theory only works on a planet in thermodynamic equilibrium, in other words, it would work on the moon. It doesn't work on the earth. A famous paper was published in 1962 with a proof that climate was chaotic, and that should really have been the end of any prediction.

2) The fact that it's chaotic means that there is no reasonable (finite, non-omniscient) way to predict climate evolution.

3) As a matter of principle, and organisation that publishes wrong predictions 4 times in a row should be laughed out of office, and out of funding. I think that this didn't happen indicates we just really, really, really want to believe climate change is happening and is human-caused.

and cue the shills...

Internet surveillance was widely known, but not a matter of public interest until Snowden.

The climate denial network is also widely known, but not a matter of public interest. There has to be some sort of catalyst to bring climate denial info focus.

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