Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight action on climate change | Hacker News Reader

Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight action on climate change

theguardian.com

44 pointsjballanc26 comments

Here's a much better write-up by the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservat... (not a fan of Wired's so-called "exposé" that is only a few paragraphs long and links to the Guardian article anyway)

Exposed: a US-based 77 billion dollar climate alarmist network:

  https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43227.pdf

(NB: My research has about as much bearing on the legitimate disagreement over the causes and extent of global warming as the original article.)

Well, one pot of money goes towards grants and publications subject to peer review, and scientific datasets that are publicly accessible, while the other comes from shady origins with no review whatsoever, for purposes that are clearly marked as PR, lobby and obstructionism...

With the series of exposes about the shortcomings of the peer review process it seems odd to lean on that very much. This seems particularly true since this topic is so politically charged and there would be virtually no funding available for climate change research absent government spending.

You don't throw the baby out with the bath water. That certain journals aren't doing peer review correctly, or that there is politics in the academia isn't a reason to not have peer review at all. And it does seem to work for some (PLoS One, for example). A flawed peer review system to validate knowledge is still better than a propaganda system driven for short term corporate gain.

Also - most academic scientific research depends on government spending. That's the whole point of academia, no? To work on problems companies don't want to fund because of no clear short-term impact on the bottom line. Not everyone is a Bell Labs or Google.

I do have to admit I sort of find it amusing when climate denialist alarmists (mmm, watch me pile the -ists on!) try to scream "Follow the money!" as if billions upon billions of dollars don't depend on climate alarmism being maintained exactly as is.

If "money" disproves or proves scientific hypotheses, there's a lot of things that need to be rewritten.

Funny thing is that they burn through all this money to publicize the thing that isn't true but they wished it was. As if this wasn't physical reality but some sort of soft, social thing like if allowing non-whites have same rights or women to vote is good idea or not.

In the end you can't bribe physics.

It would a stretch to equate the current state of climate science with the current state of physics in terms of the reliability of its' predictive models.

This creates a false dichotomy between climate science and physics. Researchers studying the climate use physical models to do so. And their accuracy is not bad--100 years ago they predicted that burning fossil fuels would warm the climate, and that matches what we measure today.

The precision is low, though. That is a result of the chaos created by the immense complexity of the systems involved. We can't predict the precise path of an individual electron through a bar of copper either.

I know people that denie carbon dioxide traps heat and wish that basic science is a conspiracy.

The fundamental question on climate change is whether you trust the academic- and government-funded ecosystem of scientific research. Structurally, it's not substantially different for research into the climate than it is for research into any other scientific subject.

If you believe such a structure is incapable of producing objectively supportable results on climate, then you must at least be skeptical of other scientific results.

If you feel different levels of trust for the results of different areas of scientific research, then you should engage in some introspection about the criteria you're using to make those distinctions. Is it because you have a deep working familiarity with those areas of research? Or because of some other factors?

It's possible for just about any scientific field to get stuck in an error cascade and take a while to climb out of it. Medicine has pretty much the same problem as climate - lots of scientists are doing good work but some are finding bogus results and we have very poor mechanisms for making sure the good work is what bubbles to the top. Even if many of the individual studies are fine, politically organized summaries of those study results are problematic - they can rather trivially be manipulated to show any result desired by controlling the timing of the inputs.

Good discussion of "error cascades" here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642

This research study finds that most research findings are false: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

With elementary school knowledge of history we can know that the the earth was warmer 1000 years ago than it was today. It's sad that it takes a billion dollars to get this simple truth out, but in the face of the billions of dollars at stake for special interests, governments, and UN beauracrats, it's sadly the case.

Can you (a) back this up and (b) explain why it's relevant?

I think the commenter is referring to the "Little Ice Age" which we do have a substantial amount of evidence for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

It would suggest that the climate fluctuates even during periods where carbon emissions from humans was far less than today.

Another term to search for is, Medieval Warm Period

It has been warmer before on Earth while people have been around. There have been articles as early from 2003 I can find in the Telegraph but like all views not following the "common consensus line" they are mocked, derided, or ignored.

From where tree lines ended on some mountains covered by snow, to the Vikings being able to navigate areas of the ocean that have ice this day. From where crops were grown then to today, there are many identifiable items from that period which point to a warmer climate than any we have.

If anything this article could read, 1 billion dollar network goes up against the 1 trillion or more dollar Global Warming industrial machine. There is a lot of money in GW and those making it don't want it threatened.

If that's true, it still doesn't follow that human activity isn't warming the climate, or that we can take the additional warming right now without enormous disruption. I call non-sequitur.

This information is provided to plant some reasonable doubt to anthropomorphic gw and to suggest there's larger forces at play here than greenhouse gasses.

It is relevant but it is not "proof" of anything on it's own, aside from the Earth's climate can shift substantially within short periods without any human contributions.

>"This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power."

>He added: "They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy."

This guy is really onto something. I hope is next exposé is of George Soros, the SPLF, the ADL and other groups with wealthy backers who push their own political agenda.

The original paper is here: http://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionaliz...

"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 assume anonymity to their donors."

Doesn't that basically invalidate the entire thesis of this little article? If he can't prove that there's a denial machine funded by specific entities, then maybe there isn't one. Maybe there's just a bunch of skeptics out there who don't buy into the claims of global warming.

Now, I do think there are macro changes happening that we can and should do something about. Personally, I like ozone and I hate skin cancer; I think we should do everything we can to restore the ozone protection layer in the upper atmosphere. I also hate poison ivy, which has been thriving in this CO2-rich era. I think it is a good idea to cut back on CO2 emissions and push for more reforestation across North America, and preserve the rain forests of South and Central America. Africa, too -- somehow, they need to control population growth and do some reforestation. This would probably help improve the quality of life for inhabitants of the planet over the next 50-100 years. But warming -- not sure if it's even our fault, let alone what we can do to slow it down. We're coming out of an ice age; it's not clear we want to or can reverse that process.

He said it was difficult not impossible, so that invalidates your little comment.

No, it doesn't. It also tends to imply that he didn't do it, so this is just "Look! Lots of money! Surely some of it is going here!" when you really get down to it.

Does it even matter? The recipients are identified, and it's pretty clear what their intentions are, and it's not to generate science or data attempting to refute global warming. It's pretty clearly earmarked for negative PR and lobbying.

Is this the logic here? Organization X received $Y in funding. Organization X in some part denies climate change. Therefore $Y is spent on fighting climate change.

This seems analogous to someone on the right looking at Planned Parenthood's budget $Z and saying that PP spends $Z on abortion.

Am I missing something?

Well two things:

1) "Organization X in some part denies climate change"

Organization X in _totality_ denies climate change

2) "This seems analogous to someone on the right "

The difference (at least in your quote) is that espousing the benefits of abortion is different from actually performing abortion, and no one is claiming that the organizations mentioned are actually burning coal with the $Y in funding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com