Sunday, February 7, 2010

Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers

Jonathan Owen and Paul Bignell in the Independent (UK) help explain the recent energizing of the propaganda war against the science of climate change. The irrational noise machine never falls silent: An orchestrated campaign is being waged against climate change science to undermine public acceptance of man-made global warming, environment experts claimed last night. The attack against scientists supportive of the idea of man-made climate change has grown in ferocity since the leak of thousands of documents on the subject from the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit last December.

Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.
Related articles

…Climate sceptic bloggers broadcast stories last week casting doubts on scientific data predicting dramatic loss of the Amazon rainforest. All three stories, picked up by mainstream media, questioned the credibility of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the way it does its work. A new attack on climate science, already dubbed "Seagate" by sceptics, relating to claims that more than half the Netherlands is in danger of being submerged under rising sea levels, is likely to be at the centre of the newest skirmish in coming weeks.

…A complicated web of relationships revolves around a number of right-wing think-tanks around the world that dispute the threats of climate change. ExxonMobil is a key player behind the scenes, having donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past few years to climate change sceptics. The Atlas Foundation, created by the late Sir Anthony Fisher (founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs), received more than $100,000 in 2008 from ExxonMobil, according to the oil company's reports….

'A Masonic anecdote' (Alessandro, Count of Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo), by James Gillray (died 1815), published 1786

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I truly believe that we have reached the point where technology has become one with our society, and I am fairly confident when I say that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.

I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Ethical concerns aside... I just hope that as the price of memory drops, the possibility of copying our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I dream about every once in a while.

(Posted from Nintendo DS running [url=http://knol.google.com/k/anonymous/-/9v7ff0hnkzef/1]R4i DSi[/url] Net5s)

libhom said...

So much of "conservative principal" is really just corruption.