by TIMOTHY P. CARNEY
Washington Examiner
November 25, 2009
“I’m in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measur[e]ments here in the UK — looking promising,” wrote Andrew Manning, a climate-science research fellow at the University of East Anglia, “so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases.”
Manning’s e-mail, written in October to a colleague at East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit, was one of the thousands of private communiques exposed to public view by a whistleblower or a hacker. The note and others like it reveal the intriguing relationship between industry giants like Siemens and the scientists driving climate change fears. More importantly, though, Manning’s e-mail shows the incentives of climate scientists: Convince people there is a climate disaster coming, get more money.
Manning and the warming crowd benefit from a beautiful feedback loop: The more governments, businesses, and media outlets you can convince that man-made global warming is a serious threat, the more these institutions will invest in climate change studies, solutions, and policies. And the more they invest in combating global warming — whether it’s a newspaper hiring a climate reporter, a company buying emissions credits and alternative energy sources, or a government building a climate lab — the less willing they are to tolerate dissent on the issue.
So the warming crowd, these e-mails show us, suffers from the same conflicts of interest and profit motives that are frequently attributed to skeptics. When Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, Gore charged that global warming deniers were trying to protect profits. Gore quoted fabled muckraker Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
The rest is at the Examiner.
