Spending on Climate Change Research & Development

From ClimateWiki

The following is an article written by Marc Morano on the amount of money that has been spent on climate change research and development.

Paleoclimate scientist Robert Carter, who has testified before the Senate EPW committee, explains how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears.

"In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $U.S.50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one."

A Jan. 17, 2007, EPW blog post presents a breakdown of how much money flows to promoters of climate fear:

The [climate] alarmists . . . enjoy a huge financial advantage over the skeptics with numerous foundations funding climate research, University research money, and the United Nations endless promotion of the cause. Just how much money do the climate alarmists have at their disposal? There was a $3 billion donation to the global warming cause from Virgin Air's Richard Branson alone. The well-heeled environmental lobbying groups have massive operating budgets compared to groups that express global warming skepticism. The Sierra Club Foundation 2004 budget was $91 million and the Natural Resources Defense Council had a $57 million budget for the same year.

Compare that to the often media derided Competitive Enterprise Institute's small $3.6 million annual budget. In addition, if a climate skeptic receives any money from industry, the media immediately labels them and attempts to discredit their work. The same media completely ignore the money flow from the environmental lobby to climate alarmists like James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer (i.e., Hansen received $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation and Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of Environmental Defense Fund).

The alarmists have all of these advantages, yet they still feel the need to resort to desperation tactics to silence the skeptics. Could it be that the alarmists realize that the American public is increasingly rejecting their proposition that the family SUV is destroying the earth and rejecting their shrill calls for "action" to combat their computer model predictions of a "climate emergency?"

Alarmists Trump Skeptics Spending:

As Sen. Inhofe further explained in a Sept. 25, 2006 Senate floor speech: "The fact remains that political campaign funding by environmental groups to promote climate and environmental alarmism dwarfs spending by the fossil fuel industry by a 3-to-1 ratio. Environmental special interests, through their 527s, spent over $19 million compared to the $7 million that Oil and Gas spent through PACs in the 2004 election cycle."

Now contrast all of the above with how much money the "well funded" skeptics allegedly receive.

The most repeated accusation is that organizations skeptical of man-made climate fears have received $19 Million from an oil corporation over the past two decades. This was the subject of a letter by two U.S. senators in 2006.

To put this $19 million over two decades into perspective, consider that one 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant of $20 million to study how "farm odors" contribute to global warming exceeded all of the money that skeptics reportedly received in the past two decades.

To repeat: One USDA grant to study the role of "farm odors" in global warming exceeded almost all the money skeptics have been accused of receiving over the past two decades (excerpt from article: "The United States Department of Agriculture has released reports stating that when you smell cow manure, you're also smelling greenhouse gas emissions").

As erroneous and embarrassingly one-sided as Newsweek's article is, the magazine sunk deeper into journalistic irrelevance when it noted that skeptical climatologist Patrick Michaels had reportedly received industry funding without revealing to readers the full funding picture.

The magazine article mentions NASA's James Hansen as some sort of example of a scientist untainted by funding issues. But what Newsweek was derelict in reporting is that Hansen had received a $250,000 award from the Heinz Foundation run by Sen. John Kerry's wife Teresa in 2001 and then subsequently endorsed Kerry for President in 2004.

Science Vindicates Skeptics:

Finally, Newsweek's editorial rant attempts to make it appear as though the science is getting stronger in somehow proving mankind is driving a climate catastrophe. There are, however, major problem with that assertion.

Scientists are speaking up around the globe to denounce Gore, the U.N. and the media driven "consensus" on global warming.

Just recently, an EPW report detailed a sampling of scientists who were once believers in man-made global warming and who now are skeptical. (See May 15, 2007 report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics: Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research at http://epw.senate.gov/public/.)

Mathematician and engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, detailed how he left the global warming funding "gravy train" and became a skeptic. "By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming," Evans explained.

"But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed," Evans wrote. "The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were not initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role," he added.

In addition, just last week, three new scientific studies further strengthened the skeptics' views on climate change. Further, a recent analysis of peer-reviewed literature thoroughly debunks any fears of Greenland melting and a frightening sea level rise.

References

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/8/6/100434.shtml