Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) held a hearing on climate science called, “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” As one might guess given the fact that Cruz has received over $2 million from the oil and gas industry, the witnesses were heavily skewed, with three deniers testifying and only one witness, retired Navy Admiral Dr. David Titley, representing reality.
One of the witnesses that Cruz called to testify was Dr. William Happer. The same day he testified, Greenpeace undercut Happer's credibility by publishing the results of an undercover investigation showing that Happer is willing to take money (in the form of donations to his NGO) from a Middle Eastern oil company in exchange for publishing a report on the benefits of CO2. By funneling the money through the CO2 Coalition—a climate skeptic campaign group for which he sits as a member of the board—Happer could then claim that he received no financial compensation for the report.
Happer seems to have had no qualms about the funding arrangement. He agreed not to disclose the source of his money and went so far as to ask a colleague to facilitate the transfer of funds from the supposed oil company through Donors Trust so that the public would never know the proposed report was funded by a fossil fuel company . Happer also admits to being paid $8,000 by coal giant Peabody—through a “donation” to the CO2 coalition—for his testimony in a Minnesota hearing on climate change. This of course begs the question: who’s paying him how much to testify on the Hill yesterday?
Greenpeace managed to ask Happer directly before the start of the hearing how much he's taken from Peabody, to which Happer replied, “You son of a bitch, I haven’t taken a dime.” Twice.
Adding another layer of intrigue to the story, Happer apparently set out plans for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to nominally peer-review his report. The GWPF has done this for other reports, so that skeptics and deniers (like Matt Ridley) would be able to refer to the report as “peer-reviewed,” despite the report not being published in a peer-reivewed academic journal. This, in turn, has led to an investigation into GWPF by the UK Charity Commission.
So to answer the hearing’s question, "Data or Dogma?,” all the fossil-fuel-funding data suggests the answer is this: when it comes to what deniers like Cruz and his witnesses espouse, it's dogma.
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