Tomorrow's edition of the British paper The Guardian has a story by Ed Pilkington entitled Revealed: oil-funded research in Palin's campaign against protection for polar bear
The first paragraph pretty much sums it up:
Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species....Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.
Excuse the mixed methaphor, but the Palin polar bear study is the tip of the proverbial iceberg...
This spring and summer, I worked on a book on global warming for Chelsea House Publishing's "Point/Counterpoint" series. These books, which are aimed at high school debaters, present the arguments on both sides of current controversies...hence the clever series title.
In researching the "Counterpoint" ("Global warming? What global warming?"), I soon discovered that that side of the debate was dominated by a tiny group of scientists. Which shouldn't be surprising since most members of the scientific community believe that greenhouse gases are raising the Earth's temperature, and that human activities are putting those gases into the atmosphere. Many of the "Counterpoint" scientists, and the astroturf organizations and faux think tanks they are affiliated with, receive at least some of their funding from energy companies.
Back to the polar bear report (The link is to the abstract and outline; it'll cost you to read the full text.) There are seven co-authors, and Pilkington describes four of them as "well-known climate- change contrarians."
Two of the four are Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Soon completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil. At one time, he was a senior scientist at the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998.
Soon and Baliunas have collaborated on a number of published works, including a 2003 paper they submitted to a journal called Climate Change. Pilkington notes that the paper was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, 13 scientists whom they cited issued a rebuttal, and several editors of Climate Research resigned because of the "flawed peer review". Nevertheless, this article is still widely cited by global-warming deniers.
There's more. According to SourceWatch.com, Baliunas and Soon are both winners of the Petr Beckmann Award, which is awarded for "courage and achievement in defense of scientific truth and freedom" at the annual meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Other past winners include S. Fred Singer and Sherwood Idso, both of whom are veterans of the global warming denial industry.
According to SourceWatch, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness is closely linked to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a small institute who put itself on the map by distributing--allegedly, under false pretenses--the Oregon Petition. That petition was circulated in an effort to discredit the Kyoto Accord on climate. It claims, among other things, that:
there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth
Baliunas and Soon are among the petition's authors.
Then there's Senator James Inhofe, the king of global warming deniers. He cited Baliunas and Soon in his 2003 "global warming is a hoax" floor speech.
By now, you might be noticing a pattern. Contrary to what the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, the right wing and the energy companies have bought their own version of the facts, then invested in an elaborate mechanism for distributing those "facts" to the media and policymakers.
The Palin polar bear report is only the latest example of a 10-year-long, industry-funded effort to discredit the scientific consensus about climate.