Cyrus Dugger

Scientists Offered Cash by American Enterprise Institute to Dispute Climate Study

Perhaps one of the most strident supporters of the self-labeled tort “reform” movement is the Liability Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Last Friday, The Guardian published an article with allegations that the American Enterprise Institute offered $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the recent comprehensive United Nations report on climate change. Here are some excerpts from The Guardian article:

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
"The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice," he said.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.
………………………
Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash." (link)

The AEI Letter
The left-blogosphere is abuzz with the news that the American Enterprise Institute offered leading scientists $10,000 to write papers critiquing the methodology of a UN study of global warming. The story originated in the Guardian newspaper and can be read here .

The story is full of heavy breathing, much of it inaccurate. (AEI is not a "lobby group," and only a very small proportion of AEI's income comes from ExxonMobil, etc.)

But the central allegation in the story is true: Yes, when AEI asks people to do work, it generally pays for it. (link)

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Posted at 11:42 AM, Feb 05, 2007 in
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