As COP21 at Paris is underway, and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and President Barack Obama stand by their claims that manmade global warming is our greatest security threat, and the mainstream news media continue to play lapdog to the spinmeisters of the UN IPCC and the Obama Administration as they seek a global climate agreement, more and more innocent bystanders—called ordinary citizens—seem to be paying attention to the debates (which of course the alarmists say aren't occurring) over "climate change."
Case in point:
Over on Facebook, someone posted a story reporting that a university had returned to Coca-Cola a $1 million grant when it learned that the money had been used to establish an advocacy group downplaying the link between soft drinks and being overweight. (Kudos to the university—it did the right thing.) The FB user introduced the post with the words, "Another example of capitalism skewing research."
Right. That happens, and it's wrong when it does. (Except that in our civil order that recognizes the importance of adversarial proceedings in criminal and civil court to arriving at a solid judgment—each side making its best case and trying to undermine the other side's case—I'm not so sure that when everything comes out in the wash it's such a problem.)
My friend Oliver Burrows, host of the radio program Christian Economic Perspective, commented on that post: "It happens on the other side from government grants too."
The original poster replied, "But is the government paying to skewing research? Recently?" Then followed some back-and-forths, Burrows assuring that it does, the other asking for some concrete examples.
Burrows mentioned me in one of his comments, which brought the whole thing to my attention. So I provided just a relative handful of examples, and then thought, "Hey, I should make these readily available elsewhere, too."
So, here you go:
Then I focused in on the news about temperature data adjustments in just one country, Australia:
And then I went to the attempt earlier this year by Tom Karl and co-authors at NOAA to erase "the pause":
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. The frequency and magnitude of temperature fabrications, exaggerations, faultily done homogenizations, etc., to prop up panic about global warming are scandalous—among the greatest scandals in the history of science, I'd say.
Finally I posted: "President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the dangers of the mutually corrupting influence of government on science and science on government should the two become too closely intertwined—as they have indeed become," and linked to my blog post about that speech, which contains its full text: "The Dangerous Linkage of Government and Science---Ike was Right."
So keep this little article in mind the next time you have a conversation about the reliability of global temperature data, and the pernicious effect of corporate, and government funding of scientific research. (You do that all the time, don't you?)
