Friday, 4 December 2009

Vested interests are an enemy of sound science...

As our politicians and green left celebrities jet away to Copenhagen the international climategate fiasco rumbles on. The weary electorate have long since dismissed Al Gore's eco-porn scenarios, and have lost confidence in so called climate science and its practitioners. How did we ever get into this farcical situation ? ...Follow the money trail... from todays WSJ ...

...the question is...why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them. Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"...
Please note, the image to the right is the property of Maggie Terlicki and can be found at her wonderful website, here...

Harry, the anguished computer programmer summarised the sad shonky mess that climatastrophe rests on..."I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!" This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble...more here...

3 comments:

Nessa said...

Vested interests are usually very detrimental.

Name That Christmas Song

Ayrdale said...

Umm quite right Nessa, although some of my vested interests have helped me a lot. Love the green butterfly...

Maggie Terlecki said...

I don't mind you using my photograph on your website, but you could at the very least give me credit for it. Neither my name nor my website appears on the image or as a credit in your post. Since you took it without asking, you could at least do that, no?

Maggie Terlecki (photographer and artist) of the "money to burn" photo you are displaying.