Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

international | environment | other press Friday February 02, 2007 19:17 by Terence

Bribes offered by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded think-tank

It has been revealed in a report in today's Guardian newspaper that Scientists have been recently offered bribes of $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.

You have to admire these oil companies and the right-wing think tanks that they fund to shape and control public opinion. They never give up and you can believe anything they say. They will use every form of underhand tactic and deception possible to achieve their own objectives.

It has been discovered recently that in fact this sort of thing has been going on for quite a number of years and the oil companies have used the tactics to the tabacco companies to fund so called independent scientist and generally manipulate the public opinion, spread lies and disinformation and hide the facts.

Some quotes from todays report are:

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.......


AND


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.


Basically the people in involved in this bribery from the White House downwards to those calling the shots in ExxonMobile to their dupes and foot soldiers in the AEI should at some point be brought to justice. In fact ExxonMobile should be brought to court and heavily fined.

Full report at: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0202-05.htm
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