NOVEMBER 30,
2009, 7:43 P.M. ET
Climate change researchers must
believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe
in the existence of God.
Last
year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy
institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and
Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the
Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two
conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what
until recently was called--without irony--the climate change "consensus."
To read some of the press accounts of
these gifts--amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45
billion--you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But
thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the
real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages
know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working
in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball
dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure,
destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data--facts that were laid
bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the
University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper 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 hacked 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.
Associated
Press
Al
Gore wins the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Doing well by doing good?
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. The 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 Bank estimates has been spent globally this year
on what it calls "green stimulus"--largely ethanol and other alternative
energy schemes--of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at
Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own
demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or
the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable
Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their
various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to
receive them.
Today
these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not
just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone
Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change
Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California
Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the
receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must
believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming
just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se
corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something
other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently
corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their
livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof,
everything they represent--including the thousands of jobs they
provide--vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested
interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the
climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming
cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a
computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "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.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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