[geeks] Global warming, was Mr Bill?

[Dr. Robert Pasken]

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 23:45, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2008, at 01:41 , wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> 
> >> Years ago, it was probably true that most scientists worked
> >> independent of corporate interests.
> >>
> >> The opposite is true today.
> >
> > So you say.
> 
> Most scientists, engineers, and programmers now work for corporations.
> 
> They either work for their interests or they get fired.
> 
> I would imagine that the ration of corporate to non-corporate  
> scientists and engineers is probably 5 or 10 to one.


>From some one who DOES NOT WORK for a corporation, your observations
about the ratio appear very out of whack and appears to be biased by you
proximity to a group that is only weakly scientific (medical doctors and
medically related professions). Even though I work in town with two
large medical complexes and Boeing the overwhelming bulk of scientists
and engineers in town do not work for either.

<snip> <snip>
> 
> For an oil company to sponsor research to refute things like global  
> warming, they would have to use scientists that were thoughtless, took  
> money, and worked for corporate interests.

Let's pick Roy Spencer, who regularly publishes his research in AMS/AGU
journals. In this case he and his team regularly publish results that
agree with the results from the IPCC report (Spencer et al. 0.17deg C
per year. IPCC 0.19deg C per year), yet when he speaks publicly claims
his research proves the IPCC report wrong. Lizden, Michaels, Singer and
Christy are pretty much in the same boat. Then we have the Exxon/Mobil
front group, Heartland Institute, which offered a $10,000 bounty for any
paper presented at a recent Heartland Institute sponsored conference
that denied that global warming exists, yet refused to accept and paper
that documented global warming existed.
> 
> In any case, I've been reading about global temperature and human  
> factors for a long time, and a good part of it was done by oil and  
> energy companies, and most of it had fairly wide opinions and  
> theories, not the one sided view you seem to think they have.

Actually the oil and energy companies funded little or no research into
global warming, rather they have done a lot to confuse the issue by
repeating the "big lie" that the science isn't clear and there is "much
more work to be done". The funding for climate research has come almost
exclusively from NOAA, NSF and NASA.