I believe the $7 million refers to the operating budget of the IPCC as an organization. Clerical personel, PC’s, pencils, porno mags, sheep, etc.
Not among actual scientists, among whom agreement is as close to universal as it ever gets. Or even among people who have actually looked at the data and analyses, a cohort which I suspect does not include you.
I can only hope so. I believe there should always be a loyal opposition to debate the facts and help reach a proper course of action.
(p.s. Did you mean “shit tons” or “shit loads” of money?)
SPQR! I always wanted to be the guy with the lion headed helmet!
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Oh, you meant a different kind of cohort. Sorry. 
Sorry, all we have left is Third Spear Carrier from the Left. At least it’s a stage credit, ya want it?
No Roman legionary would carry a spear! Do I get a plumed helm at least??
I was wondering if we’ve given up the pretense that the Koch Bros aren’t giving this money to further an agenda that profits them?
I think that’s what I said earlier, although of course without the jokes about sheep fucking. So your claim earlier was that climate science is big business. As proof, you submitted that the budget of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has an operating budget of $7 million a year… which is about a tenth the amount that a slew of anti-climate science groups spent in the same period.
I meant shit ton. I expect a ton is more than a load.
You must have confused the Koch bros with George Soros.
The UNCF should accept the Koch bros funding. You should accept any Koch bros or UNCF funds offered. And I will gladly accept any funding you can spare.
Especially if they’re offering to donate land far from the coast.
I assumed the sheep would have been used for methane studies but your ideas on their use is intriguing.
The methane problem is usually associated with cows, which are somewhat like sheep but different. I do see some articles about sheep possibly having lower ‘emissions,’ so maybe you’re talking about that. What studies do you think the IPCC is doing on porn?
No, I’m pretty sure I know what the topic of this thread is.
Of course the IPCC is just the agency tasked with collecting the data from researchers, collating it and publishing it.
So how much funding is being provided for climate science? It’s not an easy number to nail down as funding is provided through universities, governments, NGOs, private individuals, and other organizations. There’s no one ‘umbrella’ for climate change funding.
However, I’ve heard personally from more than one scientist that so much funding has moved into climate change subjects that it’s hurting other fields. There’s a common joke that a paper titled, “A study on the migration pattern of ducks” has a much better chance of being funded if it’s titled, “A study on the changing migration patterns of ducks due to climate change.”
In any event, a little poking around on the internet found:
€281.4 million in EU funding for 284 projects on climate change and biodiversity.
Germany’s International Climate Initiative has raised over a billion dollars in funds. and receives regular funding additions of €120 million per year.
In Canada, NSERC grants were available for applicants in amounts up to $1 million per year per project. That program recently closed.
The UN Global Climate Fund is trying to ramp up fundraising to the level of $100 billion per year by 2020. It is described as a mechanism for transferring money from the developed world to the developing nations for climate change mitigation. If you don’t think putting the U.N. in control of hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth transfer isn’t a potential conflict of interest, I’m not sure what to say.
The Ford Foundation provides grants for research in climate change.
The International Research Initiative
on Adaptation to Climate Change is a 12.5 million dollar Canadian program that provides money for climate research.
Here is a list of projects funded by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network. There appears to be hundreds of them.
GlobalChange.gov is a U.S. umbrella agency controlling funding for climate change research. It has an annual budget of about 2.5 billion dollars.
Really, I could go for many pages. Every developed country is spending major bucks on climate change research.
But the real money isn’t in the research. The real money (and power) comes from tariffs, cap and trade, carbon taxes, etc. There are HUGE vested interests in government and industry fighting for control of this money. As mentioned, the U.N. wants 100 billion PER YEAR. Carbon taxes in the U.S. would net the U.S. government at least 50 billion per year. Companies like GE, which makes nuclear power plants, gas turbines, windmills, factory control systems, and other industrial products would be huge winners - in fact, GE, Siemens and other big industrial firms are already talking about the profits to be had by government regulations forcing industrial changes that require scrapping old equipment and buying new.
So I’m not impressed by your $500 million figure for anti-climate change research and promotion. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the money that will flow to special interests if climate change regulations can be implemented, and to the amount of money available for research on the pro-AGW side.
Now, I’m not claiming that this money is necessarily biasing research. That’s the claim on your side. But if it’s true that money is directing this research and biasing the outcome, then it has to be true on both sides unless you think somehow pro-AGW researchers are immune to the influence of money and status.
By the way, since we’re talking about the pernicious effects of Billionaires providing money with strings attached, shall we talk about Tom Steyer?
Tom Steyer is a billionaire who heavily funds Democratic causes. He has been fighting tooth and nail to block the Keystone pipeline, spending millions of dollars on anti-Keystone ads, providing millions in funding to political candidates who oppose the pipeline, etc. This despite the fact that his hedge fund invested $125 million in the Kinder Morgan pipeline, a direct competitor to Keystone for moving Alberta oil.
Steyer says he has divested himself in interest in that pipeline, but the fact remains that he isn’t opposing it - only Keystone. This despite the fact that if Keystone is killed the prime beneficiary will be the Kinder Morgan pipeline - and Tom Steyer’s hedge fund, which has a major interest. Steyer claims that he is now at arm’s length from the hedge fund, but in reality these transfers and divestments take years to complete.
In any event, I’m not going to claim that Steyer has black motives here - for all I know, he feels guilty for his past heavy investment in fossil fuels and is now trying to make amends. But if you’re going to accuse the Kochs of bad faith simply because they have some indirect investments that may benefit, then Steyer is fair game too. And so is George Soros. And any other billionaires that are ‘activists’ for Democrats and provide funding to them.
Sam Stone: I thought you were part of the crowd who agree that billionaires wield too much influence over political activities–which is one of the arguments among sophisticated libertarians for smaller government. Do I misremember?
In any event, I’d be curious to hear what George Soros’s profit motives are for his principal charitable activities. I suspect he’s a tad less self-interested than the man whose history you use to indict Soros.
Good, since you can’t even hypothesize any. But that should make you pause before trying to draw an equivalence to people whose motives are very clear, as well as contrary to the public interest. It should, that is.
Cut the shit.
Poor countries are generally the ones who are going to get hit the worst, so you’re not sure what to say. But I’ll point out here that doorhinge’s initial claim was that both sides are spending millions to influence public opinion. That’s technically true, but one side is outspending the other, and I expect the real ratio is far higher than 10:1. Since then doorhinge has been trying to broaden his claim until it no longer means anything, and you seem to be playing along. Of course studying climate change costs money, and of course alternative energy and AGW countermeasures cost money. I guess the endgame here is that researching climate change makes you biased. The oil industry, though- those are folks we can trust. It’s not like they have anything at stake here.
That’s not at all what I said, and you know it. The point is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too - you can’t accuse the Koch Brothers of only funding AGW research because they have a vested interest in protecting oil interests, while at the same time ignoring the huge benefits to be had by the many special interests on the other side who are funding other research.
The Kochs have a long history of funding science and other philanthropic activity that they did not personally benefit from. There is no reason to believe that they are funding current research for any other reason. If they were interested in making a few hundred million dollars or even a few billion dollars from this, it’s kind of hard to explain why they give away hundreds of millions or billions to various charities.
And it’s already been noted in this thread that they funded the Berkeley Earth Project with no strings attached, and that study came out supporting AGW which proves they did not attach strings to it. There are quotes from members of that team in this very thread saying that the Kochs never pressured them once to come to any specific conclusion. That little piece of data was completely ignored, but it seems rather important, doesn’t it?
Charles Koch recently published this editorial explaining his motives:
You can read his op-ed as a libertarian diatribe if you want, and from your perspective that might be fair. But it’s an ideological position, not one designed to manipulate the wheels of power to benefit him financially. It’s no different than George Soros or Tom Steyer or Paul Allen or any other billionaire providing funding for left-wing causes they believe in.
And how many companies have come out against subsidies that they themselves benefited from? How do you square that with the claim that the Kochs are funding anti-AGW research for economic gain?
It seems to me that the orchestrated smearing of the Kochs by the left is nothing more than a blatant attempt to rile up the ‘base’ and to intimidate the Kochs into withdrawing from the public arena. I find it particularly offensive that the Senate Majority leader repeatedly calls out these private citizens by name and accuses them of being un-American and attempts to rile up hatred towards them.
No, that’s not me. I’m a first-amendment absolutist. Free speech is free speech. Even when it’s harmful, the alternative of allowing the government to choose which speech is ‘good’ speech is abhorrent and would do much more damage in the long run.
Besides, I think those billionaires largely balance each other out. For every Koch there’s a Soros or a Steyer opposing them.
In my opinion, campaign finance reform has been a total failure - more money was spent in the last election than in any other. All CFR has done is to make the sources of funding murkier.
I’d allow anyone to contribute as much money to any campaign as they want, with one proviso: every nickel of funding must come with a complete paper trail showing exactly where the money came from, and that paper trail should be published online for all to see.
My point wasn’t to indict Soros or Steyer or anyone else. My point is that if you’re going to assume that the Kochs are funding political campaigns purely for financial profit, it’s hypocritical to assume the other billionaires have hearts of gold simply because they’re on your side.
But since you asked, I had a quick look at what Soros has been up to. In December he wrote this editorial, supporting Japan’s massive round of quantitative easing:
He goes on to condemn austerity and political polarization preventing the U.S. from following Japan’s sterling example.
Interestingly, while publicly praising Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his ‘bold experiment’, Soros’s hedge fund shorted the Japanese Yen, earning him about $1 billion dollars. The devaluation of the Yen was the expected result of Shinzo’s massive QE, and Soros cheerfully helped that along - then bet against it and won.
Did he do this intentionally? Was this a coldly calculated strategy, or was he merely hedging his bets? I’d say the evidence that Soros pushed for policies that he could profit from is at least as strong as that against the Kochs.
I also recall that the left didn’t have much of a problem with T. Boone Pickens spending millions to lobby for wind farms, despite the massive personal investment he had in the scheme.