Unsubstantiated Allegations of
Corruption Against Scientific
Funding Bodies

Extracts from Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

[Comment 71: There are two speeches by Mrs. Thatcher’s to the Royal Society that mention climate change (http://tinyurl.com/2kvovo, http://tinyurl.com/2n5n5a), neither of which contain anything that could be construed as meaning “there’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff,” or even mention the funding of climate science.]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.7, 5.10)

[Comment 82: The great majority of the diverse research communities that have been drawn to research climate change have had no direct engagement with either media or politics: indeed many have sought to clearly mark out the distance between their research and popular and political debate. This has been seen as a factor in delaying widespread public understanding and engagement with climate change as an issue (see Smith 2005, http://tinyurl.com/2cm7qt).

It is right and proper that if a scientific problem is identified and judged by peer review committees to be serious, it should attract more funding; but to suggest that media attention necessarily yields funds is wholly incorrect. Not all potential problems that have been identified by scientists and which have received a great deal of media attention go on to attract large amounts of funding (for example, MMR vaccine, and the health effects of mobile phones); because many of them are judged by peer review funding committees to be either insufficiently credible or insufficiently serious.

In addition, the cumulative effect of this collation of statements and images is to implant in the viewer’s mind the idea that almost all of the world’s climatologists have reached the scientific conclusions that they have reached, in many thousands of peer reviewed research papers, in support of environmentalist agendas. This comment fails to reflect the fact that the institutions and individuals engaged in the IPCC process are all well established in their fields of research. They have not been needy of funding. It gives an entirely false impression of the nature of academic research funding, and damages public understanding of the IPCC process: a process that was purposefully designed to be transparent, accountable and working to the highest standards of academic rigour. The editorial point driving the editing of this sequence lacks all credibility and no evidence was provided to support this idea.

Finally, the programme’s wording denies the scientific consensus on climate change that has existed since the mid-1990s by not acknowledging this and instead presenting its supposed movement from an ‘eccentric theory’ into a ‘political campaign’. This is inaccurate and misleading. Spencer R. Weart, 2003, The discovery of Global Warming (http://tinyurl.com/368wk) tracks the long history of scientists’ attempts to explain global warming and the institutional underfunding of global warming scientists throughout the 20th century.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)

[Comment 83: Richard Lindzen’s implied suggestion that it is in climate scientists’ interest in terms of preserving their jobs to hype up man-made global warming has been fully rebutted by one of his own colleagues, at http://tinyurl.com/pb9fx.

Regarding Lindzen’s highly inaccurate and misleading statement about funding, see Comment 116 [below].

Finally there is no evidence that there are any climatologists whose only interest in climatology is global warming, and it is not credible that scientists would enter a highly complex and extremely intellectually demanding profession unless they have a passionate and genuine curiosity about the science that they are studying. As a scientist himself, Lindzen must be fully aware of this, and his assertion to the contrary was again a clear attempt to deceive those members of the public who aren’t aware of how science actually works.]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.12, 7.11)

[Comment 84: In addition, at this point, given that funding is being discussed, it should have been made clear by the narrator that Richard Lindzen works for five organisations that are funded by ExxonMobile – see also Appendix C.17 [below].]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.8)

[Comment 85: Again, given that funding is being discussed, it should have been made clear at this point that Frederick Singer has worked for fourteen ExxonMobile-funded lobby groups – see Appendix C.10 [below].]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.8)

[Comment 116: In fact, the US spends around $1.1 billion on climate science research (not $4 billion); with an additional $570 million on satellite monitoring of the climate (see the “Supplement to the President’s Fiscal Year 2007 Budget”, U.S. Climate Change Science Program, at http://tinyurl.com/2ok5nq).

The “over 4 billion dollars” quoted by the programme includes energy technology research, tax incentives, etc. (see the US Department of State website at http://tinyurl.com/24tmvc, which do not benefit climatologists.

Moreover, much of the climate research funding does not relate directly or exclusively to man-made global warming (see: http://tinyurl.com/35cnj6 [U.S. Climate Change Science Program]), but is also are devoted to understanding natural factors and fundamental climatic processes such as “feedbacks”.

Finally, to place this funding into context, the US Government spends $28 billion on medical research (http://tinyurl.com/yr9q7u [NIH]), and $73 billion on military research (http://tinyurl.com/2bftxb [Department of Defense]).

Thus by quoting incorrect figures and by failing to put them into context, the film maker misled the audience.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)

[Comment 117: The programme makes a serious allegation, involving the misappropriation of public funds, in saying that scientists critical of man-made global warming are unfairly denied funding. It is therefore disappointing that the only supporting evidence offered by the programme is the unsubstantiated opinion of a single, highly partisan, interviewee (see Appendix C.19 [below]), and no solid, documentary evidence is offered. Moreover, given that the allegation raises questions about their impartiality, integrity, and competence, it is clearly a breach of the Ofcom rules, that the views of scientific funding bodies such as the National Science Foundation (US) or the Natural Environment Research Council (UK) were not represented at all in the documentary.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.5, 7.9, 7.10, 7.11)

ISI WoS

The ISI Web of Science (WoS) is a database of almost 9000 peer-reviewed journals – see: http://scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/. The database covers publications between 1970 and the present day.

All references to “ISI WoS” in the following section mean that the source of the information being cited was this database.

Dr Frederick Singer

Contrary to his billing in the programme, Singer was never a director of the US National Weather Service. In fact, he was Director of the US National Weather Satellite Center, and only between 1962 and 1964 (see http://tinyurl.com/yqbmjl).

He is also no longer a Professor, having retired as Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, in 1994.

He has published 43 articles since 1970 (ISI WoS). However few of these papers have presented original scientific research, and even fewer concerned climate: most have concerned policy.

Two papers on climate that he co-authored in 2004 have been found to have used cherry-picked data and to have been seriously flawed on a number of other counts (see http://tinyurl.com/2jf7l4).

As well as global warming, he also expresses scepticism about the link between CFCs and the ozone hole (see http://tinyurl.com/26guvf); and between second- hand smoke and cancer (see http://tinyurl.com/3by65a).

He has also oscillated rapidly between claiming in 2005 that there is no evidence that global warming is happening (see http://tinyurl.com/2jqe6y), to claiming in 2006 that it’s happening and it’s unstoppable (see http://tinyurl.com/33bk2t) to claiming in 2007 that “climate is not warming significantly” (see http://tinyurl.com/383tk5).

Dr Singer cannot therefore be objectively regarded as a leading scientist, nor as an expert on climate.

Direct Corporate Funding

Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

Professor Richard Lindzen

Lindzen is Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a well-regarded meteorologist with a distinguished publication record (see http://tinyurl.com/28wszg); however, his research is mostly in meteorology (the weather) rather than on climatology.

His last original research in climatology was published in 2001 (ISI WoS) and hypothesized an adaptive “Iris Effect” of clouds in the tropics that reduces the temperature change due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. However, this hypothesis has since been strongly disputed by other climate scientists (see http://tinyurl.com/23gwno).

Lindzen co-authored a 2001 report of the National Academy of Sciences http://tinyurl.com/yuswbu, which concluded that:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.”

He has since claimed that the summary did not accurately reflect the main report, and has made similar criticisms of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers from its 2001 Third Assessment Report (see http://tinyurl.com/2ay5vj)  – although he has yet to demonstrate the basis of these claims.

Despite reportedly saying that he is “willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now”, he has refused to accept a bet with climatologist James Annan on this, unless the payout was 50:1 or better in his favour (see http://tinyurl.com/39e5ne).

Lindzen has also been accused by distinguished scientists of having said things in public testimony, in order to win an argument, that he knew were not supported by the scientific evidence – see: http://tinyurl.com/yo5and, http://tinyurl.com/ytb2g9, http://tinyurl.com/2a35a6 and http://tinyurl.com/yrbcju.

Direct Corporate Funding

In a 1995 article in Harper’s Magazine, Ross Gelbspan asserted that Lindzen “charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels; and a speech he wrote, entitled Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus, was underwritten by OPEC” (see http://tinyurl.com/2rpr7k, subscription required).

Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

Professor John Christy and Dr Roy Spencer

Professor John Christy and Dr Roy Spencer pioneered the use of satellites to monitor temperature trends in the atmosphere. For several years this data appeared to show more warming at the surface than higher in the atmosphere, which, as discussed in the programme, was used to argue against the accuracy of the climate models.

However the programme failed to disclose that Christy and Spencer’s early satellite data has been found to be in error (see http://tinyurl.com/g2quv). As concluded in a 2006 report of the US Climate Change Science Program (see http://tinyurl.com/logfl), resolving these errors resolved the apparent discrepancy between the models and data; and in fact, John Christy was a co-author of this report. See also the 2005 New York Times article, Errors Cited in Assessing Climate Data: http://tinyurl.com/35egf3.

It is therefore deeply misleading for the programme to use the outdated data to imply problems with the climate models or the theory of greenhouse gas-driven warming, without revealing recent developments in the science which have discredited this view.

Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

The information in the table below was obtained from the websites that it cites and links to throughout. The authors of this complaint carried out this research with the help of many others, whose contributions are acknowledged in section 1.13, page 12 [of the full complaint].