All Right- This is Handy!

Now we have a simple way of ensuring that those who we really shouldn't listen to on Global Warming are easily identified.

All you have to do is check to see if they were involved with this:

Scientists and economists have been offered $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.
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.

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.

I trust I don't need to explain why this is very, very bad science, or the pall that it would cast over the careers of anybody who accepted this money.

The best part, though, is that it pretty thoroughly discredits the American Enterprise Institute. They can't even pretend that they're a neutral, scientific group anymore, or that their research is worth the paper it's printed on. This announcement makes it impossible to verify that any AEI study is scientifically worthwhile; if they're doing this now, there's no reason to believe that they haven't done it before and that they won't do it again.

Were I even peripherally involved with the AEI, I'd make a serious point of disassociating myself with them RIGHT NOW. This is, from a conservative researcher's point of view, beyond disastrous.

(I couldn't be happier.)