Ross Gelbspan, "The Heat is On": The skeptics are virtually unanimous in accusing their mainstream scientific colleagues of exaggerating the magnitude of the climate problem in order to perpetuate their own government research funding.
But that argument cuts both ways. While testifying in St. Paul, Pat Michaels revealed under oath that he had received more than $165,000 in industry and private funding over the previous five years—funding he had never previously disclosed. Not only did Western Fuels fund both his publications, he disclosed, but it provided a $63,000 grant for his research. Another $49,000 came to Michaels from the German Coal Mining Association. A smaller grant of $15,000 came from the Edison Electric Institute. Michaels also listed a grant of $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals. Questioned by the assistant attorney general about that grant, Michaels responded, "You know, with all due respect, you’re going to think I’m not telling the truth. I’m trying to remember directly what came out of the project. . . I’m sure we were looking at regional temperatures in some way."
In fact, Cyprus Minerals was, at the time, the largest single funder of the virulently antienvironmentalist Wise Use movement. The biggest organizational member of that movement was a group called People for the West!, whose largest funder, with at least $100,000 in donations, was Cyprus Minerals. According to the Clearinghouse in Environmental Advocacy and Research, as recently as 1995 Cyprus Minerals’ director of governmental affairs was a member of the board of directors of People for the West!.
In interviews, Michaels has insisted that he dissociated himself from the ICE campaign when he learned of what he called its "blatant dishonesty." But he apparently had no qualms about accepting money to publish his own journal, World Climate Review, from one of the same coal industry sources that funded the ICE campaign. (The industry funding of Michaels’s publications was first made public by Bud Ward, editor of Environment Writer, the newsletter for journalists published by the Environmental Health Center of the National Safety Council. Unfortunately the journalists Ward writes for made little use of the information.) Michaels, for his part, insists that this now-defunct journal, as well as its successor coal-funded publication, World Climate Report, which Michaels also edits, are serious journals of climate science.
However, a reading of those publications reveals passages such as this one, written by Michaels in the fall 1994 issue of World Climate Review: "The fact is that the artifice of climate-change-as-apocalypse is crumbling faster than Cuba... . There is genuine fear in the environmental community about this one, for the decline and fall of such a prominent issue is sure to horribly maim the credibility of the green movement that espoused it so cheerily."
This is not the language of science, such as one finds in Science, Nature, or The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It is the language of propaganda.
The winter 1993 issue of Michaels’s magazine featured a cover photo that appeared to replicate the front page of The Washington Post, with the headline "The End Nears Again." Michaels was subsequently forced to apologize to the Post for his choice of cover art, which more closely resembled a cover for the National Lampoon than one for a journal of science. In the winter 1993 issue, he wrote of mainstream scientists in words that would be devastating if they were applied to his own career and its sponsors: "The fact is that virtually every successful academic scientist is a ward of the federal government. One cannot do the research necessary to publish enough to be awarded tenure without appealing to one or another agency for considerable financial support. . . . Yet these and other agencies have their own political agendas."
A critical point that Michaels chooses to ignore is that all research sponsored by the federal government is subjected to the exacting requirements of scientific proof In what is called the "refereed" literature, one’s research peers systematically review an article as a condition of publication. By contrast, private, industry-funded research is not necessarily peer reviewed and is frequently published in industry journals without undergoing this kind of rigorous scientific scrutiny.
Questions of his funding aside, Michaels’s statements have frequently blurred the roles of scientist and propagandist for his and his supporters conservative political views. These views include bashing the United Nations. . .
In the spring 1996 issue of World Climate Report, Michaels reviewed the federal government’s 1996 State of the Climate document. "If this is an official document," Michaels wrote, "there’s no doubting that our federal government is a principal broadcast organ for the views of the United Nations ....... . It’s obvious that the U.N. is viewed by the current administration as the defining entity for our climate.
Michaels’s connections were further clarified in an article he authored in a 1993 issue of World Climate Review. This extensive article was essentially a retread of the Western Fuels video touting the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide. One source Michaels cited was Sherwood Idso’s son, Keith E. Idso, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. Keith Idso is another skeptic who was hired by Western Fuels to testify at the St. Paul hearing.
Idso’s testimony in St. Paul provided a moment of public embarrassment to his coal sponsors and a touch of comic relief for the audience. On the stand, he was asked about an article he had written titled "The Greening of the Planet." The article, which had appeared in a magazine called the New American, detailed in a fairly clinical scientific style his experiments on the effects of enhanced carbon dioxide on sour orange trees. But it concluded with a startling burst of political rhetoric: "This good news [about enhanced carbon dioxide] is not what those intent on destroying our freedoms and imposing their will on the nations of the earth want us to hear, and they skillfully promote alternative voices to confuse the issue. The truth, however, will not be suppressed."
Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Wirtschafter asked Idso on the witness stand, "Mr. Idso, do you know if the New Amen can is published by an advocacy group or a research institute?"
"I know it’s not a scientific magazine," Idso replied. "It’s something in the popular press."
"Is it published by an advocacy group of some sort?" Wirtschafter asked.
"I don’t know if it’s advocacy. I know it’s some political type organization.
"What organization is that?"
"I can’t remember," Idso said. "Some kind of society, I think."
"Was it the John Birch Society?" Wirtschafter asked.
Idso conceded that it was.
What is so extraordinary about the public career of Pat Michaels is that even after his initial association with the extremely cynical coal-funded campaign known as ICE, even after his publication of two journals financed by the coal industry, even after his receipt of money from such flagrantly ideological sources as the largest hinder of the Wise Use movement and his use of source material published by the John Birch Society, he has nonetheless appeared as a star witness at several congressional hearings, most notably before the House Science Committee. There Michaels’s testimony has been accorded more scientific credibility than that of scientists like Dr. Jerry Mahlman, director of NOAXs Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University; Dr. Michael MacCracken, a leading climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for twenty-five years and later director of the largest federal climate science effort, the U.S. Global Change Research Program; and Dr. Robert Watson, co-chair and lead author of the 1995 IPCC report on the impacts and uncertainties of global climate change.
The case of Robert Balling is equally intriguing. A geographer by training, much of Balling’s research prior to 1990 focused on hydrology, precipitation, water runoff, and other southwestern water-and soil-related issues. Since 1991, however, the year he was solicited by Western Fuels, Balling has emerged as one of the most visible and prolific of the climate change skeptics.
Beginning with his work for the ICE campaign, Balling has also received, either alone or with colleagues, nearly $300,000 from coal and oil interests in research funding, which he has never voluntarily disclosed. In his collaborations with Sherwood Idso, Balling has received about $50,000 in research funding from Cyprus Minerals, as well as a separate grant of $4,900 from Kenneth Barr, who at the time was CEO of Cyprus. The German Coal Mining Association has provided about $80,000 in funding for Balling’s work. The British Coal Corporation has kicked in another $75,000. Balling disclosed his industry funding under oath during the administrate hearings in Minnesota in 1995.
Given the obvious economic interests of OPEC in the climate debate, it is not surprising that Balling has also received a grant of $48,000 from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science, as well as unspecified consulting fees from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.
Balling’s 1992 book, The Heated Debate, was published by a conservative think tank, the Pacific Research Institute, one of whose goals is the large-scale repeal of environmental regulations. Balling’s book was subsequently translated into Arabic and distributed to the governments of the OPEC nations. The funding for this edition of his book was provided by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.
Just because research is funded by industry, to be sure, it is not necessarily tainted. But public disclosure of industry funding is of critical importance so that the research can be reviewed for possible bias. That disclosure requirement is mandatory in other areas of science. If a medical researcher’s work is funded by, say, a pharmaceutical company, professional ethics demand that such funding be disclosed in a tagline, when the work is published in the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association. It is unfortunate that the same standards of scientific and professional ethics do not extend to the field of climate science.
In late 1995 Balling authored an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined "Keep Cool About Global Warming." Here he attacked the integrity of the IPCC, declaring that the panel’s summaries are written "by a few group leaders, and it opens the door for slanting the underlying message of the comprehensive document.
News accounts [based on those summaries] misrepresent reality when they use selective information, offer worst-case scenarios and make claims about increased confidence in the scientific community about predictions of potentially catastrophic climate changes." It is understandable that a reader of The Wall Street Journal— say, a civic-minded executive—would be comforted to hear that concerns about global warming are overstated, especially given the tagline that identifies Balling as director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. I doubt that the same reader would be quite as sanguine, however, if he knew that some of Balling’s work was underwritten by German and British coal interests and by the government of Kuwait.
Among the skeptics, Dr. S. Fred Singer stands out for being consistently forthcoming about his funding by large oil interests. On a 1994 appearance on the television program Nightline, Singer did not deny having received funding from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (to whose newspaper, The Washington Times, he is a regular contributor and whose organization has published three of his books). Nor has he apologized for his funding from Exxon, Shell, ARCO, Unocal, and Sun Oil. Singer’s defense is that his scientific position on global atmospheric issues predates that funding and has not changed because of it.
This interesting point raises an equally interesting question. What would happen if the climate skeptics just happened to stumble on a piece of evidence confirming that global warming is indeed intensifying? Would they be willing to alter the direction of their research at the risk of cutting off their industry funding? Such a situation, to say the least, would provide them with a very serious personal and professional conflict of interest. Fortunately for Singer, Michaels, and Balling, such a situation has never apparently arisen.
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