Bret Stephens in the WSJ writes of scientists who “have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God”:

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus” — largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes — of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Or, if you like there are other scientists who have gotten some money from oil companies:

ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called — without irony — the climate change “consensus.” To read some of the press accounts of these gifts — amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion — you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age.

It seems to us that the greater dollar amounts and greater nastiness have come from the pro-AGW crowd, but feel free to disagree if you like.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, Science, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.