A Swing At The Left

OK, I know you've all been waiting for this, but I'm about the take on the left blogosphere.

Crooks and Liars ran this story about the American Enterprise Institute and its funding, from a story in The Guardian:

From C&L:

Do American corporations take responsibility for their part in global warming? No, their answer to the greatest threat to mankind (and their ultimate bottom line, come to that) is to offer a bribe to scientists to buck the overwhelming avalanche of evidence and deny man's involvement in global warming.

From The Guardian:

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.

Now, my own feeling is that The Guardian is one of those sources that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Its reporting is biased, and just because its biased toward the left doesn't excuse that.

It seems that Chris DeMuth has some additional information. Via Andrew Sullivan:

Second, attempting to disentangle science from politics on the question of climate change causation, and to fashion policies that take account of the uncertainties concerning causation, are longstanding AEI interests. The new research project that Ken and Steve Hayward have been organizing is a continuation of these interests. I am attaching the two letters that Steve and Ken have sent out to climate change scientists and policy experts (the first one emphasizing the scientific and climate-modeling issues addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the second, more recent one covering broader policy issues as well)—and invite you to read them and compare them with the characterization in the Guardian article. The first letter, sent last summer to Professor Steve Schroeder of Texas A&M (and also to his colleague Gerald North), is the one quoted by the Guardian. Ken and Steve canvassed scholars with a range of views on the scientific and policy issues, with an eye to the intrinsic quality and interest of their work rather than to whether partisans might characterize them as climate change 'skeptics' or 'advocates.' They certainly did not avoid those with a favorable view of the IPCC reports — such as Professor Schroeder himself.

Third, what the Guardian essentially characterizes as a bribe is the conventional practice of AEI — and Brookings, Harvard, and the University of Manchester — to pay individuals at other research institutions for commissioned work, and to cover their travel expenses when they come to the sponsoring institution to present their papers. The levels of authors' honoraria vary from case to case, but a $10,000 fee for a research project involving the review of a large amount of dense scientific material, and the synthesis of that material into an original, footnoted and rigorous article is hardly exorbitant or unusual; many academics would call it modest.

Jonathan Adler at Volokh posted the text of what appears to be the first letter DeMuth refers to. Adler points out one thing that seems germane to me, as well as being accurate:

In these letters AEI was certainly seeking out prominent analysts willing to participate in a critical examination of the IPCC report, but I don't think the letter suggests AEI wanted Professor Schroeder or anyone else to tailor their views to AEI's agenda. Rather it looks to me like an effort to encourage those who have been critical of climate projections in the past to provide a detailed assessment of the new IPCC report. A second letter was sent out earlier this year to a handful of scientists and economists and others seeking papers on climate change science and policy more broadly.

Read the letter. Read Adler's post, which has more iformation from AEI.

A note about timing. C&L's story was posted today, February 4. Sullivan first had it on Friday, the 2nd, while Adler's post was posted yesterday, the 3rd. So there is other information out there, in places that I would think C&L would be perusing on a regular basis -- Sullivan, at least, since he's a favorite target of both the left and the right. I'll try to remember to keep an eye on C&L for a follow-up, but frankly, their handling of this one so far is not impressive. I'll feel a lot better about it (OK, I don't really care, but I'll be more gracious about it) if I see a follow-up post with a shit-eating grin attached -- at least an admission that perhaps they jumped the gun on this one. After all, you can't always trust The Guardian. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist that.)

Another note: One of Sullivan's readers accuses AEI of acting like the Discovery Institute:

You're being a little naive if you think that AEI's goal is truly to inspire a real debate about the veracity of claims about man-made climate change. This is right out of the theocon playbook on evolution. The goal is not to have a real debate, because a real debate is something you can (and in both cases, when talking about scientific evidence, will) lose. The goal is simply to muddy the waters, try and get the media to portray climate change as a 'he said, he said' kind of issue. The fact is, there are a lot of scientists. You will find contrarians to any position imaginable. For an ideologically-inspired organization to cherry-pick a few who are willing to say what they want to hear (especially for a fee!!) and publish those reports, instead of those scientists having to go through the peer-review process, reduces the scientific rigor of the debate.

The problem with this is that AEI is not doing what creationists habitually do, which is distort evidence, bring in extra-scientific criteria, pretend that their naive (or maybe I mean "disingenuous") interpretations of the evidence somehow point to a flawed theory, or better yet, that controversies over details of the mechanisms of evolution somehow disprove its foundations.. AEI seems to be asking scientists to comment on the reliability of the various models used. Period. No theology involved here, just an analyses of the work to date.

Of course, we have to wait and see what the analyses actually say before we can render a judgment, and by that time I will have forgotten all about it.