Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

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 the United Nations climate report released on Feb. 2. A series of letters sent to scientists, economists and policy analysts by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasize the shortcomings of the report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the letters was obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace from a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, and made available to the media. Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI , confirmed he was one of the letter's authors, but said that AEI has abandoned the project based on the responses of some of the letter's recipients. The letter attacked 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 asked for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs." It offered $10,000 for an essay of 7,500 to 10,000 words and offered more "honoraria" and travel expenses if the scientist participated in a series of conferences on the same topic. Climate scientists described the move as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organization who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, who was a participant in the IPCC report. AEI, which is vice-chaired by former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, has been a leader in the effort to cast doubt on the science of climate change and has played a major role in setting the Bush administration's climate policy. Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."