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Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

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Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#61

Post by mcguire »

x1798DE wrote: post #3

Hm, I feel like this is way less sinister than it sounds. From what I know of his prior reputation, Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. If you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?

"The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.""

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#62

Post by shkkmo »

javajosh wrote: post #55
chetanahuja wrote: post #26

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections. The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale. That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager s…

What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc. Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-bu…

> What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction.

> Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway.

The use of torture 'by the good guys' is actually pretty ubiquitous in modern TV.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#63

Post by nl »

chetanahuja wrote: post #26

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections. The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale. That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager s…

I suspect that many people don't read a lot of papers, maybe?

It is absolutely, always the normal behavior to disclose all sources of funding.

For example, I had the paper EpiCaster: An Integrated Web Application For Situation Assessment and Forecasting of Global Epidemics[1] open.

This paper includes section 9, Acknowledgements:

We thank our external collaborators and members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab- oratory (NDSSL) for their suggestions and comments. This work has been partially supported by NSF Nets Grant CNS- 0626964, NSF HSD Grant SES-0729441, NIH MIDAS project 2U01GM070694-7, NSF PetaApps Grant OCI-0904844, DTRA RD Grant HDTRA1-0901-0017, DTRA CNIMS Grant HDTRA1- 07-C-0113, NSF NETS CNS-0831633, DHS 4112-31805, DOE DE-SC0003957, NSF REU Supplement CNS-0845700, US Naval Surface Warfare Center N00178-09-D-3017 DEL ORDER 13, NSF Netse CNS- 1011769 and NSF SDCI OCI-1032677.

That's just a random paper, as an example. That is simply how academic papers are done, and anyone who isn't disclosing funding isn't following normal behavior.

Maybe some people will be suspicious of this paper because it is partially funded by the US Naval Surface Warfare Center. That's their choice, and this disclosure enables them to judge it based on that.

[1] http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#65

Post by fredkbloggs »

zzalpha wrote: post #21
x1798DE wrote: post #3

Hm, I feel like this is way less sinister than it sounds. From what I know of his prior reputation, Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. If you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?

Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. You're missing the point. It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views. It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest. Those very…

While I agree that this conduct is improper and should lead to the loss of their chairs (and retractions, if any paid "research" ended up in scholarly journals), you're also missing something important about science when you say:

> Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results.

The fact that someone has a conflict of interest should be stated, certainly. But we should always question the nature of research and the quality of results. In one of these cases, it doesn't even seem that a research paper was being purchased but simply an essay, which presumably would not be cited by anyone or even considered a presentation of facts by other scholars. But in any case, we shouldn't assume someone's research is honest and valuable just because he doesn't seem to have an economic conflict of interest. There's a lot of bad science done with deliberate intent to deceive that involved no such conflict of interest at all.

The bottom line is that science is not being nearly tough enough on itself, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of bad papers that are either useless and irrelevant or full of lies, errors, and fabrications. Reporting conflicts of interest might help a little, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for gullibility.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#66

Post by fredkbloggs »

kijin wrote: post #41
x1798DE wrote: post #3

Hm, I feel like this is way less sinister than it sounds. From what I know of his prior reputation, Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. If you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?

> Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been. Even if he was on the conservative side to begin with, there's a large spectrum from "Earth might be getting warmer, but I don't think it's anthropogenic" to "CO2 is actually good for us!" Perhaps some of his previous papers were paid for by others with similar interests as well. J…

> We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been.

Does it matter? You don't have the right to demand that everyone agree with you, even if you're right. We don't burn people at the stake or try to silence them for disagreement. Please stop trying to create unanimity; it's not healthy.

What we should punish people for: lying to Congress, taking or offering bribes, doing dishonest work while in the public employ. All of those apply, and any should be sufficient, at a bare minimum, to justify firing these professors. However, thinking that climate change doesn't exist or isn't anthropogenic is not a crime. Saying so is not a crime, either. And I'm damned glad of it!

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#67

Post by sitkack »

shkkmo wrote: post #20
x1798DE wrote: post #3

Hm, I feel like this is way less sinister than it sounds. From what I know of his prior reputation, Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. If you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?

The problem is not that Will Happer's positions, nor is it even that he accepted industry funding for his papers laying out those positions. > In Happer’s case, investigators said they were part of a “Middle East oil and gas company” and asked to ensure that their commissioning of the report could not be traced. Happer reached out to a friendly Exxon lobbyist who suggested channeling it through Donors Trust, the shad…

> it should be illegal to not disclose such conflicts on interest when testifying under oath

Would this qualify ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress

or

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#68

Post by fredkbloggs »

crpatino wrote: post #35
Albright wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. If someone were to phonily offer Hawking a cartoonish sack of money to write a report about black holes, should we be shocked when he shows interest in the offer?

No, no, no, no. You miss the point. If you claim to be a scientist, you leave your personal beliefs at the lab door and abide to the experimental results. If you cannot do that, you pick a different subject of study and let some other unbiased scientist pick on the thorny (for you) subject. How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jes…

> How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jesus in the black hole?

The same way I feel about all such claims: if they can't be independently reproduced, they're garbage. The more bizarre the claim, the easier it should be to disprove it. Authors who publish outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated by others will be first disgraced and then, worse, ignored.

Hawking and the pope aren't relevant to your example. All that matters is that someone claims he saw Jesus in a black hole. It's not even clear that such a thing is a falsifiable claim, and if it weren't, it wouldn't be accepted for publication anyway. But even if it took the form of one, it would be immediately disproved and that would be the end of it. It's the claim that's important, not who made it or who paid him to do so.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#69

Post by sitkack »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #65
zzalpha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money. You're missing the point. It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views. It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest. Those very…

While I agree that this conduct is improper and should lead to the loss of their chairs (and retractions, if any paid "research" ended up in scholarly journals), you're also missing something important about science when you say: > Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results. The fact that someone has a conflict…

You are being overly pedantic when it comes to _science_ and I say this as a trained scientist. These guys are testifying before congress as experts when they are pedaling their credentials for money and burying their briber's identities. They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#70

Post by fredkbloggs »

aleh wrote: post #19

Wonder if anyone is going to do the opposite - try to buy off pro-global-warming professor to produce exaggerated doomsday prediction - and what the outcome is going to be.

I assume this happens already. It's unlikely that with so much money at stake, only one party is doing the dirty. Same applies to any issue where a lot of money is at stake.
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