AEI responds to bizarre criticism

The Guardian and the leftist blogosphere - which unfortunately includes Cosmic Variance - have invented an incredibly painful campaign against the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

They deliberately confuse AEI and ExxonMobil and misinterpret everything about the award $10,000 that AEI offers for high-quality critical analyses of the IPCC report. Here is a very decent answer of the AEI president:

• AEI responds

Let me say that I think it is an extremely good idea to stimulate people in general and scientists in particular to study documents of this importance critically and at the technical level and I applaud AEI for their award.

Scientific questions that deal with the so-called "climate change" have become extremely important for policymaking because many people, including some influential people, literally want to spend - or waste - trillions of dollars (a whole percent or more of the global economy, with its consequences for a reduced GDP growth) for policies based on certain assumptions which makes it highly desirable to attract a lot of careful eyes and investigate these documents from many angles.

As all of us know, the people who haven't become a part of this irrational hysteria about the "global warming" are victims of constant witch hunts led by various organized groups, including the inquisitors at RealClimate.ORG - an unfriendly blog that has just published a disgraceful personal attack on all people behind the summary by the Fraser Institute.

If we talk about honest scientists in that field who don't want to reduce their work to intellectual prostitution and confirmation of politically pre-determined dogmas (such as the dogma that the humanity faces a serious problem of "climate change"), they are being intensely discouraged from publishing careful technical analyses, to say the least.

Because the technically looking research in that field has been largely hijacked by certain dirty political forces that make no secrets about their intent to simply block any research whose results they don't like, there is a very small demand for non-alarmist technical papers that are nevertheless relevant for the "global warming" issues which is why the researchers who haven't become alarmists mostly write papers that are not quite technical, trying to target a different type of audience. With a few admirable exceptions, of course.

This bias is very bad and AEI is trying to fix it.

Let me finally say that I find the comments that $10,000 is a lot of money for a detailed critical analysis of the IPCC report to be extraordinarily hypocritical and morally despicable.

The global warming "industry" is a huge organized network of politicians, activists, and certain scientists that currently swallows hundreds of billions of dollars every year and intends to consume even more resources in the future. While a large percentage of this money is simply wasted, a significant part of the money ends up in the pockets of the people who actually depend on this hysteria and who support it - in the form of grants, profits from misleading alarmist movies, extraordinary salaries for many people in this "industry", or interests from the carbon indulgences.

For example, what are resources such as the 1 million dollars Centennial Fellowship Award for Stefan Rahmstorf used for? Roger Pielke Sr has explained four days ago that Rahmstorf et al. were blatantly cherry-picking in Science Magazine when they tried to overhype a certain temperature trend. All this money is used to misinform the public, selectively choose evidence, and create a whole hierarchy of inaccuracies interpolating between the technical research that is usually based on facts on one side, and the blatant lies in the newspapers on the other side.

I, for one, think that this is not too funny. I, for one, think that 1 million dollars is 100 times more than 10,000 dollars. I also think that there are literally hundreds or thousands of people who are deeply immersed in this extraordinary and ethically problematic business and who are collectively mining billions of dollars a year from their absurd hypotheses that the world is going to face climate emergency in a foreseeable future.

If someone tries to paint the skeptics - who often live as ascetic monks and whose physical safety is at risk - as corrupt people, even though everyone may easily see billions of dollars flowing to the pockets of people whose job is to defend some very different dogmas - such as the silly theory about the catastrophic global warming - he either shows that his ability to judge reality has collapsed to zero, or he shows that he is a financial part of the global warming fraud himself.

And that's the memo.