A CONFLICT OF INTEREST - AT 7:35 P.M. ET:  Don't think there are conflicts of interest in the "science" of global warming?  Reader Brian Kuhn alerts us to this CBS story that should open eyes.  And it deals with one of our great universities:

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society's review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton's Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible "catastrophic consequences" of climate change.

Socolow's research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government.

Ahem.  A bit of a problem:

"It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming," says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.

That nails it exactly.  And we see these conflicts all over science.  We've noted that President Eisenhower warned about the influence of funding on scientific results in his farewell address to the nation some 48 years ago.  The problem hasn't been solved.

Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.

And...

Petr Chylek, a fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University, said in an open letter that climate scientists "have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view." And 141 scientists have signed a statement at CopenhagenClimateChallenge.org that says actual evidence of human-caused global warming is lacking and "unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation."

COMMENT:  Nice, huh?  How many trillions will be spent, how much of our economy will be damaged, before we realize that climate-change "science" is shot through with conflicts of interest and political agendas.

And while we're at it, maybe it's time to take a look at some of our "leading" universities and the way they do business.  And remember:  It's a business.

December 11, 2009