Playing with fire
by James A. Bacon
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has prevailed in a lawsuit to obtain emails detailing how GMU climatologists organized a call for a federal investigation into corporations that “knowingly deceived” the public about climate change. The campaign was organized by Jagadish Shukla, director of the Institute for Global Environment and Society (IGES), who subsequently drew notoriety for paying himself lavishly with federal research grant monies on top of his university salary.
Quoting from the account in the Watts Up With That? blog:
The [Richmond Circuit Court] judge ruled for CEI on all counts in an April 22 ruling in Christopher Horner and CEI v. George Mason University that the court released [Friday]. The ruling concluded that by leaving it to faculty who simply told the school’s FOIA officer they had no responsive records, GMU failed to conduct an adequate search; the judge also ruled that documents including emails from GMU Professor Ed Maibach must be released to CEI.
“This victory puts on notice those academics who have increasingly inserted themselves into politics, that they cannot use taxpayer-funded positions to go after those who disagree with them and expect to hide it,” said Chris Horner, CEI fellow and co-plaintiff. “These records … will be of great assistance to the public in trying to understand how their tax dollars are being used for political fights.”
Here are the emails:
Pages 1- 59
Pages 60-102
Pages 103-133
Pages 134-178
Pages 179-190
I haven’t had a chance to read through them, but judging from the highlights I’ve read in the Global Warming (GW) skeptic blogs, there are no smoking guns here. Some hint that the email haul could be as big as the so-called East Anglia “Climate Gate” scandal, but I don’t see it. The scandal in this case was right out in the open — scientists calling for a federal investigation into Exxon Mobil and other entities for allegedly lying to the public. The emails flesh out the details but don’t illuminate any fresh efforts at quashing threats to GW orthodoxy.
However, the emails do illuminate the thinking behind the controversial letter calling for the investigation. Marc Morano, author of the Climate Depot blog, sums up the tone of the correspondence:
It quickly emerges that some of the involved scientists (unwittingly) meandered out of their academic realm, with which they are comfortable and familiar, and into a political one that is very unfamiliar to them. Their scheme was ultimately aimed at intimidating and silencing scientific dissent. … Early on they were even advised that their case was very weak, and probably best left aside. … Yet [Ed Maibach] seemed unable to resist the opportunity of getting ‘lots of media attention.’ … Clearly the political arena was a new one for scientist Shukla.
The Climate Gate emails revealed how a handful of activist scientists conspired to keep dissenting views out of peer-reviewed journals, thus corrupting the scientific process. By contrast, the GMU emails show how a group of politically naive scientists wanted to suppress dissent from Global Warming orthodoxy in the political sphere — an odious sentiment, to be sure, but not one that undermines the scientific process.
The real scandal, brought to light by Climate Warming skeptics who were punching back against Shukla, has gone relatively unremarked upon: the potential for professors to enrich themselves with federally funded research grants and the inability of conflict-of-interest forms and in-house academic review to either spot or do anything about such double dipping. We still don’t know whether Shukla’s practices, which included putting his wife on the payroll and funding a private charity in India, is widespread among research scientists — not just climate change scientists, but researchers of all stripes. The sad thing is that no one in the media or punditocracy seems remotely interested in knowing the answer. Having put Shukla in his place, even the skeptics don’t seem interested.
Update: The emails may be more significant than I thought. Katie Brown with the Energy in Depth blog argues that the emails “pull back the curtain further on the level of collusion between anti-fossil fuel activists, their funders, and the attorneys general that have launched climate investigations into people, companies, and think tanks with which they disagree on the issue.”
