Climate change: Buying criticism

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report is due out this evening (NZ time), and the remnants of the climate change denial movement are gearing up for a last-ditch battle to preserve the profits of their coal- and oil-industry backers for a few more years. How? By paying people:

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 a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

Just to make this clear, this is not how things are done in science. Scientists are not usually paid for their publications, and while they do do work-for-hire on third-party reports, offering to pay for a particular result is simply against the whole scientific ethos. Anyone taking up this offer will be prostituting their reputations and committing academic corruption. Unfortunately, I'm sure they'll find at least a few takers to lend respectibility to their bought-and-paid-for propaganda.

Meanwhile, it does suggest an interesting line of questioning when our local deniers, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, hold their inevitable press conference to denounce the IPCC report as "scaremongering": "Are you aware that the AEI is offering scientists money to say this? What do you think of that? Will you be contributing to their report? Will you be accepting payment for it?" Their answers should be quite entertaining.