<p>As presented by one of the more reliably lockstep right wing bobbleheads, Thomas Sowell, on March 15, 2007:</p>
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<p>But, inconveniently, it turns out that the scientists in the film who actually were distinguished had their views misrepresented, and the ones who weren’t misrepresented weren’t actually distinguished, or specialists in “climate related fields”, but rather industry-funded hacks. And the “readily understood graphs?” They were faked.</p>
<p>MIT’s Carl Wunsch, one of the scientists featured in the program, states that he was “completely misrepresented” in the film and had been “totally misled” when he agreed to be interviewed. He called the film “grossly distorted” and “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two.”</p>
<p>I’m thinking that if man was able to create global warming, and man is able to solve global warming - neither of which I’m willing to concede - perhaps there is an optimal global temperature range that will make the planet optimally habitable. However, we need to know the pluses and minuses at various temperatures to find this optimal point. There is precious little documentation of the benefits of global warming. More calamari is a good start, but it hardly balances out death and destruction. If only we could catalog the benefits of global warming we might find that it would be in our best interest to let the temperature rise some more before taking action.</p>
<p>So, to possibly protect the biodiversity in 50 years when the earth warms up, we’re destroying wildlife habitats and biodiversity.</p>
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<p>To save the next generation from possible food shortages as the world warms up, we’re making food unaffordable for millions of people in poverty today.</p>
<p>The scientists who make the most outrageous global warming claims get the most grants and funding for their research. A scientist who claims there is no global warming gets next to no funding.</p>
<p>I’m not a global warming denier, but what I said above is 100% true.</p>
<p>Timothy Ball, former professor University of Winnipeg, and star of “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is listed as a “consultant” of an organization called the “Friends of Science” (FOS). In January 28, 2007, the President of the FOS admitted that about one-third of the funding for the FOS is provided by the oil industry. In August, '06 the FOS was exposed as being funded in part by the oil and gas sector and hiding the fact that they were. The oil industry money was funnelled through the Calgary Foundation charity, to the University of Calgary and then put into an education trust for the FOS.</p>
<p>And don’t forget Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, who claims that “climate scientists need there to be a problem in order to get funding.”
Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a think tank that has received $561,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Spencer is also listed as an “Expert” with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Somehow I don’t think he needs to believe that there’s a problem for him to get funding, despite a few glitches in his work.</p>
<p>In fact, I suspect that if there was any research to be done that would yield results which contradicted the current scientific consensus about climate change there would be absolutely no shortage of funding to pay for it. I’d go a step further and suggest that in fact research has been done with exactly that goal in mind, but we just haven’t heard about the results. Seriously - do you think that with the billions of dollars of profits, and millions spent annually on PR and research funding, that no energy-related company would step up to fund any kind of research which would tend to blunt a scientific theory which threatens their profits?</p>