Posted on 09/15/2017 9:45:29 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
... Suggesting that climate scientists are pushing a line about global warming because their salaries depend on it is a popular talking point that deniers love to throw around.
But why do so many “sceptics”, particularly those who form part of the organised machinery of climate science denial, feel comfortable in accusing climate scientists of only being in it for the money?
Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean suggests some answers in her new book Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
The book documents how wealthy conservatives, in particular petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch, teamed up with neoliberal academics with the objective, MacLean says, of undermining the functions of government in the United States.
MacLean’s central character is the late James McGill Buchanan, a political theorist and economist who won a Nobel award in 1986 for his development of “public choice theory”.
Buchanan and Koch developed and propagated their ideas through a private organisation called the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) – an influential group known as the “neoliberal thought collective” that was established in 1947 by famed free market economist Friedrich Hayek. Buchanan was a former president and joined in 1957. Koch, who has poured millions into groups attacking mainstream climate science, joined MPS in 1970.
It would be hopelessly naive to argue that money never motivates people to do certain things.
But to suggest global warming exists only because climate scientists need the money, you need to ignore melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, increasing extreme weather events, strings of record hot years, retreating glaciers, acidifying oceans, warming sea temperatures and bleaching corals. Or claim there is a conspiracy to manufacture these impacts in exchange for a wage.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Pot calling the kettle black. For years any scientist disputing the global warming hysteria has been accused of being a schill for the oil companies, and compared to doctors who testified for tobacco companies, regardless of whether they ever actually worked for them. So when someone points out that every “climate scientist” who works for a university Climatology Dept. owes his job to global warmin hysteria you get this garbage. OK for them to impugn people’s motives, but not us.
True. And they don’t address that point. I hope you got my flippant comment.
Correct, except for the predictions. Seriously, read them and chuckle at just how wrong they were!!!
Is too, Supreme Court says it is. </s>
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