The American Spectator

The stifling of scientific dissent on the issue of global warming is not limited to the Climategate story. Last month I blogged about how American Geophysical Union scientists Willie Soon and David Legates, both realists on climate change, had a planned alarmism rebuttal session at AGU’s annual meeting suddenly yanked away from them under suspicious circumstances.

Now there’s conflict within the American Physical Society over its official position on the issue, as CBS News’s excellent blogger (on climate reporting, at least) Declan McCullagh reports:

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. In an interview published by Princeton’s public relations office, Socolow called CO2 a “climate problem” that governments need to address.

“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.

It’s amazing how we keep finding these alarmist scientists who are funded by big oil. And it’s also amazing the effect that Climategate has had on media organizations: debates on climate science are breaking out all over the cable news networks.