Politics
Out of context: Reply #11169
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- ukit0
This article goes into pretty good detail about what a shameless industry whore this guy is.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/artic…
Inhofe opened the hearing by swearing fealty to "sound science." He then lavished praise on a highly controversial paper, authored by two scholars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, that has been denounced by mainstream climate scientists. "In many important ways," Inhofe declared, the study "shifts the paradigm" away from the accepted view that the late 20th century saw unprecedented global temperature spikes.
Harvard astrophysicist Willie Soon, one of the paper's authors, then spoke, claiming his work showed that 20th-century temperatures were not, in fact, anomalous. He didn't note, however, that his research had been partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute.
Soon -- who did not respond to written questions submitted for this article -- was backed by David Legates of the University of Delaware, another contrarian and co-author of a later version of the paper. Both scientists have collaborated in the past with the George C. Marshall Institute, an organization skeptical of much climate-change science that received $90,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002, the last year for which records are currently available.
O'Keefe himself has previously chaired the (anti-Kyoto Protocol) Global Climate Coalition and served as chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute. In addition, he's a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil, though he comments, "I keep my Exxon work and my Marshall work separate."
Inhofe and others question whether fossil-fuel connections bias climate science. "It's not the politics of the scientists that counts or who funds them," says O'Keefe. "It's the immersion of the hypothesis in the acid bath of truth."