IN THIS ISSUE:
- Unreported Conflicts of Interest Rife in Climate Research
- Climate Agreements Be Damned, Coal Use Continues Growing
- Japanese, Korean Sea Level Data Show No Climate Change Effect
Unreported Conflicts of Interest Rife in Climate Research
I have written in the past concerning how the mainstream media’s objectivity concerning climate change is being compromised by direct payments from advocacy organizations to cover the “climate crisis.” To take just one example, the Associated Press, arguably the preeminent newswire service, receives millions of dollars each year in direct payments from climate alarmist foundations and interest groups to hire climate reporters and cover climate stories.
But it’s not just the media. Science itself has been corrupted by the lure of research dollars, public acclaim and prestige, and the influence flowing from it. As discussed in a recent Newsweek article, President Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw this outcome nearly 65 years ago when, in his farewell address, he warned of the dangers of both the growth of the military industrial complex and the corruption of science by big government funding and the opposite “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
In 2015, researchers David E. Wojick, Ph.D. and the late Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D. published a paper examining the corruption of science Eisenhower warned of, in the form of government funding-induced biases in scientific research.
A recent paper under open review and discussion at the Center for Open Science delves deeply into evidence of conflicts of interest in climate science.
Setting the background for the paper, Charles Rotter writes at Watts Up With That,
The field of climate science has long been presented as an objective, data-driven discipline, immune to the biases and financial conflicts that plague other scientific domains. However, a recent preprint study by Jessica Weinkle et al, Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes, challenges this assumption, shedding light on an alarming lack of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in climate research, particularly in studies linking hurricanes to climate change.
After recounting various scandals that have arisen due to lack of transparency, conflicts of interest, and outright fraud found in biomedical sciences and the “peer reviewed” journals that publish work in that field, Jessica Weinkle, the lead author of the study, notes a number of laws and rules were passed to improve transparency and reduce the threat posed by conflicts of interest:
The federal government implemented conflicts of interest disclosure rules for those receiving grant funding from Health and Human Services in 1995. In 2009, the National Academy of Medicine (then, the Institute of Medicine) released a report reviewing the issue of conflicts of research in medicine and opened with the statement that, “Hardly a week goes by without a news story about conflicts of interest in medicine.” In 2010, Congress passed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act requiring certain companies to keep track of their financial arrangements with physicians and report them to a central repository.
Similar rules and laws have not been put in place to cover climate change research, about which Weinkle says,
And yet, mum’s the word from the scientific community for improved disclosure of researcher conflicts of interest in climate change research despite decades of serious controversy around some of its leading practices, lapses in scientific integrity, entire areas of technological practice overtly oriented around advocacy and litigation, and knock-on issues in finance, insurance, energy and seemingly, well-being in young people.
Weinkle and her colleagues at universities, research institutes, and government agencies in North Carolina and Maryland set out to remedy this lack of knowledge about the potential scope of conflicts of interest in climate research and to propose remedies to reduce them going forward.
With thousands of papers discussing different aspects of climate change published over the past decade, for the sake of practicality Weinkle et al. limited their analysis to “82 peer-reviewed articles on the relationship between climate change and the geophysical properties of hurricanes published between 1994 and 2023 to determine whether conflicts of interest disclosures, funding support, or author affiliation are associated with study outcomes or recommendations.”
The researchers focused particularly on papers that discussed the detection and attribution of hurricanes, and any with political recommendations.
Of the 331 coauthors listed as contributors to the 82 papers, not a single one admitted to any conflict of interest. This occurred even though at least one author holds a patent relevant to the research they worked on and is an advisor to a risk analytics firm and a financial company, another author is an advisor to a climate risk analytics firm, another is a nonresident scholar for an insurance industry association, and “[o]ne or more authors developed research methods in collaboration with an advocacy organization to pursue climate litigation.”
While scholars undertaking research in scientific fields self-report conflicts of interest between 17 to 33 percent of the time, not a single author involved in these papers admitted to any such conflict, and their research field and many of the journals which focus on climate research don’t demand such disclosures or aren’t heavily invested in policing it. Interestingly, the research found funding from a nongovernmental organization (NGO) promoting climate action advocacy “was a significant predictor for an article to find a positive association between climate change and geophysical characteristics of hurricanes as a research outcome.”
When researchers get money from climate NGOs, often the research outcome attributes a link between climate change and hurricane behavior—imagine that.
As bad as this is, I go back to what Eisenhower said about government corrupting research and vice versa. In addition, Nobel Prize-winning public choice research has long detailed employees of government agencies have their own biases and ethical and political points of view which tend to bias toward mission creep and expanded government power tied to those who receive government funding and those who decide who receives government research dollars. Government funding influences research, and I’d wager climate research has gotten more government funding in the past decade and half, as the climate crisis hype has ratcheted up, than the field received in the entirety of its existence beforehand.
Though I have not found that Weinkle and her coauthors examined the overlap between government funding of the studies they examined or government employment of the authors of those studies, I believe there would be a huge amount of it. In that regard, Weinkle said on her blog, “Given the confluence between government, academia, industry, and NGOs in climate research, many researchers may have non-financial COIs they are not disclosing.”
In consultation with ethicists, Weinkle developed a list of factors to be considered when examining potential conflicts of interest:
- Do sponsors, institutions, or researchers have a significant financial or political stake in the outcome of a study?
- Do the financial interests of the sponsor, institution, or researcher coincide with the goal of conducting research that is objective and reliable?
- Do the sponsors, institutions, or researchers have a history of biasing research in order to promote their financial or political goals?
- How easy is it to manipulate the research in order to achieve financial or political goals?
- Are there oversight mechanisms in place that minimize bias and make it more difficult to manipulate research successfully?
Looks like a good start to me. Certainly, in light of Climategate, Climategate 2, and other climate research scandals, it boggles the imagination to believe climate research has been conducted without a single hint of conflicts of interest in research, public statements, and advocacy by the thousands of scholars involved.
Sources: Conflicted; Center for Open Science; Watts Up With That; Newsweek; Climate Change Weekly
Climate Agreements Be Damned, Coal Use Continues Growing
Despite multiple international climate agreements calling for sharp reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions and the coal use that has driven much of them, use of coal continues to grow and set records, reports Oil Price.
In a recent analysis for Oil Price, Tsvetana Paraskova found,
- Retirement of coal-fired power plants in the West has done nothing to reverse global coal demand.
- Global coal consumption is set to remain at these high levels—or even hit new all-time highs—for a few more years.
- Global operating coal power capacity has increased by 13 percent since 2015 [when the Paris climate agreement was signed], data from Global Energy Monitor shows.
Even as the United States, the EU, and the U.K. have sharply reduced or even ended coal use, the use of coal for electricity continued to grow in less-developed countries, resulting in an overall net rise in coal use and emissions.
Wishing to power economic growth and prevent blackouts or intermittency, fast-growing Asian countries, led by China and India, are adding more and more coal to their electric power portfolios.
“Since 2015, when the countries reached a deal on the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world has added 259 GW of operating coal power capacity,” writes Paraskova. “As of the end of 2024, total operating coal power capacity hit a record high of 2,175 gigawatts (GW), while another 611 GW of capacity was under development, according to GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker.”
Global demand hit a new record high in 2024, with India alone—the third-largest CO2 emitter in absolute terms—having a 5 percent increase in coal demand.
Although the International Energy Agency has projected coal demand should level off in 2017, it previously predicted a plateauing in 2024 and 2025 and earlier a decline by 2016, so the agency’s predictions are open to question. All that can be said for sure right now is that despite climate commitments, coal use continues to grow and new projects being brought online won’t be shut down for decades.
Source: Oil Price
Japanese, Korean Sea Level Data Show No Climate Change Effect
A recent study published in the journal Science Direct shows sea levels around South Korea and Japan are not rising dramatically, and what sea level rise is recorded is tied more to land movement and multidecadal fluctuations or oscillations of large-scale ocean currents.
The study consists largely of a literature review of sea level changes since the 1800s on the coasts of Japan and Korea. Long-term data exists for many locations along the coast of Japan but not Korea.
The studies examined accounted for the changes in relative sea levels due to the combination of changes in sea and land. Land changes included subsidence, changes due to seismic activity, and isostasy, the rising or falling of land caused by changes in material deposited on or removed from the surface, combined with changes in sea temperatures and thermal expansion.
The study isolated land surface from changes in sea levels for tide gauges of Hosojima, Wajima, Tonoura, and Oshoro, and found multidecadal fluctuation cycles of approximately 20 and 60 years, and there was no consistent rise in sea levels nor any accelerating rates of relative sea level rise during the recent period of modest warming.
Korea’s data from tide gauges since the 1960s displays a pattern of land surface and sea surface changes similar to those measured for Japan, a pattern confirmed by measurements taken via satellite altimetry since 1993.
The accelerating “sea level rise” measured in Korea in recent decades compared to the 1960s is due to land subsidence during the short period of reliable data, the author concludes.
Source: Science Direct
