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Friday, 28 January 2011

EU funding and the politicization of science especially regarding Man made Climate Change

There are still some people who think that 'big oil'and 'large American business interests' fund 'denier' scientists whilst the scientist proponents of man made climate change are underfunded fighters for the truth.

As with many of the accepted narratives of the left, this is almsot 180 degrees away from the truth. In fact the proponents of man made global warming receive far more funding from business, government, NGOs and especially tans-national bodies than the seekers after the truth on global warming can ever dream of.

For a detailed analysis of this area, may I commend this paper from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This report goes into great detail about the EU's funding of man made climate change 'research' and includes explanations of funding stream such as 'dgxii' which is from the Commission’s Directorate General for Research, 'dgxi' which was the acronym for the Directorate General for the Environment, 'dg' which is essentially a funding organization that controls a massive multi-year budget for research support known as the 'Framework Programme — or 'fp' for short. The acronyms go on and on and then come some quite staggering figures:
'The Research Directorate’s Framework Programme 6 — or “fp6” — ran from 2002 through 2006 and comprised a budget of some € 17.5 billion. The current Framework Programme 7 began in 2007 and will run through 2013 It comprises a research support budget of some €50.5 billion.'

Do read the whole article, print some copies out and have one to hand ready for the next time an eco-loon tells you that 'climate change deniers' receive large amounts of funding from big business' and that the environmental movement is the unfunded seeker after after truth.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the number for climate change research is much lower, the €50.5 billion refer to All research funding of the EU, for environmental (among it climate change but many other different issues as well) research there is the number of € 1.9 billion earmarked for 2007-2013. And according to your Hoover link climate change research is financed by roughly € 20-30 million annually. Compared to other research areas it does not seem to be too much...

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/environment/home_en.html

Grant said...

If Climate Change "deniers" are funded by business, the businesses still have to make a profit and stay in business.
The funders of Climate Change "believers" are doing it out of taxpayers' money.
In any case, many businesses based on traditional energy sources are diversifying into "alternative" sources as they can see a good return on investment.