GAO understands the environmental/journalism complex is dusting off an old playbook. The booming reproducibility crisis in science has left it scrambling to salvage the federally funded and engineered science blob as a turn-key vehicle to advance activist agendas. As the White House has put things, “The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research. Unfortunately, the Federal Government has contributed to this loss of trust. In several notable cases, executive departments and agencies (agencies) have used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.”
Priorities threatened by the “Gold Standard” reforms include of course advancing the “climate” agenda through policy, and even through privately financed “public” litigation campaigns.
The aforementioned ‘dusting off’ effort brings to mind the below list of “validators” for the media to turn to to support the other half of the partnership. These TPs and accompanying emails are from a larger Illinois Attorney General document production, available, here, a longer discussion of which is available here (appendix of source documents here).
JunkScience.com’s Steve Milloy has documented how it is the greens themselves who have adopted the tobacco industry’s tactics. These include a strategy of information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings and cherry-picking facts, and attempting to shift the focus away to something other than research based on observation. Finally, of course, is the climate industry’s trademark effort to stifle legitimate debate and silence those who won’t accept their dogma.
Years ago John Atkinson pointed out in the UK newspaper, the Register, “The climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe.”
Further, the premise behind most alarmist slurs, of the “tobacco scientist” variety and the ritual claims of “ties” to “big oil” or “industry,” is that a scientist’s convictions and those of other dissenters are for sale. Yet it is illogical to assume that dissenters can be bought but alarmists cannot. Looking at the balance sheets on both sides, their logic would conclude that the greatest amount of corruption occurs on the alarmist side.
Regardless, we see the addiction here.