$558 million? What?!? Where's my share???

$558 million?  What?!?  Where's my share???  This study, and especially the graph at right showing the sources of this funding, is getting a lot of press right now.  It makes the startling claim that between 2003 and 2011, $558 million dollars was distributed to “the powerful climate change countermovement” – in other words, the anthropogenic global warming skeptics.

My first thought was “Hey!  Where’s my share of that $558 million?  Nobody donated a penny to me!”

My second thought was to wonder exactly what organizations they're claiming are part of this “powerful climate change countermovement” – because intuitively that claim of over a half-billion dollars in funding is just nonsense.  The study itself (at the link above) doesn't give a precise definition, but it does discuss their methodology.  On reading that, I discovered that this study concludes that major portions of the funding for groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute are all major players in this supposed “powerful climate change countermovement”.  Only by including their funding do they arrive at the study's figure.

I'm very familiar with the work of all three those organizations.  They are all three very general conservative think tanks, and each has occasionally done some work on the climate change question.  None of them are in any sense primarily AGW skeptics.  And yet here's an apparently serious academic, publishing a study in a peer-reviewed journal, that is making precisely that claim.  The intellectual dishonesty of that claim is breathtaking, and frightening.  It immediately brings to mind the political control mechanisms so deeply embedded in the world of 1984.  Or, for that matter, North Korea.

I cry for my country...