Conflict of interest

Jul 1, 2011
Bishop Hill in Journals

The AGW upholder community is all a-quiver with the news that Willie Soon received a lot of money from the oil industry. Even Monbiot himself is on the case, with a stream of tweets on the subject:

Secret funding of climate change deniers exposed again: bit.ly/m6Yjlp. Key issue here is that interests never declared.

In fact, they were flatly denied. Funny how the same story keeps recurring, just with different names.

Is there a single prominent denier who won't turn out to have been funded by an oil or coal company, or by the Koch brothers?

@nemof: That's just what we're not going to get. CC deniers go to great lengths to keep their sources of funding secret.

In response, Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, notes that COI disclosures are now the norm for medical journals.

Now obviously there's a bit of Monbiot "puff" going on here, but I think we should look on this enthusiasm for disclosure of conflicts of interest as an area in which widespread agreement should be possible.

Perhaps George would like to consider a joint call (a) for the IPCC to activate its COI policy for all AR5 working groups with immediate effect and (b) for climate journals to require disclosure of conflicts of interest in the way that medical journals do. I'll write and ask him.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony...

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).