A major climate report was recently released after 4 years of work, and its contents were ridiculed by President Trump’s administration and its associates.
A former Republican Senator, Rick Santorum claimed that most scientists were driven by money that comes from those pushing for climate change. He claimed that scientists do not receive money from Exxon and other energy corporations.
Former House majority leader, Tom Delay who is a Republican called the report a rehash of decades of assumptions by scientists who were paid to spread the propaganda of climate change.
One of the authors of the report, Katharine Hayhoe said that they were not paid anything to produce the report. The federal government report warned that global warming could affect human health, the environment, and the American economy. Internal research from oil companies has also affirmed that climate change could be catastrophic.
Researchers working on climate change do not receive large sums of money, and they do not even receive money from oil companies. Data from the Association of American Universities have revealed that professors at public universities that teach environmental studies and earth sciences do not receive as much as their peers in law, business, and economics departments.
At Iowa State University, professors in the earth and environmental sciences department earned an average of about $98,000 which is lower than the university average of about $134,000. At Pennsylvania State University, professors in the earth and mineral sciences department earned an average of $157,000 which is lower than the university average of $166,000.
In 2017, $13.2 billion was spent by the federal government on climate change. $9 billion was used to fund clean energy technology while $2.8 billion was allocated for scientific funding. This amounted to just 2.4% out of the $118.3 billion spent on research funding in 2017.
Dr. Hayhoe explained that the $1.1 million grant that she received was divided over 4 years and part of it went to the university for facilities cost. Some went towards paying for a graduate assistant, and some went towards covering the costs of conferences, laptops, and publishing in scientific journals.
Scientists get more money by engaging in groundbreaking, innovative research and not confirming what has been said before. And Exxon Mobil and other energy companies fund climate change research on their own. 80% of internal communications and 83% of peer-reviewed studies of Exxon Mobil confirmed that climate change is real and caused by humans.
Researchers at Shell have also confirmed the same thing. They warned about climate change in the 1980s.
President Trump claimed that the United States was the cleanest country, but that is not true. The United States ranked 27th out of 180 countries in environmental performance research. Switzerland was the cleanest country. Efforts by the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been rated insufficient.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the climate report was based on the extreme model scenario. But that is wrong. The report used three models for greenhouse gas emissions.
