The EU and eek!-o-freakery

Insightful, well-researched paper by John Rosenthal, of Stanford University's Hoover Institute, on "The EU Connection in Climate Research".

The real culprit in the corruption of the scientific process and the promotion of climate alarmism is named again and again in the East Anglia e-mails and documents. But the culprit is named with many different names, mysterious combinations of letters and numbers and lyrical code words, names like dgxii, dgxi, fp5, fp6, fp7, life and enrich. What do they mean? In the final analysis, it is but one and the same multinational organization that lurks behind all these designations: the European Union.

All the designations refer either to departments of the European Commission or EU funding schemes. dgxii is the acronym by which the Commission’s Directorate General for Research was formerly designated, and dgxi was the acronym for the Directorate General for the Environment.

The Research DG is essentially a funding organization. It controls a massive multi-year budget for research support known as the Framework Programme - or fp. The European Network for Research into Global Change - or enrich - was an early climate change research initiative that was launched already under the fourth Framework Programme (1994–96). The Environment DG likewise has at its disposal a “financing instrument” (albeit a more modest one). The financing program of the Environment DG is called life. 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 (fp7) began in 2007 and will run through 2013 It comprises a research support budget of some €50.5 billion.

fp6 funded 26 projects on climate change. The total EU contribution to these projects was a whopping €165,580,451. The University of East Anglia was a partner institution in no less than eight of these projects and it was the coordinating institution for one. Under fp7, the climate research manna has flowed even more freely. In just the first three years (2007-09) of the current Framework Programme, the European Commission has already funded 28 projects on climate change for a total EU contribution, according to provisional data, of some €116,271,772. The University of East Anglia is a partner institution in four of these projects.

Several of the fp7 projects bear suitably alarmist abbreviated titles like climsave, redd-alert, and even HighNoon. As the example of HighNoon illustrates, not all the beneficiaries of the European financing are European research institutions. It is funded under an fp7 funding scheme known as cp-sica (“Collaborative Project-Specific International Cooperation Action”) that is specifically dedicated to funding research with “international,” i.e. non-EU, partner institutions. As it so happens, the lead international partner in the HighNoon project is none other than The [previously Tata] Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi. TERI is the research center of Rajendra Pachauri, the embattled chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

There follows a very detailed analysis of the money trail, to conclude:

One of the great political puzzles of the last decade is how allegedly man-made global warming - a purely hypothetical threat, of which no one has to date suffered any known consequences - could come to eclipse unquestionably man-made terrorism as the greatest “global challenge” of our times. That this development could occur during a decade in which by all accounts global temperatures have on the average declined renders the mystery all the greater. 

The eclipsing of the real and immediate threat of Islamist terror by the hypothetical long-term threat of “global warming” represents an obvious aberration. It simply cannot be the result of the spontaneous uprising of the global masses, as Friends of the Earth and other EU-funded pressure groups would like to make us believe. Instead, it would appear that the very practice of EU-funding of NGOs has helped to create a sort of pseudo civil society, amidst the din of whose protests and press releases and media campaigns the interests of actual civil society have become all but inaudible.