Think Tank Offers $10,000 to Scientists Who Criticize Climate Change

The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, has come under criticism from scientists and environmentalists for offering $10,000 and expenses to researchers who were willing to criticize an international report on climate, reports The Washington Post.

The report, issued last week by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that its researchers were 90 percent certain that recent climate change is caused by man.

American Enterprise Institute sent letters last July to scientists asking for essays on the climate-change report.

But after it received complaints that it was asking scientists to distort their views, American Enterprise last month sent out new letters asking for articles for a book on the public-policy debate over climate change.

At least two scientists have rejected the $10,000 offer, worried their work would be politicized, the newspaper reports, but Mr. Green said that a third of those approached with the offer have accepted.

“The effort to anathematize opposing views is the standard recourse of the ideologue; one of AEI’s highest purposes, here as in many other contentious areas, is to ensure that such efforts to do not succeed,” wrote Christopher DeMuth, president of the AEI, in letter issued Friday.

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