Conservative Think-Tank Bribed Scientists.

The United Nations report on the environment concocted by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 nations made the headlines last week. The main points are basically that warming was pretty much certainly man-made and it's only going to get worse (i.e. more droughts, heatwaves, rains and rising sea levels) before it gets better if it ever does!

But what has not made the headlines so much is powerful lobbies have tried to bribe scientists:

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.
The Guardian.

Exxon is very familiar with propaganda - they after all, along with other oil companies, funded tv ads that claimed that carbon dioxide is actually good for you.
The Bush administration is also good at misleading the public, as we all know by now - and I don't mean just the WMD. Remember when a scientist from NASA said in 2002 that the Bush administration was "trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed" (MSNBC)
We have also recently talked about AEI: it is a neo-conservative think tank which has been the main architect of the Bush administration's foreign policy (i.e. at the core of the ideology of the war in Iraq), which also wants to bomb Iran!
A great combination of people, isn't it? At least they have the merit of being consistent. I give them that! Time to face reality : they have lost on Iraq, they are losing on the environment, and they will lose in Iran. Time to get real people!