When they won the prize in 2007, they were hailed for their selfless efforts to protect the planet from the ravages of greedy fossil fuel industries. Since then, though, their selflessness has been questioned. Journalists started by looking at the money going to companies and nonprofit groups associated with Mr. Gore, and now they have turned their attention to Dr. Pauchauri, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The I.P.C.C., which is supposed to be the gold standard of peer-reviewed climate science, in 2007 warned of a “very high” likelihood that global warming would cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. When the Indian government subsequently published a paper concluding there was no solid evidence of Himalayan glaciers shrinking because of global warming, Dr. Pachauri initially dismissed it as “voodoo science” beneath the I.P.C.C.’s standards.
But then it came out that the I.P.C.C.’s projection was based not on the latest peer-reviewed evidence, but on speculative comments made a decade ago in a magazine interview by Syed Hasnain, a glaciologist who now works in an Indian research group led by Dr. Pachauri.
Last week, the I.P.C.C apologized for the mistake, which was embarrassing enough for Dr. Pachauri. But he also had to contend with accusations of conflict of interest. The Telegraph of London reported that he had a “worldwide portfolio of business interests,” which included relationships with carbon-trading companies and his research group, the Energy and Resources Institute.
Dr. Pachauri responded with a defense of his ethics, saying that he had not profited personally and that he had directed all revenues to his nonprofit institute. He denounced his critics’ tactics: “You can’t attack the science, so attack the chair of the I.P.C.C.”
I can’t defend that entire sentiment, because you obviously can attack some of the science in the I.P.C.C. report, not to mention other dire warnings in Dr. Pachauri’s speeches.
But I do agree with his basic insight: Conflict-of-interest accusations have become the simplest strategy for avoiding a substantive debate. The growing obsession with following the money too often leads to nothing but cheap ad hominem attacks.
Sure, money matters to everyone; the more fears that Dr. Pachauri and Mr. Gore stoke about climate change, the more money is liable to flow to them and the companies and institutions they are affiliated with. Given all the accusations they have made about the financial motives of climate change “deniers,” there is a certain justice in having their own finances investigated.
But I don’t doubt that Mr. Gore and Dr. Pachauri would be preaching against fossil fuels even if there were no money in it for them, just as I don’t doubt that skeptics would be opposing them for no pay. Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?
One reason is laziness. It is simpler to note a corporate connection than to analyze all the other factors that can bias researchers’ work: their background and ideology, their yearnings for publicity and prestige and power, the politics of their profession, the agendas of the public agencies and foundations and grant committees that finance so much scientific work.
Another reason is a snobbery akin to the old British aristocracy’s disdain for people “in trade.” Many scientists, journal editors and journalists see themselves as a sort of priestly class untainted by commerce, even when they work at institutions that regularly collect money from corporations in the form of research grants and advertising.
We trust our judgments to be uncorrupted by lucre — and we would be appalled if, say, a national commission to study the publishing industry were composed only of people who had never made any money in the business. (How dare those amateurs tell us how to run our profession!) But we insist that others avoid even “the appearance of impropriety.”
This snobbery was codified by The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, when it essentially required chaperones for any researchers receiving corporate money. Citing “concerns about misleading reporting of industry-sponsored research,” the journal refused to publish such work unless there was at least one author with no ties to the industry who would formally vouch for the data.
That policy was called “manifestly unfair” by BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal), which criticized JAMA for creating a “hierarchy of purity among authors.” The hierarchy looked especially dubious after a team of academic researchers (not financed by industry) analyzed dozens of large-scale clinical trials in previous decades and reported that industry-sponsored ones met significantly higher standards than the nonindustry ones.
The new fetish for disclosing “conflicts” has led some of the best medical researchers to shun drug company money altogether — not because they think it leads to bad research, but because they are tired of that fact being highlighted every time they are identified in a news story, as if that were the most important thing to know about their work.
There are, of course, notorious cases of corporate money buying predetermined conclusions, like the reports once put out by the Tobacco Institute to rebut concerns about smoking and cancer. But there has also been dubious work promoted by government agencies and foundations eager to generate publicity and advance their own agendas.
It’s naïve to caricature scientific disputes as battles between “industry” and the “public interest,” as if bureaucrats and activists didn’t have their own selfish interests (and wealthy, powerful allies like trial lawyers). Too often, corporate conflict-of-interest accusations have been used as smear tactics to silence scientists who ended up being correct. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for examples.)
Instead of stigmatizing certain kinds of research grants, perhaps we should consider the bigger picture. If scientists listed all their public and private donors on their Web pages, journalists could simply link to that page and let readers decide which ones are potentially corrupting. Instead of following rigid rules to report “conflicts,” journalists could use their judgment and report only the ones that seem relevant.
Sometimes you can’t understand a debate or a controversy without knowing who is paying whom. But in general, I’m with Dr. Pachauri: follow the science, not the money.
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