Also note nonsensical use of this week's conservative catch phrase, because Fox News viewers
need you to jingle your keys constantly if you're going to keep their attention.
We don't do much coverage of conservative "pundit" Jonah Goldberg here anymore because Jonah Goldberg's punditry these days is, for the most part, performance art—things said because someone needed to be quoted saying them, not things that Jonah Goldberg could defend with a coherent argument, or an incoherent argument, or via creative arrangement of twigs. The good news is that Fox News has finally dumbed itself down enough that even a person of his limited talents
can find a small place.
On the November 18 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Goldberg argued that climate scientists have a conflict of interest reporting on climate change because they are "deeply invested in the whole industry of global warming" for their university programs. Goldberg also called climate scientists and advocates "people who are financially incentivized to go one way."
The catch, aside from imagining the world's scientists to be well-heeled and financially savvy mountebanks whose idea of monetary windfall is
not just having the grad students put in an extra shift in the specimen-handling room, is that Jonah Goldberg is employed by the now-notorious American Enterprise Institute, an organization so linked to oil company interests and steeped in oil company money that Jonah Goldberg has to towel himself off before appearing in public. Not only are they "deeply invested in the whole industry" of denying global warming, their fellows are "incentivized" to deny global warming by genuine cash money. And if their fellows cannot fumble through it, AEI offers cash to any scientist or pseudo-scientist who can muster something printable for them:
In 2007, The Guardian reported that AEI offered scientists and economists $10,000 to write articles that "emphasise the shortcomings" of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which found a 90 percent chance that human activity was causing global temperature increases.
So there we go. The nice pundit from the think tank that offers oil company cash to anyone willing to dispute climate change says you can't trust the world's scientists on whether burning oil is damaging our climate,
those people are just in it for the money. I think we've summed up all of Fox News quite nicely there, so paying attention to Jonah Goldberg just this once seems to have paid off after all. Oh ,and bonus points go to Neil Cavuto for achieving a
Fox & Friends moment of televised incompetence without the usual presence of Not Steve Doocy.