In early November of this year, NASA/GISS released a statement that this October had been the warmest October on record. From Jerry Pournelle’s website, a link to an article in the UK Telegraph describing how this claim was based on bad data from Russia. The GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) excused this by saying “that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with.”

This article predates the leaked CRU emails by a couple of days (in fact, the actual hack was discovered by the CRU a day after this article was posted).

There is a call from members of the American Physical Society to have their 2007 statement calling for reductions of CO2 reviewed by a scientist who is not in charge of a research center that would be expected to receive more funding if it endorsed the AGW/CO2 hypothesis.

“It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming,” says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.”

I don’t have any reason to doubt the validity of the Dr. Socolow’s research – but he shouldn’t be the one in charge of reviewing it since a continued affirmation of the APS’ 2007 statement could easily send more research money his way. Someone without that conflict of interest should be the reviewer.