IPCC Versus AEI

You see below the projections of global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored scientific organization dedicated to looking at such matters. Reason's Ronald Bailey writes that "Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now."

But not everyone agrees. The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, for example, will give you $10,000 if you produce essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs" since in their view, the IPCC is "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work." Coincidentally enough, AEI happens to receive large doses of funding from the energy industry. The real question is why media outlets continue to treat the output of people who work at AEI as some kind of near-substitute for actual scholarship.