If you’re like most people — even if you’re the type that’s interested in how much the climate is changing, how serious it is, how much of it is anthropogenic, and whether the seriousness is being exaggerated for political ends — you’re probably not going to sit down and read a 39-page study titled “Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes.”
And, indeed, if you skipped the abstract and waded just a few pages into the report, you might be thinking that the only spoiler alert is that there is no spoilers: ” Conflict of interest (COI) in scientific research emerged as a topic of public concern in the mid-1980s, when journalists published exposés on fraud and deception in science and the U.S. Congress held hearings on misconduct, bias, and financial interests in federally-funded science.
“Since then, government agencies, universities, professional societies, and journals have adopted policies for disclosing COIs and funding support, and scholars studied how financial interests can influence decisions concerning research design, data analysis, data interpretation, and data sharing and publication.”
Are you asleep yet? The paper goes on to say that the issue of climate change is indeed a controversial one, since there are several sides to the issue and pretty much every side aside from those who paint it as not just climate change but “climate catastrophe” aren’t likely to get much funding in or, frankly, out of academia.
However, the interesting part of the paper — authored by academics Jessica Weinkle (University of North Carolina, Wilmington), Paula Glover (North Carolina State), Ryan Philips (Johns Hopkins University), William Tepper (High Point University), Min Shi, and David Resnik (both of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science) — is, thankfully, contained in the abstract. Funding from non-governmental organizations was correlated with finding “a positive association between climate change and geophysical characteristics of hurricanes as a research outcomes.” That’s pretty important stuff, considering that how much climate change may or may not impact hurricane strength has serious implications on public policy.
But, here’s the great part: Nobody was able to identify the conflict of interest here, since “none (0) of the 331 authors disclosed COIs.”
That’s right: Out of 82 papers the authors analyzed in the meta-analysis, written between 1994 and 2023, absolutely zero of the 331 academics who had conflicts of interest disclosed them, despite the fact that the conflicts of interest are positively correlated with alarmism about anthropogenic climate change and hurricane strength.
In a stunning new preprint researchers found that between 1994-2023 not one of the 82 “climate science” papers they identified had a financial or non-financial COI disclosure from at least one author.
The research also found that funding from NGOs was a significant predictor of… pic.twitter.com/zte5wC4yn7
— Champagne Joshi (@JoshWalkos) February 23, 2025
“Since COI disclosures 27in other areas of research, such as bioscience, range from about 17% to 33%, we suspect that some authors had COIs that they did not disclose,” the authors of the study, published Feb. 18, added.
“To promote objectivity, transparency, and trust in climate science, journals that publish this research should clearly state that authors must disclose financial and non-financial COIs and provide clear processes for doing so.
“Scientific societies and journals should foster COI disclosure as a norm of professional ethics through policy development, education and peer modeling.”
To which I say two things:
- Duh.
- Good luck with that.
The rest of the study is filled with other nuggets that might interest those who are skeptical about how scientific “The Science” around certain areas of climate change are; for instance, “most of the articles (61%) were published in 2016 or later (range 1994-2023).”
A cynic might note that a search for this link in academia comes downstream from mainstream media, which always loves to dramatize hurricane coverage and would love to peg the dramatic footage of a weatherman standing out in a storm with debris hitting his head on insufficiently restrictive energy policy.
A cynic, in fact, would probably be right, although the paper doesn’t study that; however, the fact that most of the articles that fell under the rubric they were analyzing were published in just an eight-year period despite the meta-analysis looking at studies over a 30-year period tells you a great deal in and of itself.
But that’s invariably the problem: No, one meta-analysis of conflicts of interest isn’t necessarily dispositive of a widespread problem, but it certainly points that way for reasons one can certainly guess at.
If anyone thinks, furthermore, that those reasons — mainly, non-governmental organizations which have an agenda to push — can be dismantled or hindered, or conflicts of interest more effectively detected in an area of study where opacity is profoundly beneficial, clearly nobody’s been taking notice of the moneyed edifice of protection academia and The Science™ has been erecting around climate change dogma to prevent any open and honest discussion about it.
To everyone who hides behind that edifice, that established dogma around anthropogenic global warming is that it’s very real, very horrifying, and we need to be screaming very loudly about it. If we aren’t, we’re “deniers,” language deliberately employed to evoke the Holocaust.
The wonder isn’t that these study authors didn’t disclose the conflicts of interest, or that there will be zero repercussions for not doing so. The wonder is that anyone had the fortitude and aplomb — self-sabotaging though it may be in the academic world — to look in the first place.
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