Big Oil Funded Research in Palin's Campaign Against Protection for Polar Bear. By Ed Pilkington, London Guardian, October 1, 2008. "Gov. Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry. In official submissions to the US government's consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil. The paper, entitled Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate Change [PDF, 22 pp], has been criticized for relying on old research and ignoring evidence that Arctic sea-ice is melting at a quickening pace. Walt Meier, a world authority on sea ice, based at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: 'The paper doesn't measure up scientifically.' One co-author of the paper, Willie Soon, completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil -- which has oil operations in Alaska's North Slope -- as well as from the American Petroleum Institute. Soon was a former senior scientist with the George C Marshall Institute, which acts as an incubator for climate-change scepticism. The institute has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998."
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