Look How BIG The Conspiracy Is!

From today's Tribune-Review editorial board:

And milking the cash cow that's climate change, a report issued by a Pentagon think tank rings a global-warming alarm and urges the Defense Department to step up spending to combat a “man-made” problem, The Washington Times reports. The report, based on “absolute objectivity,” was funded by a climate change group that's one of the think tank's customers. Such stunning “objectivity” is the foundation on which the Church of Global Warming is built.

Let's try to unweave some of the rather confusing prose in the above.

The Washington Times piece is here and it says:

Retired military officers deeply involved in the climate change movement — and some in companies positioned to profit from it — spearheaded an alarmist global warming report this month that calls on the Defense Department to ramp up spending on what it calls a man-made problem.

The report, which the Obama administration immediately hailed as a call to action, was issued not by a private advocacy group but by a Pentagon-financed think tank that trumpets "absolute objectivity." The research was funded by a climate change group that is also one of the think tank's main customers.

The May 13 report came from the military advisory board within CNA Corp., a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia, that includes the Center for Naval Analyses, a Navy-financed group that also gets contracts from other Pentagon units. CNA also operates the Institute for Public Research.

Ok, so now we're getting somewhere.  The port came from a board within the CNA Corp and the CNA Corp operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research.

But Scaife's braintrust charges that the people who wrote the report are doing so to line their own pockets.  So what sort of people are these that wrote this report?  Here's the press release page announcing the report:

As a follow-up to its landmark 2007 study on climate and national security, the CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board's National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change (PDF) re-examines the impact of climate change on U.S. national security in the context of a more informed, but more complex and integrated world.

The Board’s 2007 report described projected climate change as a “threat multiplier.” In this report the 16 retired Generals and Admirals who make up the board look at new vulnerabilities and tensions posed by climate change, which, when set against the backdrop of increasingly decentralized power structures around the world, they now identify as a “catalyst for conflict.”

Ok, so it was the Military Advisory Board who wrote the report.  So who are THEY?

Here they are.  Here's the bio of the Chairman of the Board (sorry, Frank):

General Paul Kern, USA (Ret.), Chairman, Military Advisory Board Former Commanding General, U.S. Army Materiel Command General Kern was Commanding General, Army Materiel Command from 2001-2004, and senior advisor for Army Research, Development, and Acquisition from 1997-2001. He was commissioned as an Armor Lieutenant following graduation from West Point in 1967 and served three combat tours – two in Vietnam as a platoon leader and troop commander and the third in Desert Shield/Desert Storm. In the 1990s, Kern served as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense William Perry. In June 2004, at the request of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Kern led the military's internal investigation into the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

So the guy Donald Rumsfeld asked to investigate Abu Ghraib is in on the climate change conspiracy.

This is the level of their argument, the braintrust.  It's all a conspiracy to get more money out of the Pentagon.  The facts are false, the reasoning is false it's all a big conspiracy - git aht yer tin hats!

But if the source of the funding can, in fact, skew the research, then why are they silent about the money Big Oil has poured into the "research" denying climate science?