Today, more than 100 geoscientists sent a letter to the President of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) - the world’s largest association of Earth scientists - calling for an end to ExxonMobil sponsorship of AGU in a stand against climate science disinformation.“As Earth scientists, we are deeply troubled by the well-documented complicity of ExxonMobil in climate denial and misinformation…By allowing Exxon to appropriate AGU’s institutional social license to help legitimize the company’s climate misinformation, AGU is undermining its stated values as well as the work of many of its own members,” states the letter.
In fact, AGU’s own Organizational Support Policy states that “AGU will not accept funding from organizational partners that promote and/or disseminate misinformation of science, or that fund organizations that publicly promote misinformation of science.” Despite this claim, the nearly 24,000 attendees of the AGU 2015 Fall meeting were greeted by a prominent display of gratitude for Exxon’s sponsorship.
Signatories include leading AGU-member scientists such as former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and renowned climatologist Professor James E. Hansen, former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Harvard Professor James J. McCarthy, Penn State’s Earth System Science Center director Michael E. Mann, and author of Merchants of Doubt and Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes, as well as other concerned geoscientists including Professor Hans Schellnhuber, CBE, who currently serves as Chair of the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change and as a climate advisor to the Pope.
The open letter is published in full at: http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/scientists-to-agu-drop-exxon-sponsorship
The letter follows an editorial by three AGU members, published in January, calling on AGU to reject Exxon’s sponsorship of its future scientific conferences: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jan/06/why-is-the-largest-earth-science-conference-still-sponsored-by-exxon
