In message <005501c87fff$3f059e60$bd10db20$@net>, Denys Beauchemin 
<[log in to unmask]> writes

>unlike the Dr James Hansen of NASA who is funded by George Soros.

Yeah, right.

This canard is based on James Hansen receiving a small amount of 
non-monetary assistance from an organisation, the Government 
Accountability Project, to which George Soros' Foundation had made a 
grant from its funds.

It had donated some $720,000 dollars under the heading 'Politicization 
of Science' in 2006, which the knee-jerk right-wing bloggers claimed 
went straight into Hansen's pocket, and implied the knowledge and 
connivance of Hansen in this.

However, the reality is somewhat different; as can be seen at:
<URL:http://www.soros.org/initiatives/sof/focus_areas/politicization/gran
tees>
the amount that went to the GAP was just $100,000.

Well, maybe Hansen got all of that then? Hardly. The 2006 budget for GAP 
was $2.1m.

<URL:http://www.whistleblower.org/doc/2006/2006%20Final%20Financial%20Sta
tements.pdf>

So however much was spent to help Hansen (and it would not have been a 
large amount, and none of it would have gone into Hansen's pocket), you 
can see that no more than 5% of it would have come from the Soros 
Foundation; and none of it directly such that Hansen would have known 
where it was coming from.

Nor can we suppose that Soros' Foundation knew specifically, or had any 
control over, how the money would be used. They were pleased to mention 
its application to Hansen in their next Annual report - which to me is a 
bit like one contributor trying to annex the credit for funding all the 
work done by OpenMPE - but it seems as if this was just to confer some 
respectability on Soros, rather than the opposite.


Now, I have asked Denys in the past if he can find any flaws in the 
above description, or has any other independent evidence to back up his 
claim, but he has not so far done so.

Sadly, though, the presence of this canard in his exposition means that 
I am unable to give any higher credence to anything else he says about 
AGW.

However, I do believe he is sound on the topic of rack-mounted disc 
drives :-)

-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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