I am with you here. I expect that academics collect fees for providing testimony, presentations, and papers all the time. The secrecy is a bit disconcerting, but Happer does not request secrecy, nor does he request a fee. The article claims this undercover investigation but the e-mail chain shows Happer specifically sought agreement on his position first: "I would be glad to try to help if my views, outlined in the attachments, are in line with those of your client." He further and very specifically explained his position in the next message. (A note added to this passage reads "A 2013 survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers found 97% of scientists agreed global warming was man-made." This does not contradict Happer's position, nor is it true. If it is the same survey I looked into, only some 3000 scientists responded to the survey, and only 82% of them were in agreement. When only the most expert scientists were counted -- 79 of them -- two of them denied climate change and were thrown out of the results. 75 of the 77 left -- the 97% -- said that human activity is "a significant contributing factor" to climate change, not that it is the only or primary factor.)Maybe I'm jaded, but I found nothing surprising here.
revealed just how easy it is to pay an academic to say whatever you want him to
To be sure your client is not misled on my views, it is clear there are real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen for most of them, fly ash and heavy metals for coal, volatile organics for gasoline, etc. I fully support regulations for cost-effective control of these real pollutants. But the Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.