Heartland Institute documents reveal strategy of attacks against climate science
Documents illegally leaked from the Heartland Institute, one of the most active groups engaged in attacking the science of climate change, provide an unprecedented look into how these groups operate. The story was broken Tuesday by DeSmogBlog, a website dedicated to exposing false claims about climate change science. The documents reveal that donors to Heartland included oil billionaire Charles Koch, and Heartland has spent several million dollars over the past five years to undermine climate science. Tens of thousands of dollars are slated to go this year to well-known climate contrarians S.Fred Singer, Craig Idso, and Anthony Watts of the Watts Up With That? website. Naturally, the leaked documents have lit up the blogosphere, but none of the revelations are particularly surprising. The U.S. has a very successful and well-funded climate change denial industry, primarily funded by fossil fuel companies, that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few decades on a PR campaign against climate change science. I made a lengthy post on the subject in 2009 called, The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy. I won't say more here, but getenergysmartnow.com has compiled a long list of blogs that have interesting posts on the Heartland Institute affair for those interested in following this story.
Eight books challenging the Manufactured Doubt industry
Important scientific findings should always be challenged with the goal of finding flaws and improving our scientific understanding. But there's nothing a scientist hates more than to see good science attacked and the reputations of good scientists smeared in name of protecting corporate profits or ideology. A number of scientists have fought back against the recent unfounded assaults on climate change science by publishing books calling attention to the Manufactured Doubt industry's tactics and goals. Anyone priding themselves on being a open-minded skeptic of human-caused global warming should challenge their skepticism by reading one of these works. I thought so highly of Unscientific America, Merchants of Doubt, and Climate Coverup, that I donated 50 copies of these books to undergraduates at the University of Michigan last year. Here's a short synopsis of eight books published in the past three years defending climate change science against the attacks of the Manufactured Doubt industry:
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. If you're going to read one book on the attacks on climate science, this should probably be the one--Dr. Oreskes, a history professor at UC San Diego, was voted climate change communicator of the year in 2011. A review of Merchants of Doubt and a video of her defending her book against skeptics is at climateprogress.org, my favorite website for staying current on the politics of climate change. From the review: "Make the journey with them, and you’ll see renowned scientists abandon science, you’ll see environmentalism equated with communism, and you’ll discover the connection between the Cold War and climate denial. And for the most part, you’ll be entertained along the way."
Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, by desmogblog.com co-founders James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. The main author, James Hoggan, owns a Canadian public relations firm, and is intimately familiar with how public relations campaigns work. It's another fascinating and very readable book.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, by science writer Chris Mooney. He writes a blog focusing on science communication called the intersection. This is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for all college science majors.
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand, by Haydn Washington and John Cook. John Cook writes for one of my favorite climate science blogs, skepticalscience.com, which focuses on debunking false skeptic claims about climate science. The book does a great job debunking all the classic climate change denial arguments.
Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, by George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who now heads the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). This meticulously-researched book has just one chapter on climate change, and focuses more on tobacco and hazardous chemicals. About the the tobacco industry's Manufactured Doubt campaigns, Michaels wrote: "the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy".
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, by climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann. Dr. Mann is the originator of the much-debated "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years, which looks like a hockey stick due to the sharp increase in temperatures in recent decades. This book just came out last week, and I hope to write a review on it this spring. Dr. Mann is one of the main contributors to my favorite web site for staying current on climate change research, realclimate.org. John Cook of skepticalscience.com wrote a review, calling it "an eye-opening account of the lengths the opponents of climate science will go to in their campaign to slander climate scientists and distract the public from the realities of human caused global warming."
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto. I haven't had a chance to read this one yet, but it looks interesting. A review by Katherine O’Konski of Climate Science Watch called the book "a fascinating look at the status of science in American society."
The Inquisition of Climate Science, by Dr. James Lawrence Powell, a geochemist with a distinguished career as a college teacher, college president, museum director, and author of books on earth science for general audiences. I haven't read it, but John Cook of skepticalscience.com wrote a review, calling it "a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the full scope of the denial industry and their modern day persecution of climate science."
Have a great weekend, everyone! I'll be taking a few vacation days next week, and wunderground meteorologist Angela Fritz will probably be doing most of the blogging for me during the coming week.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 — Blog Index
Not sure. But the scientific method isn't to say, "We don't understand it yet, so we'll just assume an old guy with a white beard made it." From such an ignorance-based thought process are creation myths--such as the biblical one--born. And while those myths often make for evocative and beautiful poetry, they're not at all satisfying for a person with a scientifically inquisitive mind.
Do you understand everything about a computer?
Unless you are a 1 in a million genius and engineer, I highly doubt you will be able to answer "yes".
Guess what? Some guys made it, of this we know for certain.
What's the matter, isn't it "enough" on some level to know the computer was made?
It is a false statement to say, "Somebody made the computer," just because there's a lot more technical process to it than just that? Absolutely not.
Your argument is irrational, because you would never apply the same form of reasoning to other phenomena.
Quoting weathers4me:
Science is not a theory like Religion is. Religion is based on "faith" and followers. Science is based on structured, tested, proven facts and hard evidence. Enough said.
not really.....your big bang theory is justa theory.....nothing has ever been proven to support the big bang!
I agree. Big Bang Theory is a Throry, hence "Theory" at the end. What I was talking about was evolution and scientific proof life evolved over millions of years, a fact that "religious" people brush aside along with the age of the the earth. Sorry, I do not believe in majic, the tooth fairy, or Santa Clause so no, I don't believe in GOD. One almighty being that touched the sky and created life overnight. I turn to sceince and the facts.
i know these people are crazy today...i cant even convince them of something with photos...this beater kid has got to be in high school or less!
Im not crazy and im in highschool
yesh i know...its obvious
In other words, no, it is nowhere near enough for me to simply "know the computer was made".
BTW, please don't keep using the insulting term "irrational" simply because you don't agree with or understand what someone else is trying to say. Thanks!
Quoting uncwhurricane85:
i know these people are crazy today...i cant even convince them of something with photos...this beater kid has got to be in high school or less!
If you writed it down in the Bible they will be more inclined to believe it. LOL
we have high IQ
hahahah! i know
What does that mean, and by the way there is a new blog
I had a lot typed up on my views on the second amendment.I deleted it all because this is a climate change politics blog. I will just say that the written dissenting views from the justices that Clinton an Obama appointed. Dont support that view.
An we have laws on the book forbidding felons an insane from buying gun.
But criminals aren't very good at following laws an our mental health system is a joke. I do like your approach to speaking civil on the global warming issues. I don't agree with everything you believe politically but I do respect your views. If more people had a commonsense approach to discussion instead of resorting to name calling an mocking dissenting views. We would have a far more advanced society.
If you add in the money we pay in health premiums and tax dollar to deal with the problems caused by burning coal you'll see that coal-electricity is very expensive. At least $0.15/kWh and possibly higher than $0.20/kWh.
Wind, solar, hydro and geothermal generation are cheaper. If we would switch over we would save money.
An EV uses about 0.35kWh per mile. At $0.08/kWh it's like driving a 30MPG gasmobile on $1/gallon gasoline.
Lots of the rest of the world understands this much better than we do here in the US. I think you understand why that is so.
A lot of the world is getting very serious about renewable energy. Very small scale solar (a small panel, a battery, and a couple of LED lamps) is bringing clean power to Africa and parts of Asia like India, Bangladesh and Cambodia.
Those people were spending a lot of their income to purchase kerosene. They're getting the opportunity to purchase basic solar systems and pay less per month than they were paying for kerosene. They're avoiding the health problems caused by living with kerosene fumes. And that's a little less CO2 being produced.
India has discovered that solar is cheaper than burning diesel to make electricity. That means that at least part of the day they can turn off their diesel generators and use clean solar power. As battery prices fall they will be able to use solar for most of their power needs.
We absolutely need to do more, and we're doing more each year. Wind generation became cheap only a few years ago. Solar has reached "affordable" and is rapidly on its way to cheap. Storage, our other big need, is not yet quite affordable but it's getting there.
I have no doubt that we will switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Economics will cause that to happen.
Right now the US Virgin Islands is paying $0.47/kWh for their electricity because they use oil. That price will go up. They could install solar and pay $0.17/kWh during the sunny hours. They could install lithium-ion batteries and store solar for $0.30/kWh. Or they could contract with Puerto Rico which has very good offshore wind to install turbines there and ship the power over on a HVDC cable.
That is the sort of leading edge place where renewables will work right now. Hawaii is another place. Right now a lot of expensive oil-electricity but Hawaii has great solar, wind, geothermal and wave potential.
The rest of the world will follow. But the big concern, IMO, is whether we move fast enough. We're playing a very dangerous game. Sort of like Russian roulette with five of the six chambers loaded. We wait too long and melting permafrost accelerates warming faster than we can prevent it.
It looks like we'll loose the Arctic sea ice in the next two - five years. If that happens then people might wake up....
DANG he has FOLLOWERS.....wish'n i had some of them.....Course not the same groupies tho! just kidding all but, i just found that comment a little amusing.
It assumes:
A) The laws are the same for all space and time.
B) Running a system backwards indefinitely produces states that were in the system's past.
then it looks at the hubble constant and says, "Gee, the universe is expanding, it must have been doing so forever. Let's run it backwards and see what happens."
PROBLEM.
That is an invalid experment, because you can't prove when and where the universe originate to prove when the "running backwards" should stop.
The infinitesmal point origin is a valid mathematical solution to a curve in a model, but the problem is the assumption that the curve can be or should be followed indefinitely is a fallacy.
If I start with a watch, and run it backwards, the assumption that the dates and times on the watch are valid states in the system's past is a fallacy. After all, we can run a watch backwards to infinity or until the device breaks, but it's meaningless. It was made a finite time, in most cases a few months or a few years ago.
The problem I am pointing out with the BB model is that running a system backwards indefinitely is not necessarily logically valid for finding previous states. The watch example shows how the "run it backwards" experiment can produce false states which never actually existed in the system's past.
Just one "tiny" problem.
Looking at red shift doesn't solve it, since the light could have been created that way in the first place.
But again, even if you ignore all the glaring problems in the BB model itself, it still doesn't solve the real question of origins. It doesn't.
If believing in God is irrational or non-scientific, since you can't see or test him in a lab, then how idiotic does this make Michio Kaku and other M-theory and string theorists? They literally believe in the spaghetti monster they cannot see, but disbelieve in God.
I had found another video the other day, in which the expert atheist narrator basically accidentally defeated his own argument against the existence of God.
It will take me a while to find it, but it went something like this.
He admitted the universe itself cannot be eternal, since entropy would have destroyed it.
Therefore the universe needs an origin and needs some form of eternal "cause that was not caused".
And that, friends, is the same thing as Aquinas' cosmological argument.
Yet in the very next statement the narrator dismisses God for no rational reason whatsoever, except that he just doesn't like the idea that God exists.
So the atheist said that there needed to be an "uncaused cause," exactly what any creationist would say, but he refuses to accept God as that solution.
the biblical God is, by defintion, the "uncaused cause", the "First and the Last".
So actually, the atheist narrator logically supported the existence of God, and then willfully rejected him.
I'm unaware of any Clinton/Obama Justices supporting taking guns away from people. If you've got some documentation for that I'd like to see it.
I spend time reading liberal blogs and I see almost no calls for taking guns away from people. I'm sure that there are a few who feel that way but I expect that they are a tiny minority of liberals.
I'm a liberal and a gun owner. Just about every liberal I know owns a gun. But we're country people, there are rattlesnakes and animals to be put down.
If I had to live in a dangerous part of a city then I'd have a shotgun handy. The sound of a round is quite attention-getting and pellets don't go through walls and hit people.
What I have a problem with, and the concern I see from some liberals, is the weapons that can be fired dozens of times and then quickly reloaded. The rounds that are designed to penetrate the body armor that police wear. Like fully automatic machine guns, I can't see any reason for private citizens to own those sorts of weapons.
I wish our country was able to have a reasoned discussion about guns (and a few other issues). I'm not convinced that we're all that far apart on the issue but we too often take rigid stances that don't allow us to talk to each other.
You are somewhat correct. There's no absolute proof that the universe started with a "big bang".
But it's the best explanation we have based on the facts we know. We can look back in time and see the condition of the universe shortly after its beginning and put those facts into a story that gives us a pretty good idea of what happened.
The facts don't support "The god SXwerfew sneezed and the universe came to be".
there is no proof of evolution either......just a theory......where is your proof of it?
Well, there's the fossil record.
There's the current evolution that we're observing.
Evolution is a theory that takes the facts that we have in hand and puts them together.
I believe the cases were McDonald VS Chicago and heller VS DC
The dissenting views among other things said the 2nd amendment only protected the national guard right to have weapons. Even though there are laws one in the early 1800s an revised in I believe 1903 that state the militia is every able bodied male between 17-45. To be ready when called up for county, state , or country to have weapons suitable for infantry duty. I grew up in the inner city and you better own guns or you will be a victim. I moved to the country because I wanted my children to be safe. On the global warming debate isn't the fact that we are such a large country make all the alternative sources of energy harder to use. The largest co2 per person are the US, Australia, Canada, and Russia. The size prevents alot of the actions smaller countries use to great effect far less effective.
What evolution are we observing?
No, evolution is not a religion or faith. Evolution can be tested, is subject to the experimental method and can be ultimately discarded if proven false. It can both explain what we observe and has predictive value.
Unlike evolution, creation is entirely faith based and therefore cannot be verified experimentally, cannot be refuted and provides no predictive value.
The evolution of drug and pesticide is resistance is a perfect example.
Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.
An additional document Gleick represented as coming from The Heartland Institute, a forged memo purporting to set out our strategies on global warming, has been extensively cited by newspapers and in news releases and articles posted on Web sites and blogs around the world. It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists, policy experts, and organizations we work with.
A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.
In his statement, Gleick claims he committed this crime because he believed The Heartland Institute was preventing a “rational debate” from taking place over global warming. This is unbelievable. Heartland has repeatedly asked for real debate on this important topic. Gleick himself was specifically invited to attend a Heartland event to debate global warming just days before he stole the documents. He turned down the invitation.
Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source. This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.
We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days.
We are consulting with legal counsel to determine our next steps and plan to release a more complete statement about the situation tomorrow. In the meantime, we ask again that publishers, bloggers, and Web site hosts take the stolen and fraudulent documents off their sites, remove defamatory commentary based on them, and issue retractions.
The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
As far as I can tell, oil & gas companies have donated to both sides - for example, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell were once a big funders of Phil Jones East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Saying that sceptics are funded by fossil fuel companiesis is mainly a myth being pushed to smear the sceptics.
Heartland's biggest donor documented in the stolen documents is an individual - just as Bill Gates spent $700 K in the campaign against California's proposition 23 (to suspend greenhouse gas rules), and Al Gore funds and speaks on the pro-warming side.
Are you saying that people do not have the free speech right to promote their ideas, however uncool or even loony they may be?
Viewing: 1551 - 1580
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 — Blog Index