Chris Horner of the American Tradition Institute writes in with this:
So the American Association for the Advancement of Science, thoroughly rattled by the American Tradition Institute’s FOIA requests of UVa and NASA — and even more so by the litigation forced by the institutions’ respective stonewalling — issued a board statement comparing FOIA requests of climate scientists with death threats. Really.
Naturally this caught the eye of the New York Times, which had a young lady contact us for comment. Right off the bat it was clear she, too, had been rattled by the horrors of our outrageous efforts to …see certain records the taxpayer has paid for and which are expressly covered by transparency laws.
Her stance was sympathetic to AAS’s to the point of temper.
She first reaffirmed a fancy for the apparently absolute truth that a FOIA request for climate scientists’ records is indeed no different than death threats allegedly made in Australia against scientists — sadly, if that’s true, they are now treated to what ‘skeptics’ have experienced for years, as I have detailed.
Well, actually, her disinterest in Greenpeace having created this little cottage practice indicated that this is true only for certain climate scientists’ records. Not the ones whose records Greenpeace is asking her for…that’s just transparency, good-government type stuff.
She continued by wondering, as such, do we condone death threats (really?) and, if not, why would we then also issue a FOIA?
Why that is particularly amusing, as opposed to sad, is that she was shocked by my assertion that Big Science/Big Academia’s objection to having laws that obviously cover their own actually applied to their own was of a part with Hollywood objecting to laws being applied to Roman Polanski. Apparently, by saying this, I was accusing Michael Mann of some heinous crime. Or something.
So see the below as I sent to her and, given the above, I expect you will not see in the story. Surely because it will be too busy explaining the tyranny of Greenpeace broadly filing similar requests. ATI’s statement is here.
—–Original Message—–From: chornerlaw@aol.com
To: fostej@nytimes.com
Sent: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 1:14 pm
Subject: AAAS release citing ATI transparency efforts
Dear Joanna,I’m told you called ATI for comment. Below is my response per an earlier inquiry.Best,Christopher C. Horner Senior Fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute 1899 L St, NW 12th Floor Washington, DC, 20036 +1.202.331.2260 (O)…Several points:I noticed no relation between our initiative and the Board’s rhetoric until they mentioned us somewhat incongruously.The notion that application of laws expressly covering academics [is] an ‘attack’ on academics is substantively identical to Hollywood apologists calling application of other laws to Roman Polanski an attack on Polanski. They rather lost the plot somewhere along the way.The failure to mention the group that invented this series of requests, Greenpeace, informs a conclusion that this attempt at outrage is selective, and therefore either feigned or hypocritical. This is also new; their problem is quite plainly with the law(s), but it is a problem they have, over the decades of transparency and ethics laws applying to scientists subsisting on taxpayer revenue, heretofore forgotten to mention.Opposition to such laws applying to them is rather shocking. But then, maybe not so much when you also note their failure to comment on scientists being outed as advocating the flaunting of transparency laws.Finally, AAUP’s code of professional ethics indicates that efforts to manipulate the peer review process are impermissible. Given the overlap and for other reasons we assume this is something AAAS agrees with or at minimum accepts. But this, too, is insincere if such behavior is permissible — or at least, where just cause indicates further inquiry is warranted, it is to be ignored — if the party at issue is one who for various reasons the AAAS or AAUP et al. elevate or find sympathetic. In Mann’s case, if our review of his documents which belong to the taxpayer also happen to exonerate him from the suspicions that have arisen, we will be the first to do so.
==============================================================
Below is the ATI statement – Anthony
==============================================================
Statement from American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center in Response to American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Misleading Accusations Against ATI Today
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Contacts:
Christopher Horner, director of litigation, chris.horner@atinstitute.org
Paul Chesser, executive director, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org
Today the board of directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a statement and press release that denounced “personal attacks,” “harassment,” “death threats,” and “legal challenges” toward climate scientists. AAAS’s press release specifically cited actions taken by American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center in its efforts to obtain records of Climategate scientist Dr. Michael Mann from the University of Virginia, and its efforts to obtain outside employment records of climate activist Dr. James Hansen from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration(NASA).
AAAS wrote, in part,
“we are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.”
Response to AAAS from ATI Environmental Law Center director of litigation Christopher Horner:
“I noticed no relation between our initiative and the AAAS Board’s rhetoric until they mentioned us somewhat incongruously.
“The notion that application of laws that expressly cover academics is an ‘attack’ on them is substantively identical to Hollywood apologists who call application of other laws to Roman Polanski an attack on Polanski. They lost the plot somewhere along the way.
“AAAS’s failure to mention the group that invented this series of requests, Greenpeace, informs our conclusion that this outrage is selective, and is therefore either feigned or hypocritical. Their problem is plainly with the laws, but it is a problem they have had over the decades: That transparency and ethics laws also apply to scientists who subsist on taxpayer revenue. This they also forgot to mention.
“Finally, the American Association of University Professors’ code of professional ethics indicates that efforts to manipulate the peer review process are impermissible. Given the overlap, and for other reasons, we assume AAAS agrees with these principles or at a minimum accepts them. But this, too, is insincere if such behavior is permitted or ignored where just cause indicates further inquiry is warranted, as long as the parties at issue are those whose views the AAAS or AAUP sympathize with. In Mann’s case, if our review of his documents which belong to the taxpayer also happen to exonerate him from the suspicions that have arisen, we will be the first to do so.”
For an interview with Christopher Horner, email chris.horner@atinstitute.org or paul.chesser@atinstitute.org or call (202)670-2680.
================================================================
Reaction is now coming in. Alana Goodman of Commentray Magazine writes in a piece titled
Contentions – Climate Change Skepticism Now Considered ‘Harassment’?
…
Of course, what the AAAS calls “personal information” actually appears to be public data. The group’s statement comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed against NASA by the conservative American Traditional Institute earlier this month, which is trying to force the agency to release information about scientist James Hansen.
And after years of watching climate change advocates demonizing global warming skeptics, it’s hard to have any sympathy for the AAAS on this issue. Not to mention, previously leaked emails have shown climate change scientists behaving in ways abusive to the public trust. Skeptics should absolutely work to expose any potential corruption in the global warming advocacy community — and the fact AAAS is so terrified of legal challenges is good reason to believe these skeptics might be onto something.
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[snip see reply upstream – action required]
From David Falkner on July 3, 2011 at 9:29 pm:
Since I provided that number I’ll try to find an answer.
Looking around, I found this page from NOAA about NCDC’s info.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
Ending in the References, there was this which specifically mentioned a land-sea combination, as with the provided 20th century global average temperature:
Smith, T. M., and R. W. Reynolds (2005), A global merged land air and sea surface temperature reconstruction based on historical observations (1880-1997), J. Climate, 18, 2021-2036.
I found this relevant bit in familiar plus-minus format, pdf pg 8:
Thus as mentioned just before that in the same paragraph, 20th century warming could have been anywhere from 0.3 to 0.9°C. Since the amount of global warming is only known to ±0.3°C, I would not expect the average global temperature of the same period to be any more accurate than that.
There was one newer reference given, it might yield lower uncertainty figures:
Smith, T. M., et al. (2008), Improvements to NOAA’s Historical Merged Land-Ocean Surface Temperature Analysis (1880-2006), J. Climate, 21, 2283-2293.
But NOAA’s own link to their own servers does not work.
From John B on July 3, 2011 at 2:20 pm:
That the observations are within natural variability is not enough, you need an alternative explanation to the “CO2=AGW” proposal? Okay.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157309002865
Qing-Bin Lu: Cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reactions of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces: Implications for atmospheric ozone depletion and global climate change. Physics Reports, Volume 487, Issue 5, February 2010, Pages 141-167.
Available here.
http://journalofcosmology.com/QingBinLu.pdf
Qing-Bin Lu: What is the Major Culprit for Global Warming: CFCs or CO2? Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 8, 1846-1862
From the abstract of 2nd paper:
Read the 2nd paper. Clearly CO2 cannot explain the recent warming as well as CFCs can. As stated in the last lines of the Concluding Remarks:
Very convincing work. If you need an alternative explanation, finding natural variation insufficient, this is a very good one. So will you now be changing your mind as you said you would?
The average temperature is, itself, a statistic that should have uncertainty associated with it, so wouldn’t having a 0.3C uncertainty associated with the original point estimate screw up the process of calculating the anomaly?
@Kadaka
Thanks for the links. I’ll take a good look, but probably tomorrow, and get right back to you.
John
[snip – see reply upstream – action required]
@Kadaka
Well, I read the papers, but I’m not convinced, for the following reasons:
1. There conclusion is based on a correlation, without any plausible mechanism to back it up. We all here know that “correlation does not imply causation”.
2. The correlation period is too short to conlude that CFCs are the driver rather than CO2 (point 1 notwithstanding)
But the real test will be their prediction: “a long-term global cooling starting around 2002 is expected to continue for next five to seven decades.” If that happens, we’ll take another look…
John
Been on vacation, so missed some of the discussion.
Re Hansen’s Scenario C, the mantra in some circles seems to be that Scenario C “didn’t happen” so “it doesn’t matter”.
The fact that the temperature record can’t validate either Scenario B (which supposedly “did happen”) and Scenario C (which “didn’t happen”) doesn’t say much for the falsifiability of his hypothesis, does it?
But I guess that’s good enough for climate science, where good enough is…well…good enough.
Maybe some day it will grow up and become a real science.
(June 30, 2011 at 4:45 pm David Appell says): “It just came out that Willie Soon has received $1M from the oil and coal industries… Singer has gotten such money too…. This has been reported on by Oreskes, Chris Mooney, and others.”
Oreskes, Mooney, and others source this basic fossil fuel funding accusation from a single person, anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan. He, along with all the others relying on his central piece of ‘evidence’ supporting an otherwise vague guilt-by-association accusation, never show it in its full context. That would be the 1991 coal industry memo I mentioned in my June 25th guest post here, “The End is Near for Faith in AGW” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/25/the-end-is-near-for-faith-in-agw/
[snip]
[snip]
[snip]
[Snip. Anthony asked for an apology. Until then, your comments get snipped. And any apology had better be sincere. ~dbstealey, moderator.]
S. Fred Singer got $143K for writing the NIPCC report as shown by SEPP’s tax filing
Yo, Bunnyboi:
Some of Michael Mann’s grants:
Development of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term Variability in the Monsoons, $250,000
Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, $1,884,991 [Note: this grant was payola, pure and simple. If someone wanted a study of mosquito vectors, they would have gone to a biologist or an epidemiologist – not to a debunked astronomer and pretend climatologist. This particular bribe was paid on the heels of the Climategate leak to show support for the despicable Michael Mann. And where is the “study” that $1.8 million supposedly bought?]
Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, $541,184
A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, $330,000
AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship, $23,000
Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, $759,928
Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, $459,000
Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, $68,065
Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), $100,000
Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, $102,000
Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, $315,000
Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, $133,000
Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, $14,400
Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, $20,775
Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, $214,700
Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, $20,775
Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data Intercomparison, $381,647
The changing seasons? Detecting and understanding climatic change, $266,235
Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, $270,000
Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last Millennium, $78,000
Going by your own ad hominem insinuation, Mann is almost fifty times more corrupt than the innocent target of your low-down ad hom.