Heartland has yet to produce a press release, but I thought in the meantime I’d share some behind the scenes. If/when they do, I’ll add it to this post.
UPDATE: 11:45AM -The press release has been added below. One of the key documents is a fabrication
UPDATE2: 2:30PM The BBC’s Richard Black slimes me, without so much as asking me a single question (he has my email, I’ve corresponded with him previously) or even understanding what the project is about Hint: Richard, it’s about HIGHS and LOWS, not trends. No journalistic integrity with this one. – Anthony
I’m surprised at the number of articles out there on this where journalists have not bothered to ask me for a statement, but rather rely on their own opinion. To date, only Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian has asked for a statement, and she used very little of it in her article. Her colleague, Leo Hickman asked me no questions at all for his article, but instead relied on a comment I sent to Bishop Hill. So much for journalism. (Update: In response to Hickman, Lucia asks What’s horrible about this?)
(Update: 10:45AM Seth Borenstein of the AP has contacted me and I note that has waited until he can get some kind of confirmation that these documents are real. The Heartland press release is something he’s waiting for. Contacting involved parties is the right way to investigate this story.)
Here’s the query from Goldenberg:
Name: Suzanne Goldenberg
Email: suzanne.goldenberg@xxx.xxx
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk
Message: Hello, I am seeking comment on the leak of the Heartland
documents by Desmogblog which appear to suggest you are funded by them. Is
this accurate? Thanks
MY REPLY:
===============================================================
Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.
They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.
It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don’t tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn’t free and I could not do on my own. Compare the funding I asked for initially to
get it started to the millions some other outfits (such as CRU) get in the UK for studies that then end up as a science paper behind a publishers paywall, making the public pay again. My project will be a free public service when finished.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Description from the same (Heartland) documents:
Weather Stations Project
Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record – either high
or low – has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous “climate change.”
Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who hosts WattsUpwithThat.com, one of the
most popular and influential science blogs in the world, has documented that many of the
temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces. It is not uncommon for these stations to over-state temperatures by 3 or 4 degrees or more, enough to set spurious records.
Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications. Unfortunately, NOAA doesn’t widely publicize data from this new network, and puts raw data in spreadsheets buried on one of its Web sites.
Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new
temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011. The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DeSmog, as part of their public relations for hire methodology to demonize skeptics, will of course try to find nefarious motives for this project. But there simply are none here. It’s something that needs doing because NOAA hasn’t made this new data available in a user friendly visual format. For example, here’s a private company website that tracks highs and low records using NOAA data:
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/yesterday/us.html
NOAA doesn’t make any kind of presentation like that either, which is why such things are often done by private ventures.
================================================================
That above is what I sent to the Guardian, and also in a comment to Bishop Hill.
The reaction has been interesting, particularly since the David-Goliath nature of funding is laid bare here. For example, Al Gore says he started a 300 million dollar advertising campaign. The Daily Bayonet sums it up pretty well:
Hippies hate Heartland « The Daily Bayonet
What the Heartland document show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed.
Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF, the Sierra Club, The Natural Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.
Yet they’ve been thwarted by a few honest scientists, a number of blogs and a small pile of cash from Heartland.
Here’s a clue for DeSmog, Joe Romm and other warmists enjoying a little schadenfreude today. It’s not the money that’s beating you, it’s the message.
Your climate fear-mongering backfired. You cried wolf so often the villagers stopped listening. Then Climategate I & II gave the world a peek behind the curtain into the shady practices, petty-feuding and data-manipulation that seems to pass for routine in climate ‘science’.
So enjoy the moment, warmists, because what this episode really demonstrates to the world is how little money was needed to bring the greatest scam in history to its knees. That’s not something I’d think you’d want to advertise, but knock yourselves out. It’s what you do best.
I see none of the same people at the Guardian or the blogs complaining about this:
Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income
NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.
This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.
(Update: Dr. Hansen responds here)
Or the NGO’s and their budgets (thanks Tom Nelson)
With tiny budgets like $310 million, $100 million, and $95 million respectively, how can lovable underdogs like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and NRDC *ever* hope to compete with mighty Heartland’s $6.5 million?
Heartland is projecting a boost in revenues from $4.6 million in 2011, to $7.7 million in 2012. That will enable an operating budget of $6.5 million, as well as topping up the fund balance a further $1.2 million.
[Sept 2011]: Greenpeace Environmental Group Turns 40
Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, now has offices in more than 40 countries and claims some 2.8 million supporters. Its 1,200-strong staff ranges from “direct action” activists to scientific researchers.
Last year, its budget reached $310 million.
[Nov 2011]: Sierra Club Leader Will Step Down – NYTimes.com
He said the Sierra Club had just approved the organization’s largest annual budget ever, about $100 million for 2012, up from $88 million this year.
[Oct 2011]: Do green groups need to get religion?
That’s Peter Lehner talking. Peter, a 52-year-old environmental lawyer, is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most important environmental groups. The NRDC has a $95 million budget, about 400 employees and about 1.3 million members. They’re big and they represent a lot of people.
But me and my little temperature web project to provide a public service are the real baddies here apparently. The dichotomy is stunning.
Some additional added notes:
“Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications.”
For the record, and as previously cited on WUWT, NCDC started on the new network in 2003 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/annual-reports.html Heartland may have confused the Climate Reference Network with the updated COOP/USHCN modernization network which did indeed start after my surfacestations project: What the modernized USHCN will look like (April 29, 2008)
They then asked for 100 million to update it NOAA/NCDC – USHCN is broken please send 100 million dollars (Sept 21, 2010)
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Moderators, do your best to keep the sort of hateful messages I’ve been getting in the past 18 hours in check in comments below. Please direct related comments from other threads to this one. Commenters please note the site policy.
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PRESS RELEASE 11:45 AM – source http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-responds-stolen-and-fake-documents
FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.
Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.
Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.
Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.
But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.
Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.
jono1066 @ur momisugly February 15, 2012 at 2:36 pm, said
now if I can find your `funding` box thats hidden hereabouts there`s 44$ to your account, if 1000 of us donate that there`s the rest of the money,
You only need 998. Donation button is just above the link to the other blogs. It is very understated.
Justa Passerby wrote: “Though experiment: Let’s say I’m a leading commentator on, say, which brand of automobile is best for the consumer. It is revealed that GM “helped me find a a donor for funding” some project… to the tune of almost $100,000. Does this strengthen the credibility of my new report, which states enthusiastically that GM has absolutely the only worthwhile car on the market?”
Except that Watts is using the funding to build a web service to allow citizens to access GOVERNMENT information. It has nothing to do with advocasy. How does building a service to allow you to access sound temperature data PROVIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT have anything to do with your analogy?
William M. Connolley says:
February 15, 2012 at 3:18 pm
“> how are things going for you at Wikipedia these days
Very well thanks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/William_M._Connolley if you’re wondering; you’re behind the times I’m afraid.
I see that Heartland are now claiming the “key” document is fake. That makes things more exciting. It will be fun to see if they can hold that line.”
The real fun will only start when even wikipedia will have to recognize reality. Please make sure there’s NPOV reporting about the ensuing purges.
Seriously, Connolly. If you find it “exciting” to update an article taking a group you don’t like down a peg, you shouldn’t be editing that article. How could you possibly have NPOV? Consider that Wikipedia as a project is more important than you getting a rush.
Let’s review Watt’s proposed project, which as far as I know has not even been announce yet:
From Anthony: “It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don’t tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. ***The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations ***, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn’t free and I could not do on my own.
And that is it. A web service to allow people to compare station data. That would be NOAA data, as in government data. That’s it. And this is all the hoaxsters have to “smear” him with. Actually Mr. Watts, you should probably be laughing your @SS off write now. This really is comical. Well, the fake document supposedly recording Heartland plotting to keep teachers from teaching science might even be funnier.
This little episode simply confirms that to some people funding and its source are far more important than the science.
Latitude said @ur momisugly February 15, 2012 at 3:24 pm
….
It doesn’t matter who finances the science…the science is on the internet….and will face the ultimate peer review
I have suggested such an approach myself, on here and to Lief Salvgaard, our Sun specialist. For critical science, donations over the webinet should be able to raise large sums of money to sponsor actual science. If Obama can raise a billion dollars for a stupid election, then how much could be raised for a Mars probe … given that NASA has been defunded in the latest Obama budget from doing anything other than propagandizing global warming.
Joshua Corning says:
February 15, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Well they are business partners, maybe that constitutes an unnatural act?
DaveE.
John Billings says:
February 15, 2012 at 3:44 pm
“You censors are not very good: you need to take out the replies too.”
============
They are all still there, near as I can tell.
Which one do you think is missing ?
£231,441 to investigate a “divergence problem”. The problem is they’re using a shoddy proxy for temperature. What’s to investigate?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/research/grants.htm
Made front page on Today’s Sydney Morning Herald (printed version), the main target being Professor Bob Carter. It now it seems to have been relegated to the Environment section with a clarification from the Heartland institute, and the comments have been closed.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/scientist-accepts-cash-for-climate-20120215-1t7ho.html
“I’m growing damned tired of your insinuations”.
What insinuations Anthony? None at all. Only verifiable facts. Back off. I accept that we are here in your parlour, you are the host, but do not ever accuse me of any insinuation. Take a walk and a deep breath and come back, or ban me from your parlour (for nothing), but do not accuse me of insinuating anything. If I have anything to say, I will tell you to your face.
REPLY: “on the quiet” is an insinuation, and I’m insulted by it, especially since this disclosure denied me the opportunity to do the project normally and to post the funding sources on the final product like is done with scientific papers. I’m not going to “back off” in defending myself against your insinuations that I did something wrong, when in fact I did not. What I am going to do is put you in the troll bin where your comments will be automatically given an extra level of moderation and then approved if they add something to the discussion. Be as upset as you wish. – Anthony Watts
Sometimes, I really wonder what is the goal of people like John Billings, and why they think throwing hissy fits on blog boards advances it?
In any case, this looks like a huge non-story. Unless they can produce a document where Heartland instructed scientists to “hide the incline” or some such, it doesn’t even register compared to the revelations of fraud at UEA. It’s not even a mote on the fact that the IPCC farmed out the writing of sections of its official documents to left-wing advocacy groups like the WWF and Greenpeace.
Have they no sense of decency, at long last? Apparently not.
Another observation about “The Heartland Leak”, or, as the Warmistas would hope “Heartlandgate”, is that the Warmistas are grabbing onto this like a rabid dog with a dead skunk. For them, it is hoped to counterbalance real scientific malfeasance by the Warmistas, as revealed by Climategate.
It will backfire if we point out the discrepency in funding between them and us.
Yes, I am part of the skeptic conspiracy!
If one inspects the new IPCC policy on conflicts of interest you will note that the only interest group targeted are corporate. Funding from other groups are, apparently, ok. Heartland describes itself as:
“The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit research organization dedicated to finding and promoting ideas that empower people.”
On that basis, there would be no apparent conflict of interest if the group funded, say, IPCC scientists.
Heartland’s funding is actually described on their web page:
http://heartland.org/about
“Funding: Approximately 1,800 supporters support an annual budget of $6 million. Heartland does not accept government funding. Contributions are tax-deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code”
So exactly what major secret has been exposed here that couldn’t be googled in a few seconds?
What am I missing?
u.k.(us) said @ur momisugly February 15, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Anthony? Mods? Can you please censor John Billings so we don’t have to read his continual whining about being censored?
In 2003 they lost the science, when profound criticism prove Mann’s Hockeystick false and the solar connection was reinstalled.
The response was to avoid scientific discussion and instead control scientific bodies, access to journals, the peer review process, funding and everything else including the mainstream media.
This blew up with climategate. Reputations are gone since then.
The reponse was an upgrade in secrecy and, as reputations were gone anyways, not to bother about these any more.
After 2005, nature as well started to conspire against the global warming movement. Temperatures refused to go up, winters came back, sea levels and ocean heat content stalled, PDO is negative and AMO will follow soon. And a solar Maunder Minimum is around the corner.
With data brutally proving them wrong, low level behaviour now appears to the order of the day.
The trouble is trying to understand that for many AGW proponents , anything done in the name of ‘the cause ‘ is justified , so a fake document is not wrong, in fact it receives instant absolution from any sins by its use against the ‘evil deniers’ that threaten ‘the cause’
The cold reality this that is fabricated document has already entered the mythology of ‘the cause’ , it matters not one bit what Heartland can prove , for the ‘faithful’ they will always know its true.
The good news , in reality very few outside of usual suspects are running with this story in anyway , while even the BBC currently has nothing more than the article from ‘the Teams’ BBC bag boy and the Guardian are sticking the story in the web site cellar.
In any straight , who funds who and how much , fight its the AGW proponents that will come out looking worse in the public eye , so lets if it comes to such a fight it is straight .
The scanned “Strategy” document obviously stands out as the fake. It is the only scanned document, while the other pdf documents have the Heartland author in the metadata. Why would this be the lone scanned document?
As another person has pointed out, a Word document retains numerous imprints behind the scenes from the author. A scan (apparently with an Epson scanner) is a way that an amateur could easily scrub the MSWord metadata from the document.
According to the embedded information, it was scanned on Monday 2/13 and last modified on Tuesday 2/14:
2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00
2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00
2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00
What am I missing? WRT warmist crowing, that is.
Somebody stole some financial documents, and a meeting agenda. Even attempting to look at it with a jaundiced eye, I don’t see anything scandalous. What did we learn from it? A think tank has donors, and spends money to influence public perception and opinon. And? That is what think tanks are supposed to do.
The only thing in it that is even mildly amusing is the “… dissuading teachers from teaching science” bit. That would be a chuckle inducing gaffe at best, but even that appears to be fabricated. Heartland says that document is made up. That is supported by the fact that the PDF file is unlike all of the others supposedly authored by Heartland in that it is a scan of a printed document (why?) and it has no author stored in the file properties. It reads like someone from Desmogblog, realizing that nobody is going to wade thru pages of BOD materials without dozing off, was trying to distill the Heartland documents into a short “talking points” piece, and they forgot to contain their snark so as to keep the document in the voice of the victim.
Weird that anyone thinks that there is anything of note in there.
On the other hand, it appears that the thief was an outsider who resorted to “social engineering” … aka identity theft … to obtain documents that, while not incriminating or even embarassing in any way that I can figure out, were private property. The people whining about “stolen” public emails that revealed gross misconduct, fraud, and potentially prosecutable crimes should be ashamed of their double standard. But they arent.
@shawn Halayka,
So you only made $44K/yr as a software engineer? Do you not live in the US? I make that much in 3.5 months as a professional software engineer here in California. That is not much money considering capital investments in addition to the software development.
There are lies, there are damned lies, then there’s R. Pachauri the railwayman.
The problem with lies is that sometimes you might not be aware you are making stuff up.
What were you saying again about lies?
John Billings says:
February 15, 2012 at 3:31 pm
No, Russ, I don’t think that “taking money on the quiet from left-wing sources is perfectly ok”.
[snip] > Nor do I think that taking money from right wing sources is OK
You’ve ratted yourself out John. Is it taking money on the quiet or taking money from left/right wing sources? Can we take money from middle of road sources on the quite? In the end, if the science is sound the source of funding is irrelevant. Unless, of course its government money. That is a different ball game. That money belongs to all of us.
Sorry, the above tags didn’t translate right. Should have been:
<xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00</xmp:ModifyDate>
<xmp:CreateDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00</xmp:CreateDate>
<xmp:MetadataDate>2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00</xmp:MetadataDate>
BTW – “Heartland Leak” does not appear to be accurate. At this point, the person who released the documents appears to be someone outside the organization.