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.
Martin says:
February 15, 2012 at 9:15 pm
“The DeSmogBlog has reviewed that Strategy document and compared its content to other material they have in hand. It addresses five elements:
The Increased Climate Project Fundraising material is reproduced in and confirmed by Heartland’s own budget.
The “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” is also a Heartland budget item and has been confirmed independently by the author, Dr. David Wojick.
The Funding for Parallel Organizations; Funding for Selected Individuals Outside Heartland are both reproduced and confirmed in the Heartland budget. And Anthony Watts has confirmed independently the payments in Expanded Climate Communications.
All this is in the alleged faked document. It seems that Heartland needs to come clean and admit that the alleged faked doco is actually not faked at all.”
—————————————————————————-
Ex Post Facto, my friend. The Strategy Document was created a month after the material it’s based on. Try again.
Wow. Its 11pm and I have just finally finished reading all the posts in this thread, and…wow. There are a lot of very uninformed people wandering around this planet tonight, and it seems like they’ve all been drawn to the light like so many suicidal moths. I’m almost embarrassed for them. Almost.
Two things that I expect will happen as a result of this little imbroglio: Anthony’s tip jar will be ringing merrily for the next little while.
And so will the Heritage Institute’s.
Win.
A reasoned response from Judith Curry:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/15/heartland/
And a comment on that post directly from David Wojick:
Martin,
The faked document is a phony. If all of the information is available in the other Heartland documents, then wouldn’t the forger also have that information when authoring this fraud? The project by Dr. Wojick is also discussed in detail in other documents, so I am not surprised he confirmed it. No one is denying that Heartland is funding the production of source materials for teachers to present a balanced view on the AGW theory, for example, presenting how using upside-down Tiljander gives you a hockeystick. No one is denying that Watts requested help from Heartland in lining up a donor to fund the development of a web service to provide GOVERNMENT temperature data, for free, in graphical form to the public. No one is denying that Heartland received 3% of its funding from Koch, a reputable firm that provides high paying jobs to thousands. No one is denying this. What is being pointed out is that the document uses facts to inject a false story. For example, that Heartland “coordinates” with Anthony Watts. Or that Heartland directors sit around discussing how to prevent teachers from “teaching science” or how to “work” the climate story. These are bogus claims and Heartland has said that this unique scanned copy is a fraud. Why would the criminal print this one document (they were received by email), then scan it? Maybe to remove embedded data tracking edits? Perhaps? The other documents, which contain nothing scandalous, are all presented in original electronic form, but this one document, presenting Heartland as a bunch of Neanderthals, is scanned. And Heartland states it is a fraud. They are telling the truth as every reader of this comment section will know.
re post by Ken Hall says: February 15, 2012 at 1:08 pm, and others who’ve made similar comments:
I can’t help but find the irony in the fact that just yesterday Obama, when asked by a journalist how he has lived up to the ‘change’ in his 2008 “hope and change” slogan, bragged that he has made government websites easier for people to use, but other things have been harder to accomplish because the world was worse than he knew when he took office (while loudly proclaiming, at the time, that he knew just how bad things were while his opponent did not)… I guess the word never got to the NASA temperature folks.
Obama On Change: I’ve Made It Easier To Navigate Government Websites
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/02/14/obama_on_change_ive_made_it_easier_to_navigate_government_websites_.html
Richard Black reeks of fear and desperation. He and those like him must seize upon this and blow it out of proportion because it’s all they’ve got – they don’t have truth and honesty on their side.
Anthony is effective so they are afraid of Anthony – and it shows.
So this site is not paid for by Al Gore ?
Anyway, I would suggest this … Let the story run and run. it will bring visitors here where they can read for themselves what is happening in the real world.
Put a notice on the temperature station site re it’s funding.
Then you will be completely open and honest, then ask RC, SkS, et al to do the same.
And another comment directly from David Wojick:
Let see. 502 post till this. Obviously there is some level of excitement. Nothing has changed.
re post by: DirkH says: February 15, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Or perhaps he’s referring to how well Al Gore’s “The Inconvenient Truth” held up in court in the EU (hint, Gore lost and now if the film is shown in school, they must in effect warn first that it’s propaganda, not accurate science). Wish that were the case here in the USA also.
Frankly, I hope Heartland or someone actually is preparing some decent K-12 modules that present the climate issue accurately and counter the blatant propaganda that’s being taught — and actually manage to get that information into our schools.
on a tanget or slightly off topic — BEST has been mentioned again in the comments, but just what is the current status with the BEST research papers? Have any of them actually made it thru peer review and been published? Hasn’t it been almost a year now since the media blitz about it? (thanks in advance for info)
John Billings says:
February 15, 2012 at 2:05 pm
If there is any fault here, and I am not sure there is, it is that Anthony should have flagged money he has received. It is hard to square the persistent flagging of warmists’ funding while keeping quiet about your own. It smacks of double standards.
;———————————————————————————————————————
You have a lot in common with insects.
They never see it coming and they always end up with their ass where their head should be.
Actually, I paraphrased the Daily Bayonet.
It appears to me the 20 ppm of anthropogenic CO2 has cooked your noodle.
So..nah, nah, nah, nah.
The stuff the HI says is nothing compared to some of the Alramist websites.
e.g.
http://grist.org/climate-change/cohort-replacement-climate-deniers-wont-change-but-they-will-die/
”It will take time for younger, more climate-enlightened folks to assume positions of influence and power. Anything that accelerates that process (like, say, abolishing the U.S. Senate) is to the good. It will be a subtle process, largely under the radar … until it isn’t. And things change. Quickly.
So forget arguing, arguing, arguing with a tribe unmoored from reality. Start organizing, organizing, organizing the cohorts that are amenable to reality. Prepare them for when it’s their turn to take over. Time will do the rest.
”
Are they are touching on indoctrination of children ?
WOW! Here’s one hell of an accusation! On Facebook;
“Gillian King LOL… but Antony, did you notice that the source is good ole “cash for climate” Watts… he’s paid by Heartland to push this line.”
Gillian King is a FB troll AGW believer…and since this story broke she’s been going mad about this.
the old saying is “If you are taking flak, you know you are over the target.”
thank you for the w*rk you do and don’t let the scum drag you down.
I’m with Squidly: first laugh, then sue. Then bank and laugh again.
Anthony, you are a beacon of light in a world full of fog and smoke. Keep up the good work.
re post by: John Billings says: February 15, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Your comment was there for me to read some time ago, and still there when I checked it on reading your first complaint about it supposedly being missing. I suspect you managed to pass over it or miss it somehow, resulting in you thinking it was missing when it wasn’t.
re post: John Billings says: February 15, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Are you brain dead?? If your posts were being censored, do you REALLY think that they would then be allowed to show up in someone else’s post and not be censored there also? Or do you just think we’re brain dead and will believe, oh the horrors, that for some reason they’re out to get you, and only you?? Please.
Carpet burns on knees coming up for Leo and Richard methinks…
My full support, Anthony, both for you personally and for WUWT?
Lucky I went long on popcorn yesterday.*
*The only word I understand in the sentence is popcorn.
At 9:59 PM on 15 February, peeke provides yet another demonstration that las warmistas (also known as “watermelons,” green on the outside and red to the core) are blankly illiterate when it comes to the language of formal logic, conflating the technical term argumentum ad hominem with simple incidental insult.
I wish there was something resembling plain bloody sense in that 9:59 PM post of peeke‘s to recap here, but it’s simply incoherent sputtering. The most that can be extracted from it is that peeke thinks I’d committed argumentum ad hominem by condemning his pitiful noise as the equivalent of clumsily shoveling bovine excrement.
Insult and argumentum ad hominem, peeke, are not the same. The former (as I’d explained) is a failure in reasoned argument which amounts to an evasion of the responsibility to focus upon the objectively verifiable factuality of an assertion by diverting your attention (and attempting to divert the attention of your disputant and other readers) to the source of the assertion instead.
Expressions of contempt for you personally, peeke, provided in addition to reasoned argument demonstrating that your position and/or presentation lacks validity, are merely incidental assessments of what can laughingly be called your “character” and ineptitude.
Las warmistas who frequent only those alarmist venues in which their incestuous exchanges are protected by censoring co-religionists equally committed to the erroneous orthodoxy of their pitiful junk science, tend so reliably to be incapable of reasoned argument that when they venture out of their stuffy reservations to encounter intellectually skeptical persons who have considered and spurned the catastrophists’ Cargo Cult Science as devoid of supporting evidence, methodlogical rigor, or even (in so very many cases) lucidity of thought, seem to show a robust tendency to believe that by inappropriately spouting Latinate technical terms, they can project an illusion of education they’ve never attained.
The use of “ad hominem” in lieu of “insult” seems to be one of this fellahin crowd’s most consistent (and truly pitiful) bits of putzelry.
You would’ve evaded this error, peeke, if you’d ever so much as participated in your secondary school’s debate team, or gotten a passing grade in an undergraduate course in elementary logic.
But, of course, it’s a pretty solid bet that you hadn’t. Damn, bubbie, but you’re on the Web. You could sure hell as pop open a browser tab and look it up, couldn’tcha? You want links?
Inasmuch as a warmista insensately pushing the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) conjecture despite its complete dearth of supporting evidence is either gullible in the extreme (that’s “gullible” as in “not skeptical”) or maliciously duplicitous, peeke, you really ought to be used to a boatload of simple incidental insult when you try to shovel your manure over the shoes of people who are properly skeptical when assessing the preposterous bogosity of the “We’re All Gonna Die!” man-made global climate change hokum that’s predicated on the supposed adverse effects of a trace increase in a trace atmospheric component while deliberately evading consideration of factors undeniably more puissant in their effects on changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land surface areas.
Consider that when you get insulted as well as refuted, peeke, it’s only because you’ve earned it.
re post by: R. Gates says: February 15, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Of course theft = theft.
For that matter, theft = hacked files
However, theft ≠ leaked, whistleblower, or found on public ftp server.
The UK police are VERY careful to always write leaked or hacked, and alleged crime, or the like. After all this time, they’ve been unable to even establish that there was actually any crime involved.
Police, however, ARE required to investigate any reported, alleged crimes. That doesn’t mean a crime actually occurred, only that one was reported and possible.
Before climategate II occurred, they were so hot on the alleged crime that not a single person had been charged, and they didn’t even have a single policeman or staffer working on the issue full time. Not one.
Get it?
The fun part here is that, just like the typewriters of old, all printers have their own forensic signatures caused by the tiny variations in the wear and manufacture of the print train. So this Epson printer can be identified by the police. It won’t be any good chucking it in the Shenandoah River as all documents ever printed by it will show the same signature. So our poor old perpetrator now has to round up every page ever printed and destroy it before the police get there. Lieutenant Columbo, eat your heart out, that it could be this easy. It sure ain’t rocket science!