Guest post by Alan Caruba
Full disclosure: Years ago I received a small stipend from The Heartland Institute to help cover the costs of writing articles regarding the global warming hoax, well before it was exposed in 2009 when emails between its perpetrators—the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—revealed the total lack of real science involved. I have continued to expose the hoax without any support from Heartland or any other entity.
A total of six conferences on climate change have been sponsored by The Heartland Institute. I attended the first conference in New York City in 2008 and my initial observation was that virtually no one from the press was there and the meager coverage it received disparaged it.
This week, a major smear campaign against the Institute erupted as the result of an act of deception and thievery that may well result in criminal charges against its as yet unknown perpetrator.
The President of the Institute, Joe Bast, immediately informed its supporters, directors, donors and friends that someone pretending to be a board member had sent Heartland an email claiming to be a director and asking that documents regarding a January board meeting be re-sent.
A clever ruse, but the result was that elements of the confidential documents were then posted on a number of so-called climate blogs and from there to various members of the media who, with the exception of The Guardian, took no steps whatever to verify the authenticity of the documents, some of which Heartland says were either a concoction of lies or altered to convey inaccurate information.
The leading disseminator of the global warming hoax, The New York Times, published its version on Wednesday, February 15th, titled “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science.”
Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened. Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.
The original leak of their emails in November 2009 instantly revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it. A second release in 2011 confirmed what anyone paying any attention already knew.
The “warmists”, a name applied to global warming hoaxers, launched into a paroxysm of denial that has not stopped to this day. Their respective universities have since engaged in every possible way to hide the documentation they claimed supported their claims. Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.
We have reached the point where the warmists have been claiming that global warming causes global cooling! Along the way the bogus warming has been blamed for thousands of utterly absurd events and trends. What really worried the perpetrators was the fact that the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998.
At the heart of the hoax was the claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the Earth to heat and that CO2 emissions must be reduced to save the Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it sustains all vegetation which in turn sustains every creature that depends on it as a source of food. It represents a mere 0.033% of the Earth’s atmosphere and is referred to by warmists as a “greenhouse gas.” It is, as any meteorologist or climatologist will tell you, the atmosphere that protects the Earth from becoming a dissociated planet like Mars.
The New York Times article is a case study in bad journalism and bias on a scale for which this failing newspaper is renowned. The Times reported that “Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming part of the nation’s culture wars.”
Wrong, so wrong. Polls have demonstrated that global warming is last on a list of concerns by the public. It barely registers because the public has concluded that it is either a hoax or just not happening. Teaching global warming in the nation’s schools constitutes a crime against the truth and the students.
The Times article makes much of the amounts some donors to Heartland have contributed, but in each cited case, with one exception, the donations had nothing to do with its rebuttal of global warming science.
“It is in fact not a scientific controversy”, said the Times article. “The majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by human beings are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.”
The exact magnitude is zero. Thousands of scientists have signed petitions denouncing global warming as a hoax. The Times lies.
A post at The Daily Bayonet on February 14th said it well, “What the Heartland documents 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 (World Wildlife Fund), the Sierra Club, the National 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.
The Times will continue to publish lies about global warming, as will others like Time and Newsweek magazines. The attacks on Heartland and the many scientists and others like myself who debunk this fraud will continue, but their efforts are just the dying gasp of the greatest hoax of the modern era.
There’s a reason the theme of Heartland’s sixth conference in 2011 was “Restoring the Scientific Method.” Real science does not depend on declaring “a consensus” before the hypothesis has been thoroughly tested, a process that often involves years of effort. Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool.
@Vince Causey says (responding to R. Gate)s:
February 16, 2012 at 12:45 pm
R Gates,
“The perception is of course, that the Institute will take any position that supports and protects big business versus public health and the public interest.”
“i would have expected that even you would have realised that this is an extremely simplistic black-white argument of the sort most commonly associated with the lowest form of politics. it should be clear to any enquiring mind that there are plenty of big businesses that are profiting from the AGW cult, as there are those that are disadvantaged by it. […]”
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Vince, I’ve been disappointed by R. Gates on the BogusGate topic. R. Gates seems to be a maladroit shill on the political side of the CAGW argument. I do appreciate R. Gates’ scientific arguments as, most of the time, they focus on the debatable points of CAGW.
R. Gates makes some interesting points in the CAGW debate, but in this instance, I see R; Gates succombing to base political instincts. I expressed my disappointment in the long original thread of the Heartland documents. The raw political side of CAGW is beneath the R. Gates I like to read.
The Pompous Git
February 16, 2012 at 5:15 pm
BTW Mods, I don’t mind at all that DesertYote called me a fool. More than happy to be called a fool for believing in such things as honesty, truth, justice… that kind of thing.
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I did not call you a fool for those things, and I really did not call you a fool. What I said was that you would be a fool IF you did not understand that socialist want to decimate the economy. You talk about both sides of the political spectrum. What you mean is both sides, as in the terms left and right, which are just either end of the SOCIALIST spectrum as defined by lefties. Conservatives are learning to abandon the term “right” as it really is a trap designed by socialist and overloaded with meaning that is contrary to conservatism.
The greatest good for the greatest number of people has been made possible only because of a limited government with limited ability to intrude into the market. Socialist have to destroy that in order to bring about their great socialist utopia, which has little room for individual freedom. That is why ever single thing socialist do is target at destroying society and its infrastructure.
[Moderator’s Observation: The Git and the Yote seem to have, sort of, acknowledged their similarities and congruence of interests. My job here is done. -REP]
And right you are. As a scanned, non-searchable PDF – Adobe is acting as no more than a wrapper around the G42D Tiffs that make up the document. Extract the tiffs and, voila, you have the scanner metadata in the images. TIFF, if you didn’t already know, is Tagged Image File Format and most scanning hardware/software embeds information in the tags at scan time. Since the source scanner (Epson) had not been scrubbed from the PDF, I’d bet the image tags are intact. Not really any big trick to getting at it either. Very simple and routine matter for someone that does electronic document forensic analysis.
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 2:30 pm
No, the planet continues to warm
It’s called “global warming.” It’s caused by human activity. It’s dangerous.
That is only in the adjusted data, not the real data.
For the real data for the last 10 years see the downward trends for both the combined 4 major data sets and the sea surface temperatures.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1980/plot/wti/from:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/trend
#Time series (wti) from 1979 to 2012
#Selected data from 2002
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00383708 per year
#File: hadsst2gl.txt
#
#Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 2002
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00903442 per year
Now whether or not this is significant or over a long enough time period is a totally different but valid question.
If your bath tub is filling as fast as it can with the hot tap turned on fully it will indeed fill faster if you also turn the cold tap on.
If the Earth’s surface is filling with thermal energy (ie it is warming) as fast as it can on a sunny morning with the Sun shining fully it will indeed fill (warm) faster if you also radiate extra thermal energy from a colder atmosphere if and only if you violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Rosco, you answered your question, why max temp on the moon is higher than max temp on earth in your last paragraph. It is due to the atmosphere, convection, advection, evaporation, and one more you didn’t mention: heat capacity.
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And you Eric forgot to mention the far greater amount of thermal energy in the crust, mantle and core (at about 5,700 deg.C) of the Earth- all of which has a significant stabilising effect on surface temperatures so they don’t warm too much in the day, or cool too much at night. Of course the atmosphere helps keep us cooler in the day and warmer at night also.
Frankly I’m glad the Earth’s atmosphere cools the Earth so the Sun doesn’t boil the lakes as it would if any existed on the Moon, seeing that maximum temperatures exceed 100 deg.C.
And thank Heaven for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which also helps to absorb incoming energy in the infra-red which makes up about half the Sun’s radiative flux.
Who knows, without carbon dioxide sending back to space some of the incoming solar radiation, we might have been 33 degrees hotter /sarc.
And, by the way, if all other things are equal (including relative humidity and pressure) I see no reason why cloudy nights should be cooler or warmer than clear nights. You tell me your reasons based on genuine physics which does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by transferring any thermal energy from any colder point in the atmosphere to any warmer point on the surface at any time, morning, evening or whenever.
R. Gates’ move, n’est-ce pas?
It appears those who push the extreme AGW paradigm can no longer defend the science and must therefore attack the messenger. If attacking the messenger does not work, basic propaganda and buying support is another tactic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/theater/04arts-SCIENCEFOUND_BRF.html
“The National Science Foundation has awarded a $700,000 grant to the Civilians, a New York theater company, to finance the production of a show about climate change. “The Great Immensity,” with a book by Steven Cosson (“This Beautiful City”) and music and lyrics by Michael Friedman (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”), tells the story of Polly, a photojournalist who disappears while working in the rain forests of Panama. The grant is a rare gift to an arts organization from the foundation, a federal agency that pays for science, engineering and mathematics research and education. The company says it plans to spend the money on the development and evaluation of the show, as well as on a tour and educational programs, including post-show panel discussions with experts in related scientific fields. No performance dates have been announced.”
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:41 pm
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 12:02 pm): ”
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
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So apparently you can’t. Thanks, that says a lot.”
Actually, I did. And thank you, too. Your answer says a lot about you.
So much for your “honest” question.
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Please be specific in listing which “big businesses” would stand to benefit from global warming “alarmism”. We can certainly all list those who benefit by creating doubt about the existence or threat, and Heartland’s own documents indicate who’d they like to see increase their donations to fight this “alarmism”. So who benefits from the alarmism?
The Pompous Git says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Or, regardless of how much money or popularity you garner to your cause, that has absolutely NO bearing on it’s rightness or wrongness. As Einstein said (paraphrased), everyone can agree with my hypothesis, it takes only one experiment to prove it totally wrong.
I beg to differ says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Regardless of the releases of any information, it is the science that will win the argument. From the beginning proponents of AGW forgot the first law of data analysis, ‘things correlated to the same thing, aren’t necessarily correlated to each other.’ As temperatiures went up, they made millions, but now that temperatures have leveled and threaten to go down, they resort to the base tactics they have displayed all along.
Facts will always (eventually) trump bad science, and it looks like we are there.
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Not quite…but close. But as a skeptic, you may not like the way it goes.
Gates says:
“So who benefits from the alarmism?”
Answer: government bureaucrats, politicians, NGO’s, QUANGOs, universities, and big businesses like GE that make windmills.
But taxpayers lose.
[Moderator’s Observation: The Git and the Yote seem to have, sort of, acknowledged their similarities and congruence of interests. My job here is done. -REP]
Not much chance of open warfare between two libertarians REP 🙂
H.R. said:
“I expressed my disappointment in the long original thread of the Heartland documents. The raw political side of CAGW is beneath the R. Gates I like to read.”
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Hey, I asked an honest question about the truth and reasoning being Heartland’s positions on the issues which has given them a bad reputation with both the press and the majority of the scientific community. I actually know very little about Heartland. This whole “supposed” scandal, which the majority of average people could care less about (much like Climategate by the way), just got my curiousity aroused to find out a bit more about Heartland. When I found out Anthony was involved, it especially got my curiousity up. Politically I’m an Independent, with conservative leanings in financial and basic constitutional and personal freedom issues, but tend to be somewhat liberal in social issues. So in checking a bit about Heartland on the web, you come across what I consider to be pretty unscientifically founded positions that some claim that Heartland has taken over the years. So I’m curious about what the truth is. For example:
In spite of massive evidence to the contrary, did Heartland at one time actually try to claim that either smoking and/or second hand smoke was not bad for people’s health? (i.e. likely to cause a whole host of bad health effects?) And were they paid to make this claim by those with a financial interest in the issue?
Did Heartland at one time actually try to claim that CFC’s were not damaging the ozone layer? And were they paid to make this claim by those with a financial interest in the issue?
These are simple questions, that should have yes or no answers, but in asking them, I get attacked. Very interesting.
DesertYote said @ur momisugly February 16, 2012 at 6:01 pm
My response was badly worded; I should have said I didn’t mind if you called me a fool 😉 However, we do disagree on the accepted definition of socialism. I can live with that. I do agree that socialism is an economic disaster. I do not agree that Australia’s conservative coalition are socialists, but they are welfare statists. Welfare statism is also an economic disaster. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.
Smokey says:
February 16, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Gates says:
“So who benefits from the alarmism?”
Answer: government bureaucrats, politicians, NGO’s, QUANGOs, universities, and big businesses like GE that make windmills.
But taxpayers lose.
_____
Interesting list there Smokey. Except for GE, this is not very specific, and of course, GE benefits from just about any issue out there, no matter which side wins because they are so big and do so many different things. The others also benefit from many different issues, and in fact, you could substitute “Excessive and Bloated Military Budgets” for the term “alarmism” in your statement above, and you’d see that pretty much the same groups benefit, and the same group is the loser– the taxpayer. In this regard, I agree with much of Ron Paul’s thinking.
I would like to disclose that I allowed methane to be produced on the family ranch I have managed for the past 7 years. I rented and leased to ranchers who put…cows…on the pasture. Gawd…I feel so much better.
Smokey said @ur momisugly February 16, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Smokey, you forgot “big” oil. They seem to benefit greatly from this: increased prices, diversification into “alternative” energy where profit margins are likely higher than oil profits. Oh, and the financiers: Goldman Sachs etc. Lotsa snouts in the trough; almost too many to count.
And yes, we lose 🙁
Rosco,
There are two main reasons the moon gets much hotter during the day. First, there being no atmosphere. there are no winds and thus no way for the heat accumulating where the sun is high in the sky to be dissipated. (note this has nothing particular to do with “greenhouse” gases. An atmosphere of say, Helium, would do a pretty good job of mixing the heat around.) Second, the moon is locked into having one side facing the earth, which means it’s “day” is 28 times as long as an earth day.
Now would you like to try asking a hard question?
Git,
Right. Lots of entities benefit from alarmism. Those were just some things that occurred to me over about half a minute. No doubt there are lots more. But I’m not playing Gates’ game because he doesn’t play fair. He asked, I answered, he nitpicked. No matter what I answer, he will nitpick endlessly. He can’t help it. Cognitive dissonance. Or, at least 75% cognitive dissonance.
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:51 pm
No doubt most here have heard this joke, but for the few who haven’t:
A liberal, a moderate, and a conservative walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hi, Mitt.”
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Of course, he covered his bases well with the statement, “I’m extremely conservative!” What’s next? Maybe he’ll say: “When it comes to my wealth, I’m just hyper-middle class?”
R. Gates,
I would recommend that you do not bet your life savings on the extreme AGW paradigm. It appears that there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling and occasionally by extreme, rapid cooling events, that following a 1470 year pattern. The sun does appear to be acting strangely. If you are interested in the science this book is a good introduction.
http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theory-Climate-Change/dp/1840468157
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amet/aip/543146.pdf
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10–12 years. The relations between the length of a solar cycle and the mean temperature in the following cycle are used to model Svalbard annual mean temperature and seasonal temperature variations.
These models can be applied as forecasting models. We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 to 2oC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 oC.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
Pamela Gray says:
February 16, 2012 at 8:08 pm
I would like to disclose that I allowed methane to be produced on the family ranch I have managed for the past 7 years. I rented and leased to ranchers who put…cows…on the pasture. Gawd…I feel so much better.
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I would like to disclose that I own a family couch in which various people have used over the years and I’ve allowed the production of methane on said couch, but received no financial benefit from same.
Pamela Gray said @ur momisugly February 16, 2012 at 8:08 pm
And The Git would like to disclose that not only do the cattle he agists for his neighbours emit methane, but also is known to exit the house through the French window, onto the deck where he also emits methane. SWMBO says she much prefers this to said emissions taking place indoors. And yes, gawd… he feels so much better after letting one rip 😉
Why not comment on the original topic, namely the fabrication of a memo? Are you one of who approves of such tactics? Are you saying it’s OK to fabricate evidence if the institute in question ‘deserves it’ in your opinion? Is that the reason behind your questions?