Guest post by Dr. Nicola Scafetta
I am following this story about Gleick vs. Heartland Institute. I believe I found something that might be useful and/or interesting.
To understand what happened in the mind of Gleick you need to carefully read the exchange occurred on Forbes between Gleick and Taylor in January. Apparently, everything started from this post by Gleick
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/05/the-2011-climate-b-s-of-the-year-awards/
where Gleick personally attacked known scientists who are critical of AGW and he also attacked you.Later James Taylor of Heartland Institute responded to Gleick here
First, you need to note the dates of Taylor reply (2012/01/12) and the date of the email sent by Gleick to Heartland which started a couple of weeks later on 2012/01/27. So the dates match.
Now you need to take into account that the article by Taylor is quite strong and solid, and very likely severely damaged the scientific credibility of Gleick who was proven not even having the scientific facts right and having his analysis of the scientific literature, in a particular of that that opposes the AGW theory, extremely superficial and unfair.
I would say that Taylor won the debate without doubts, and Gleick simply matured the idea of having a strong revenge.
Now you need to carefully read the comment by Gleick to Taylor’s article that you can read at the bottom on the Forbes’ article page. Gleick wrote
“I don’t normally respond to the posts by James Taylor — reading them makes my head explode. They are written as though from a completely different universe — some parallel universe where up is down, left is right, and global warming isn’t happening…. whew (though a careful reader of this post by Taylor will note that he accidentally acknowledges global warming is occurring). But since I’m the entire target of this rant, I thought I might offer a minor comment or two: He says I’m upset because so few people agree with me… Hmm, 97-98% of all climate scientists (of which I am one, and James Taylor is not) agree with me — climate change is happening, and it is happening because of human activities. Maybe no one at the Heartland Institute agrees (though they are paid not to), but I like the company I keep better. I will ignore the completely scientific nonsense that comprises the rest of his post, except to note the fine response by “cyruspinkerton” who sets Taylor straight about extreme events in 2011. Taylor must not read the news, or the science, either. I wonder, however, if Taylor would publish the list of who really DOES fund the Heartland Institute. It seems to be a secret — no information is listed on their website about actual contributors of that $7 million budget that they use to deny the reality of climate change (and previously, the health effects of tobacco — their other focus). And their 990 tax form doesn’t say either. [By the way, while my Forbes posts reflect my personal opinion and not the opinion of the Pacific Institute, all of the Pacific Institute’s financial records are public.] So, Mr. Taylor: let’s have the complete list of your funders.”
As you can see, instead of discussing the scientific facts that Taylor was addressing in his article strongly disproving Gleick, Gleick just wanted the names of the donors of Heartland Institute more than anything else, as if that was the most important issue.
Now you need to read the response from Taylor. At the end Taylor responded
“Finally, Gleick asks for the Heartland Institute to publicly reveal all the names of its donors. The Heartland Institute used to do so, while similarly appealing to other groups to do the same. However, environmental activists and other extremist groups used the information to launch a campaign of personal harassment against Heartland Institute donors while simultaneously refusing to release the names of their own donors. It is funny how Gleick rants against the alleged harassment of Katharine Hayhoe yet remains silent about the harassment of people who disagree with him. This further reveals Gleick’s appalling lack of objectivity, as does Gleick’s call for the Heartland Institute to release the names of its donors while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of global warming activist groups have been far less transparent than the Heartland Institute. Of course, Gleick’s attempts to make Heartland Institute funding an issue while ignoring the less transparent funding reports of global warming activist groups with 10, 20, or even 80 times the funding of the Heartland Institute is a tired and sad tactic used by global warming alarmists who try desperately to take attention away from scientific facts and objective scientific data. I can see why Gleick views these scientific facts and objective data as a “parallel universe” that makes his “head spin.”
Now you need to focus on the key sentence in Taylor’s response:
“However, environmental activists and other extremist groups used the information to launch a campaign of personal harassment against Heartland Institute donors”
At this point, Gleick knew what he could do to have his personal revenge against Taylor and the Heartland Institute . He simply needed to get the list of names of the donors of Heartland Institute and make it public in such a way that environmental activists and other extremist groups could use the information to launch a campaign of personal harassment against those persons and damage the finance of the Heartland Institute. And in two weeks Gleick prepared his “smart” plan that we know.
In my opinion Gleick was simply blinded by a strong feeling of personal hatred against Taylor and just wanted his personal revenge against the person that so efficiently rebutted him in public. The irony of this story is that it was Taylor himself to suggest Gleick what he could do to have his revenge and to efficiently damage the Heartland Institute. ButGleick’s plan was uncovered…
In conclusion, the real reason why people like Gleick do not want to publicly debate with the AGW and IPCC critics is simply because somehow they know that they will lose the debate. And they get mad of it.
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Addendum by Anthony
I would add that there is one other exacerbating factor that occurred on January 27th, 2012, and that is seen in this article on Forbes by Dr. Peter Gleick:
Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal
Gleick writes:
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”
Then there’s this, Gleick was one of the signers:
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down.
The NAS essay is here. The WSJ article is here
Seems to me that he was quite put out that WSJ would accept the 16, but not the 255. I see it as contributory to his anger that day, the day he decided to assume a new fake email identity and break the law.
It seems he also made his own bias very clear in an article where he asks readers:
Do you have an open mind?
It doesn’t matter what might be said or published, he claims we are wrong:
I’d say he’s now disqualified himself, and in spectacular fashion.
Official Climate refugees-I don’t know if anyone has claimed climate refugee status but my husband and I claim climate refugee status on Feb 28th. Leaving cold snowy Ontario Canada for balmy Bahamas. I have been so busy, I almost missed reading about the fakegate. I went to desmog blog today; they are still posting and yelling about it so I think they missed the news. The warmists can freeze to death, I don’t care anymore.
From barry on February 26, 2012 at 4:32 pm:
The Library of Congress has a reportedly impressive Third Reich Collection. Does that mean Congress has accepted the positions of the Third Reich?
And the WWF accepts money from Philip Morris. The WWF certainly does a lot of lobbying. How much PR for tobacco companies does the WWF do?
Then barry said on February 26, 2012 at 4:34 pm:
*sigh*
Can you really be this inept at web searches? You dug up some edited thing with “2009” stuck on it, which comes with a broken link, and claim that doc was removed from the Heartland site.
Yet all I had to do was search with the first full sentence and I found the whole thing on the Heartland site, in full un-removed glory, and dated 2007.
So you found a mis-dated severely chopped-up piece on an anti-smoking site with a bad link, and this leads to your implying there’s a nefarious plot by Heartland to sanitize their site by removing the original full document? Which IS NOT the “central policy document” you portrayed it as being.
*groan* You’re pathetic. Your defending of Gleick as far as you can, and attacking Heartland to make up the difference, is really looking rather obvious in its motivation to me.
re post by: barry says: February 26, 2012 at 4:32 pm
What have you got against facts? Are you allergic to them or something? I could give a rip if the facts ‘downplay’ or ‘up-play’ whatever the common impression of something is. For that matter, I’m greatly appreciative of facts which do anything to correct any general false impressions that exist regardless of the topic. Which is how anyone who cares about a subject or about science ought to be.
After that, this is trivial – but what is wrong with lobbying for lowered taxes? Frankly, it’s always seemed hinkey to me that the government demonizes something, going so far as to use photoshopped gore/scare photos, all the while claiming that it’s reasonable for them to profit more from someone’s labor and product than is the case for labor and products from other industries. Particularly when the people harmed most by that tax are by far the poorest in our nation to begin with. Talk about a regressive tax.
At this point I would be surprised if you weren’t labeling me a troglodyte smoker in your mind, so perhaps I’d best tell you that I don’t smoke, I’ve never smoked (unless you count snitching a single cigarette from my parent when I was a very little kid. Then using it to teach myself how to blow smoke rings while doing everything I could to not get it in my lungs – and once since then as an adult to see if I could still blow rings, yep, still could), and I hate smoking. But I’ll also defend any adult’s right to decide to smoke it they want to, so long as they aren’t two feet from me blowing it in my face. Two feet from me with the smoke drifting in another direction, fine.
The only ‘spin’ so far in this thread is clearly coming from people who apparently care more about the impressions than the facts – even when that means wasted money and laws and policies that don’t properly prioritize and deal with risks.
You didn’t just respond to whether Heartland confines it’s lobbying to second hand smoke, you went far beyond that and far into spin and advocacy. You showed rather clearly that you could give a rip for what the actual facts of a matter are, you just want to demonize anything you don’t happen to like personally. That’s the only thing that reeks of spin and deception here.
kadaka,
the policy document, mentioned at the top of the page on the article I linked, is called “Tobacco and Freedom.” It has been removed from Heartland’s website. Various websites link to it but the doc is no longer there. I searched for it at Heartland. You are welcome to try and retrieve it. It was written by Joseph Bast and Maureen Martin.
No mention of the letter from Joseph Bast to the Philip Morris rep, in which Heartland lobby efforts for big tobacco are laid out? Your focus appears to be a bit lop-sided.
What Gleick did was indefensible – I’ve said as much in a few posts upthread. Despite the knee-jerk reaction to my posts, I have little interest in pursuing the topic beyond the misconception that Heartland doesn’t lobby in favour of direct (not just passive) smoking. Your conjecture on my motives is just wrong. You seem to have a need to frame my participation in a certain way. Go for it. I’m not interested in whatever paradigm you need to reinforce. I’m certainly not interested in promoting any.
Db8, I have no idea what you’re trying to say, but you asked,
“but what is wrong with lobbying for lowered taxes”
There answer is, nothing.
I see a lot of hand-waving over some of my assertions, and some character assessment of me personally, but absolutely no discussion of the facts as I presented them from you or anyone else.
Which of these do you think are non-factual?
1. Heartland Institute, Cato and other think tanks lobby government representatives.
2. They do PR-like activities for various industries.
3. Their ‘science’ reports are guided by their policy agendas.
4. Heartland’s tobacco lobbying includes direct smoking, not just passive smoking. (This is where entered the topic)
5. The medical science behind the risks of passive smoking is solid.
From barry on February 26, 2012 at 8:13 pm:
YO, MORON!
IT’S THE SAME DOCUMENT. I don’t care what “tobacco.org” gave it for a title. Do you think Heartland titled their own document “MARTIN/BAST”? Look at the text, the parts that “tobacco.org” have match verbatim with the full document that’s still on Heartland’s site
Good Lord, you’re so stupid you must be deliberately stupid. How else can you keep claiming Heartland deleted a document that is still there in plain view?
I put the evidence right before your eyes, you ignore it and keep blabbering away with your little “conspiracy theory.” You’re not discussing, you’re just trolling.
What’s to mention about that document? Except that you’re misrepresenting what they do as “lobby efforts for big tobacco”. I’ll let Heartland speak for itself on the issue:
There it is. Year to year they get little to no tobacco money, yet they maintain their position on the principle of freedom.
Come on, if they really wanted to advocate something that’d really bring in the bucks and were willing to support it with shonky churned-out “science”, they’d be pushing (C)AGW alongside those other advocacy groups.
kadaka,
First of all, thanks for opening the name-calling, and I appreciate the mods allowing it to happen. I trust they they will show no favouritism towards you and allow me to do the same.
You brought up sourcewatch – did you know that they also have a dead link to the essay “Tobacco and Freedom”?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute_and_tobacco#cite_note-Tobacco_and_Freedom-21
The document you linked might be it – I thought it was covering material or an overview. Perhaps they changed or got rid of the title. Yes, I’m aware the two web pages have the same material, dipstick.
Whatever the case, the document is a fine example of Heartland’s lobby profile for big tobacco. My point remains that they are not just dealing with passive smoking. Your interpretation of my intent is just as wrong as before, puss-face. You’re a dab hand with a search engine (gee-whiz! have you learned that copy’n’paste trick?), but your comprehension is lousy.
Your defense of Heartland is strange. Why are you even bothering? I see nothing wrong with them lobbying to make things easier for tobacco smokers. It’s also not a problem that they have requested and received funding from tobacco companies based on their lobbying efforts – that is the exact point of Joseph Bast’s letter to Philip Morris, BTW. Could it be any clearer, from the president of Heartland no less?
So, when you read, “I see nothing wrong,” and, “it’s not a problem,” what happens in that strange wee brain of yours that overrides my words and decides I’ve said the complete opposite? Just who do you imagine you are talking to?
You are defending Heartland. I am defending, or attacking, nobody. I was a smoker for 20 years and enjoyed every one. I think you should take up smoking. It might calm you down.
Because they said so? Fine display of skepticism, kadaka.
But again, you are fabricating a disagreement. I’ve repeatedly said that their lobbying and ‘science’ reports are guided by their political philosophy. Whatever position you think you are arguing against, it isn’t mine.
barry says:
February 26, 2012 at 5:47 am
If the evidence against second hand smoke is so solid, you should have no trouble producing links to dozens of peer reviewed studies that prove it.
Besides accelerated global warming and sea level rise, has anyone observed the sky in falling? Obviously, it was a very big apple that hit Chicken Little Gleick in the head. Poor science = Poor policy.