More Fakegate fallout. On February 28, 2012, the report Climate Change Denial in the Classroom was issued by the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism of the Centre for Inquiry (Canada) (CFI). The related news release, Climate Change Denial in Carleton University Course Exposed by National Science Team, was issued on the same day.
I found the media response to this report, as well as the report itself, rather stunning for all the excitement surrounding it. It seemed to be nothing more than some sort of piling on “gotcha journalism” like the sorts we’ve seen in The Guardian and other left leaning newspapers since Fakegate first broke. One the biggest failures in journalism come from the Guardian, where both Leo Hickman and Suzanne Goldenberg ran with stories naming me, without so much as asking me a question first or determining if the documents were real or not. Initially I thought Goldenberg might have a modicum of journalistic sense, having the presence of mind to send me an email asking for a response, but then I discovered she’d run the story without waiting for my response, and then via an update, only including a small portion of my detailed response, as I show in entirety here.
I asked Mr. Tom Harris, who is specifically named in the report, if this course was a requirement for Earth Science undergraduates at Carleton, or if it was an elective.
He responded immediately that it was an elective, and that nobody was required to take it to get their Earth Sciences degree at Carleton. So it seems to me that all of the media angst and smear surrounding this report is simply that they don’t want students to even be able to choose to take it. The fake moral outrage displayed is quite impressive.
I asked Tom Harris to provide background for me, and he has contributed significantly to what follows, and I have edited and added as needed for this story to convey the background from his side of the story (as well as mine).
The CFI report billed itself as “an audit” of the 2011 version of the 2nd year elective course for non-Earth Science majors at Carleton—“Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective” (course designator ERTH2402). ERTH2402 is a “survey” course that presents an overview of many of the most important areas of climate science at the level of an educated layperson. It has attracted a viewing audience in the general public via CUTV, Carleton’s cable TV station seen across Canada and, via the Web, internationally.
The ERTH2402 course was created by Carleton University Earth Sciences Professor Tim Patterson, PhD, and he taught the course for over a decade. Due to his public climate education work with Professor Patterson since 1998, his teaching experience, and his science and technology background, Mr. Tom Harris, Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, was selected to teach the 2009 version of the course while Dr. Patterson was on sabbatical. 95% of the course material presented to students by Mr. Harris in 2009 was the same as that presented by Dr. Patterson in 2008.
The 2009 version of ERTH2402 was taught successfully with approximately 500 students completing the course. Consequently, Mr. Harris was invited to teach ERTH2402 three more times—twice in 2010 and again in 2011, achieving consistently high student ratings. A total of about 1,500 students completed the course in the four sessions taught by Mr. Harris (who describes the course here). ERTH2402 was not offered in 2012 but Professor Patterson will teach the course again in 2013.
In September 2010, Carleton University postdoctoral fellow Dr. Christopher Hassell, a contract biology instructor (Conservation Biology) at the university, requested, and was granted access to the lectures for the January – April 2011 term. In his September 13, 2010 e-mail to the university “Video on Demand” staff, Dr. Hassell wrote, “I am not interested in taking the course, but simply desire some background information on the lectures” (see p. 89 in the subject audit report).
Dr. Hassell then worked with three other authors (two other biology PhDs and a communications professional) to complete the 98 page report “Climate Change Denial in the Classroom”. At no point before media release of the “audit” did the authors contact Mr. Harris or inform him of their work. Mr. Harris states he has had no previous contact with any of the authors.
The first main stream media to cover the report was The Guardian (London, UK). Their piece was: “Heartland associate taught ‘biased’ climate course at Ottawa university—Expert audit finds man connected with climate sceptic think tank taught climate course to students at Carleton University.”
Approximately one hour before publication on The Guardian Webpage on Feb 28, the author of the piece, The Guardian’s US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg, left a message on Professor Patterson’s voice mail requesting an interview. Professor Patterson did not receive the message until after Goldenberg’s piece was uploaded to the Guardian’s Website. In her article, Goldenberg wrote, “The head of the earth sciences department, Tim Patterson, did not respond to requests for comment.”
How could he? Sheesh. Ms. Goldenberg’s method here almost ensures that no comment could be made before publication. And judging from how she reported on the 2009 Heartland ICCC, where she immediate jumps in the headline from skeptics to “deniers” it seems clear she has a built in bias, perhaps even an irrational hatred, like we see from other environmental reporters on a regular basis.
Goldenberg did however speak with Mr. Harris earlier in the afternoon. Harris had the presence of mind to ask Ms. Goldenberg if he could record the interview (she gave the OK) and the 26 minute interview may be heard here (MP3 audio) and the verbatim transcript of the discussion you can read here: Tom_Harris_Interview_with_the_Guardian-28-02-12 (1) (PDF)
Mr. Harris also corresponded with Goldenberg by e-mail four hours before the piece went live to ensure she was aware of the details of Mr. Harris’ connection with the Heartland Institute. According to him, when he last taught at Carleton he was not a “Heartland associate” (and still is not) and did not become an unpaid “Policy Advisor” with Heartland until approximately six months after he had completed teaching the Carleton course.
On 28 February 2012 19:36, Tom Harris tom.harris@xxxxxxx wrote:
Dear Suzanne,I forgot to mention that Heartland asked me to be a Policy Advisor a few months back and I accepted (you can see their many advisors at http://heartland.org/experts). There is no remuneration for this position and I have no assigned responsibilities, aside from commenting when interesting items related to my field arise when I want to.
Tom
Mr. Harris explained to Goldenberg that Heartland encourages fair and open dialog on climate change and even hosted a friendly public debate between a “skeptic” and an “alarmist” at their last climate conference in Washington DC seven months ago. In 2010, I also talked about this at WUWT and praised Scott Denning for his choice to embrace skeptics and about the warm welcome he received. Even Joe Romm was invited to the last conference. He declined of course, because even though there would be no cost to him he can’t risk being treated warmly by climate skeptics; it might make his head explode.
This call for open and equal debate on the part of Heartland is also evidenced in their invitation to Dr. Peter Gleick to have him debate James Taylor at the Heartland Annual Dinner, which Dr. Gleick declined shortly before launching his criminal phishing attack on Heartland.
Contrary to Goldenberg’s statement that the review of the Earth Sciences course was “an expert audit”, Mr. Harris in his telephone interview (from the transcript linked above) explained to her that it was conducted by two biologists and a writer, none of whom apparently have significant expertise in Earth Sciences or Climate Science.
According to Mr. Harris, contrary to assertions in the Guardian piece, the 2011 version of the ERTH2402 course was well supported by peer reviewed science literature and was in no way extreme. It merely concluded that we are a long way from understanding the science well enough to be able to make reliable forecasts about future climate. Harris says the course was completely nonpartisan politically and avoided any sort of commercial endorsement.
Goldenberg wrote in her Guardian article:
“A team of scientists, who reviewed the videotapes of Mr. Harris’s lectures provided by the university, found 142 false, biased and misleading claims”.
Mr. Harris advises me that he will release an appropriate response to those claims when he has thoroughly reviewed the CASS “audit” report. However, as of this writing, no problems have yet been raised by Carleton in the course material as taught in 2011. It appears that Carelton University itself has no issue with the course material, only the CASS group and the media seem to have issues.
Suzanne Goldenberg’s Guardian piece condemning ERTH2402 is itself riddled with logical fallacies, misrepresentations, omissions, and errors, some of which were described in a letter to the editor sent by Mr. Harris to The Guardian early on February 29. So far, The Guardian has not responded or published the necessary corrections in either their Letters to the Editor or “Corrections and clarifications” sections.
If they don’t, and I’m predicting they won’t, I’ll carry the letter from Mr. Harris here as a separate post.
Here is a TV interview from yesterday with Mr. Harris:
It is clear from the evidence that Suzanne Goldenberg and Dr. Christopher Hassell have allowed their extreme warmist bias to compromise their personal integrity.
I look forward to Tom Harris’s rebuttal of the three biologists clandestine CASS “audit” of a course taught originally by expert paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson – I doubt that many, if any of their alleged “142 false, biased and misleading claims” have validity.
The danger is this sort of Pavlovian hatred of “climate common sense” is that it can unhinge violent people, who are already hanging onto reality by a thread.
This (perhaps unintended) incitement to violence is why I recently chose to post the following note on wattsup, and forward it to some of my friends.
Let’s be careful out there.
Full disclosure:
I have known Tim Patterson and Tom Harris for about a decade, and know that they are individuals of the highest intelligence and integrity.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/20/breaking-gleick-confesses/#comment-898691
On a more serious note:
Desperate people do desperate things.
I know that climate skeptics have received death threats in the past, and some have suffered actual acts of violence.
This is not new – about a decade ago, I counselled some of my colleagues to take precautions to protect their safety and that of their families.
But at that time we were losing the public debate, drowned out by false shouts that “the science is settled”. The global warmists were winning then.
The tables have turned now – there has been no global warming for a decade, and the global warmist elite has been exposed in the Climategate emails as liars, bullies, and fraudsters.
So perhaps now it is even more necessary for global warming skeptics to take reasonable precautions to protect their safety and that of their families.
Desperate people do desperate things.
William Sears said @ur momisugly March 3, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Maybe you just don’t understand bullshit; neither do I!
I wonder if M.Hulme in comments is Mike Hulme of CRU fame & notoriety.
Beesaman said @ur momisugly March 3, 2012 at 12:53 pm
You should consider making some; it’s lots of fun and often very rewarding 🙂
Wow! There is not a single dissenting voice in the comments on this blog. Is it because such comments are blocked, or because no one bothers anymore?
Patterson and Harris are both part of the International Climate Science Coalition, which opposes the IPCC and the scores of organizations of professional scientists in different countries that express support for AGW. So it not surprising that the Patterson and Harris have almost identical course content. This is not a valid argument that the curriculum is legitimate science.
REPLY: Hey “eadler” your comment was approved. So much for your whining. – Anthony
Curiousgeorge says:
March 3, 2012 at 10:45 am:
“Check the T-shirts that many of the alarmists wear when nobody is looking. Many are fans of Che Guevera. They view their cause as a ‘revolution’ and employ the same tactics, albeit without guns – yet.”
Weird, isn’t it? Liberals worshiping Che Guevara, a sociopath who routinely tortured animals for fun, and derived special joy from killing puppies. And these people pretend to be benign and enlightened. Obama’s daughter was wearing one of those T-shirts in a photo last year. It seems to me that everything in their world view is based on fiction, fantasy, and PR imagery. Symbolism over substance is their norm.
I say this as a pretty liberal person myself, but one who refuses to join the Borg.
The Other Pamela Gray says:
March 3, 2012 at 10:21 am
“The warmers’ world is simply REEKING of desperation. For those who may not be aware of the ongoing political farce here in the US, the left is trying to frame the right as wanting to deny contraception to women. They have now tried to stitch it together with – gasp! – global warming!…”
________________________________
Follow their logic, Pamela… since we’re all screwed by Global Warming…
Beesaman says:
March 3, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Goldenberg is not a journalist, she’s a propagandist.
Her distortions of reality are bizarre and one would really have to question her motivation. Is she being paid by some green advocacy group, other than the Guardian, to fabricate this nonsense, or is she really that twisted morally, that she can’t tell right from wrong anymore?
*************************************************************************************
I was surprised when her name turned up in this context. In the past she has specialised in using her “talents” in fabricating and twisting with respect to a particular place in the Middle East.
I wonder what goes on in her head. What must it be like living a life bathed in hate, nastiness and “certainty”?
She’s probably just being lazy and submitting under her byline a packaged article from Futerra or Fenton, UK.
Vision TV (Toronto?) is giving us reruns of “Yes, Minister”. Even though I have probably seen them all at least once, AND enjoyed all the scripts from the two paperbacks, I still watch and enjoy the programs because of the eternal truths contained in them. I am sure that Sir Humphrey Appleby, with his Oxford (??) degree would be right at home with the intellectuals and progressives who are trying to foist belief in AGW onto all of us.
IanM
dogparliament says:
March 3, 2012 at 10:45 am
I know CFI of old. They control Skeptical Inquirer, but their skepticism only goes so far.
Center For Inquiry (CFI) educates on secularism and promotes scientific viewpoints, and has Special Consultative Status at the UN (ECOSOC). They also lobby Congress, The Administation and the State Deaprtment on UN-related issues.
ECOSOC Consultative Status is only granted if the NGO has “.. provided that they can demonstrate that their programme of work is of direct relevance to the aims and purposes of the United Nations ”
To hold this status, ECOSOC’s terms state that they must “..support the work of the United Nations and to promote knowledge of its principles and activities..”.
http://www.un.org/documents/ecosoc/res/1996/eres1996-31.htm
This means CFI cannot produce articles that do not support the UN and its interests, they have to be UN mouthpieces which expains why their supposedly balanced articles are never critical of the IPCC or Global Warming.
Here is a list of over 3000 ECOSOC NGOs, some of which purport to be involved scientific research, but all of which are tied to being UN zombies. They do the UN’s propaganda and viral marketing while UN remains saintly.
http://www.un.org/esa/coordination/ngo/pdf/INF_List.pdf
———–
Incredible. Learn something new every day. More and more reasons to shut down the UN, or at least take away their funding!
This is the same UN that brought cholera to Haiti (and denied it), brought AIDS to Cambodia and many other places and harbors corrupt perverts that prey on locals where ever they go. What’s not to love about them? /sarc
How much evidence of their malfeasance needs to pile up before things change? Having human rights abusers chair committees on human rights? Corruption on an epic scale, like food for oil.
That they are out of control should be self evident:
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/Agenda21.pdf
They’re drowning in their own muck and the more they kick the deeper sink.
Ignorance of the truth is one thing – who is not ignorant in at least some things?
Carelessness with the truth is, for a journalist, a failure of professionalism.
But active distortion of the truth (less politely called ‘lying’) is unacceptable for any person.
In the end, no-one places any reliance on what a liar might say.
In my mind, all that Ms Goldenberg has achieved is to raise questions as to all of her work – past, present, or to come.
(P.S. …”past, present, or to come.” It wasn’t me!!!)
Eric Adler
“Is it because such comments are blocked, or because no one bothers anymore?”
The fact your post is up here dismisses the blocked bit and as for the cannot be bothered that is a failure of the weak minds who run off rather then stand their ground !
William Sears says:
March 3, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Following the links we come to this:
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-02-08/#feature
…If you skip to the comment section at the end of the article you will see that a large number of (I assume) regular readers are very upset with this article and some have threatened to cancel their subscriptions. So, maybe there is hope yet.
Definitely heartening, very good and here’s a funny one:
#29 Genuine Skeptic:…”Anyway, I am sure you know all this, and the article was just a joke to test the skeptical credentials of your readers.”
I thought university students were supposed to be adults, perfectly able to decide for themselves what course to take (or what kind of government to elect, for that matter). What is more, they are educated ones, who can read and understand scientific literature, so anyone who would try to deceive them in this respect, could easily find himself in a pretty difficult situation.
Have some journalists actually gone out of their mind to the extent questioning academic freedom?
Listen to the interview, Goldenberg flat out lies when talking about the title of the report. A little thing but if she is willing to lie about that…
I listened twice through to Tom Harris’ phone conversation with Ms. Goldenberg and it appears she never heard a word he said, not in a reasoning sense. Seemed she was just trolling for a hit on a Heartland connection, obsessively. It is the warmista failure to reason, or even to experience the pleasure of reasoning, of taking another point of view, factoring in new evidence, that sickens and saddens me, and appalls when you consider this is the mindset the warmista want imposed on the young.
Reminded of the experience recorded by Elinor Burket (So Many enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places) teaching master’s classes in Kyrgyzstan in 2001 (arrived the week before 9/11). She was an inspired and inventive teacher, but the hardest thing was to prompt the students to think, to initiate…they had been, with their culture, so accustomed to not make waves, to wait to be told what to do/think. The chilling North Korean model that seems so attractive to control freaks. I believe the Peter Gleicks and Ms. Goldenbergs would be horrified at the awareness that such is the world and result to which their actions and efforts tend. …they know not what they do….
There is such a stark difference in the heart of the people side versus the warmista. Many thanks for such a site where each is free to be what it is, for all the world to see.
@William Howard
Regarding that “sceptic”.com article – things like that make me think the universe is having us on: the author is named Prothero. Prothero was one of the major antagonists in ‘V for Vendetta’ – being the propaganda mouthpiece for the Norsefire government.
When I went for an interview for the Civil Service I was told to read the Guardian for a fortnight beforehand as all the current news topics would be drawn from it and I would have to give the correct responses according to it’s dogma to be even considered for a position. Needless to say I have never read it since.
Happily the majority of its circulation is in official offices, hotels and the like and very few copies are sold over the counter at news agents. If you don’t read the Guardian now you never will.
I have been told that it is excellent for sleeping rough as the pages are large enough to stuff up your shirt and down your trousers for extra insulation. It also makes excellent toilet paper although one may get a blue arse as often the ink is not properly fixed.
As a newspaper it is also good when wrapped around plants to protect them from frost.
Again the large paper size comes in handy for origami and papier mache.
I have seen it used by builders to stuff into holes so that they can apply cement over it without having to buy expensive wire base; some insolubility comes in handy here as with the toilet paper use.
It makes an excellent fire lighter when scrunched up tightly, though there has been a move towards fire retardant paper. This is because most of the papers are left in unsold stacks and the garbage in them reacts like any other compost to give off heat.
Even Civil Servants buy the Telegraph for the crossword as the Guardian one is either so encrypted that you would need an Enigma machine, or as sharp as a kindergarten alphabet book. Without consistency a Civil Servant just cannot function. Worse than asking a Frenchman if he wants a croissant after 10 am.
The only thing that the Guardian is not good for is reading. It is packed with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and it wouldn’t see a fact coming if it came on the tip of an arrow and hit it between the eyes.
Someone asked if it has links to NGO’s or Warmista cells. It does not need them as it is itself an activist rag. It needs no other links. It has some spectacular fails… It invested heavily in the Sarah Palin emails( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/11/palin-emails-response-criticism-guardian ) and when she turned out to be just a slightly eccentric but honest politician they quietly swept it under the carpet. It also joined some group of international newspapers at the time of Copenhagen with a statement to save the planet, which not only failed to catch on it lost the paper even more circulation. (Can’t find the link)
Fearing the Guardian is like the elephant fearing the mouse. One more good stomp and it will be gone, leaving a blue tinged scrap of miss spelled news print frozen in the coming ice cap for future anthropologists to find and marvel at the incredible inaccuracies.
(Add excess commas, and, parenthesis to your taste)
Its name should be the Center Against Inquiry.
“Fake moral outrage translated to smear” — unfortunately, the moral outrage is probably genuine, which says more about their morals than anything else.
I get this a lot, people who have no formal training, qualifications or experience in Earth Sciences, Climate Science, Meteorology or any form of oceanography or atmospheric sciences, who are instant experts in global warming cos they watched “an inconvenient propaganda” or read a piece in “New Scientist” and happen to have a degree in a non related biological field. Usually I try to ignore them these days because it’s too painful. However, its really annoying when non- experts do things like this – isn’t there a code of ethics for this?
“Fake moral outrage……….”
I too am outraged.
All science students have to read the following IF they want to clear their heads.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/
I meant
All science studentS
According the EPA Act, oxygen and water are all pollutants.