Press release
On Tuesday, October 23, PBS’s “Frontline” program will broadcast a special titled “Climate of Doubt.” It promises to go “inside the organizations” that helped turn the tide of public opinion, and then of elected officials, away from excessive concern over the possible threat of man-made global warming.
The Heartland Institute is likely to be a central figure in this program as we welcomed “Frontline” producer Catherine Upin and her crew to our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago in May. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor also gave a three-hour interview to the film crew in August. Earlier this year, The Economist called Heartland “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
We hope the program is accurate and fair, but past experience both with PBS and other mainstream media outlets leads us to predict it will be neither. Several Heartland staff will be watching the program and commenting live via Twitter and on our blog, Somewhat Reasonable.
Meanwhile, here are some facts to keep in mind when watching this program:
- There is no “scientific consensus” about how much the planet has warmed, how much of the warming may be due to human activity, whether the warming has had positive or negative consequences, or what should be done about it. These are all hotly contested issues in the scientific, economic, and public policy communities.
- The best scientific data show there has been no warming for 16 years, something none of the computer models that predict an eco-catastrophe predicted or can explain. Data show no connection between man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. Natural variation in climate readily explains the small changes in temperature that occurred in the twentieth century. Global warming, simply put, is not a crisis.
- The more scientists explore climate, the more they realize how small the human impact can be. But the global warming movement – the environmental activists, “green” businesses, politicians, and even the researchers – has strong financial motives to deny that the science behind their cause, never strong to begin with, is now collapsing.
- The Heartland Institute emerged as a major voice in the international debate over climate change about seven years ago when we observed a lack of balance in the mainstream media’s coverage of the climate debate. We challenged Al Gore to debate his critics, and he never did. We documented errors in his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” but he refused to correct them. We identified scores and then hundreds of scientists whose important work on the issue was being ignored – actually censored – by reporters in the mainstream media and published their work.
- In 2009 and 2011 we published two volumes in a series titled Climate Change Reconsidered that comprehensively refutes the reports of the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our reports, which cite thousands of scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals, have never been refuted by alarmists because they cannot be refuted: They cite the published research of many scientists who self-identify as alarmists in the debate, but whose own research finds evidence of only a small or even nonexistent human impact on climate. After repeated scandals involving the IPCC, Climate Change Reconsidered stands as the most authoritative overview of the science of climate change now available.
- Because of our leadership role in opposing global warming alarmism, Heartland has been mercilessly attacked and demonized by environmental groups and their allies in the mainstream media. We’ve even had our corporate documents stolen and our donors subjected to fake petitions demanding they stop funding us. The mainstream media has participated in these attacks in a clear violation of journalistic ethics.
For the record, The Heartland Institute has been advocating free-market solutions to social and economic problems for 28 years. We address a wide range of topics, not just climate change. We are supported by approximately 5,000 donors. We never take positions to satisfy our donors; donors support us because they agree with the positions we take. No corporation gives more than 5 percent of our annual budget. We have been endorsed by many of the world’s leading think tank leaders, elected officials, and policy experts.
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You know, that was not too bad of a story by the “true green” PBS. I cringed at a few key points, like saying temperatures have been level for ten years instead of the more accurate fifteen years, ant the very distasteful treatment of Santer (but one by one his views are being proven correct across the board, global warming was not the first science-hijacked topic, it’s just that many learned their MO this time around). What did you expect. At least their ending that this will be revisited some fifteen years from now was pretty correct, politically that is, if ever. But yet you could still feel the alarmist-phobic overtones throughout the entire piece, after all, they are all still ocophobic, seems some real marked global cooling would be a blessing right now for a while to drive the science home (sorry northerners).
Just finished watching, and must agree with David Ball above. It was difficult to sit quietly while listening to the smear and distraction tactics. It will keep the zombiefied loyalist fired up a little longer as it shores up, all of their usual BS, wrapped in the respectability of PBS.
True believers indeed rule the MSM. GK
I think the show got about 40 minutes in pretending a sort of balanced discussion before throwing in 100% bias and smear against the “evil oil funded conservative movement”. They totally relied on the bogus 97% consensus number as the basis of what is right and made every effort to avoid any facts unless they could spin it to show how the skeptics are using facts to undermine the truth.
After the mid point they shifted the conversation to how skeptics are conservative, republican and teaparty idiots blindly lead by an elite group of professional contrarians who knowingly undermine he good science of the IPCC and every other science group to support their evil goals.
In the end they claimed the world is currently undergoing every type of disaster and harm imaginable and everyone is too politically afraid of the evil oil funded groups to do anything about it. So in the end the lives of millions are being destroyed by people who will never be held accountable for the wrong they are knowingly committing out of pure selfishness and greed.
I had to quit watching at 23 minutes. Completely unwatchable.
MarqueG says:
October 23, 2012 at 2:30 pm
“Yet their exploration might somehow be redeemed if they also question the funding sources for the AGW/CAGW researchers and whether or not these folks are ideologically motivated. I’ll just hold my breath for now and write back after regaining consciousness.”
I watched the whole thing and as MarqueG expected, no mention was made of the levels of funding or sources thereof for to the warmist faction. The “97% of climate scientists’ canard was trumpeted as gospel. Gavin Schmitt was given significant air time to wallpaper over the significance of the flat 21st century global temperatures with no mention of divergence from model projections. In spite of the bias, at least the program acknowledged that CAGW skeptics are a force of growing influence and can’t be easily dismissed. And maybe I am biased but Monkton, Singer and Michaels certainly had more presence than Schmitt, Dressler and Hayhoe.
PBS will be holding a Live Chat 2 p.m. ET Thursday: Inside the Climate Wars (That is this Thursday, 25 October 2012, in the Eastern time zone of the USA.)
Well they were right. It was a more outrageous piece of propaganda than even is produced by the public broadcasters of socialist commonwealth countries like the BBC, CBC and ABC
Gary says:
October 23, 2012 at 8:30 pm
“So in the end the lives of millions are being destroyed by people who will never be held accountable for the wrong they are knowingly committing out of pure selfishness and greed.”
They were projecting, then.
Does anyone know when the US govt will be declaring bankruptcy? I’d like to buy Hawaii when they have to start selling assets off.
Thank you, PBS Frontline for uncovering this important truth about skeptics… umm.
Well, personally, I appreciate the fact that Mr. Hockenberry did not muddy up his excellent piece with messy details about science. So many of those skeptics try to confuse us with silly arguments about the putative Little Ice Age, and the recent growth in the extent of Antarctic ice. I’ve watched many movies about Roman times, and it didn’t seem all that hot to me. And who can even spell Medieval.
No, John, better to just do what you did: ask some fake-innocent questions with lots of doe-eyed gazes to really expose the venality of those stupid skeptics – make fools out of them with tricky questions like, “Did that make you feel good?” and then, in the sock-o finish, show how evil they are by bringing in a real scientist, like Mr. Schmidt, with the “modern historical” climate record – since 1850 – and show how it’s been zigzagging up the whole time. I laughed when you said, “scientists have a name for this: it’s called going down the up escalator”. Then you showed devastating images of how bad our world really has become. [Great shots of droughts, dust storms, smokestacks and forest fires! Don’t those people know they’re causing all this stuff?]
Anyway, you sure made me and some others really think. Thanks.
I think that the Heartland Institute was treated unfairly, in that Fred Singer was mistreated a bit in his interview clips, while other scientists, those with more dynamic and less skeptical personalities were not interviewed in the show. Also, there was a large section at the end, where alarmists were made to look like victims.
An interesting part for me was in noticing the growing number of alarmists who are coming out as religious.
Welcome to the People’s Revolutionary News Network. We are glad to know you have tuned in, even though we know you don’t have a choice.
But let us get right to today’s Enemy of the People…
Reading the latest comments here, I just realized I wrote of Dr Santer above and I meant Dr Singer. My bad Dr.Singer, your interview was perfect, no pussyfooting around about the facts that we now realize!