Guest Post by Joe Bast
In a December 28 post, blogger Greg Laden, a self-described “biological anthropologist and science communicator,” ranked The Heartland Institute’s efforts to expose global warming alarmism as one of the “top climate stories of 2012”. I suppose we should be flattered, but his error-filled explanation for including us in the list requires some corrections:
- Heartland isn’t a “climate denial ‘think’ tank.” Last time I checked, no Heartland spokesperson ever denied the existence of the climate, or even climate change.
- Heartland didn’t “implode” or “suffer major damage” in 2012. In fact, we increased receipts by about 15% from 2011, increased the number of donors nearly four-fold, more than doubled the number of policy advisors (to 237), and set records for press attention and online traffic for our sites. 2012 was a breakthrough year for us, thanks in no small part to the attention generated by our work on global warming/cooling.
- We have never tried to “prove that cigarette smoking was not bad for you.” We do argue that taxes on smokers are too high and second-hand smoke is not the public health threat that anti-smoking zealots claim.
- We were not “caught red handed trying to fund an effort explicitly (but secretly) designed to damage science education in public schools.” That description is based on a fake memo circulated by disgraced water scientist Peter Gleick. We announced the curriculum project in our members newsletter and explained there that our intent is to help de-politicize the issue. How is that a bad thing?
- We did run a billboard about global warming, but it did not “equat[e] people who thought the climate science on global warming is based on facts and is not a fraud with well-known serial killers.” The billboard simply pointed out that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, still believes in global warming, and asked viewers if they do, too. We know why lefties went nuts over it – Kaczynski, after all, is one of their own – but it wasn’t inaccurate or offensive.
- We lost a few corporate donors who couldn’t stand the heat when liberal advocacy groups, using a donor list stolen by the aforementioned Peter Gleick, circulated online petitions demanding that they stop funding us. But as already mentioned, we gained many more donors than we lost and had an exceptionally good fundraising year.
- Laden ends by saying The Heartland Institute, “which never was really that big, is now no longer a factor in the climate change.” He’s right that we aren’t very big – about $6 million a year – but he’s wrong about the role we continue to play in the international debate. Our Eighth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Munich on November 31-December 1, 2012, was a huge success. We’ve got projects on climate already lined up for 2013 that make 2012 look like a dress rehearsal.
In short, Heartland played a major role in shaping the debate over global warming in 2012, and we expect to play an even larger role in 2013. Sometimes it takes a little controversy to break through media bias and public indifference. Heartland achieved this in 2012.
Joe Bast is the president of the Heartland Institute
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Note to get a window into the strange and hateful mind of Greg Laden, all you need to do is read his about page here and scroll down. Pity the soul that lives in Texas or West Virginia.
– Anthony
Wouldn’t be at all surprised if ‘trafamadore’ was laden in disguise… both come across as intellectual cowards / cretins / dishonest.
Did I mention he went to Havard to be Harvard educated beyond his intelligence at Harvard?
Joe Bast;
I want to chime in with pokerguy. The Unabomber billboard was a mistake. Stop defending it, that only weakens your position. If you are going to spend time on the issue, then may I suggest a crowd sourcing effort to as to what should be on your next foray into billboard politics. The great part of crowd sourcing these things is that you have a huge audience who will point you at all the ways your great ideas can be twisted into something unexpected. Forewarned is forearmed as they say.
So Laden is a self styled “Science Communicator”, hows that working out for him?
The team and their apologists, keep saying, we are not lying its just a failure to communicate the science. Yet public engagement with panic about the weather keeps right on slipping, Canada has ditched Kyoto and no-body up here has done more than cheer.
And the stammering from the cheap seats, over the collapse of any correlation between rising co2 emissions and rising global temperature, is priceless.
Now these clowns are reduced to whining about weather, its our fault if any storm happens????
Oh yeah, what was the “context” missing in the CRU emails? I’m still waiting.
Happy New year to Heartland and all honest folk. To the true believers, well you made your bed. Enjoy.
Wikipedia is a source.
A convenient source, with (often) on deeply technical scientific issues, a credible source and a credible reference for formulas and constants that are universally constant.
they are terrible on “wider-range” issues of global warming in particular – and the environment in general – but convenient, if I trust the accuracy of what they are saying because of my prior knowledge.
For example, I’d trust Wiki with a formula for the heat transfer of energy through ice and the heat transfer coefficient of ice, but NOT the paragraphs before and after it discussing Greenland ice melt.
I’d trust it with the emissivity of forested land, but NOT the paragraphs discussing land use and albedo.
I trust it for the “average speed” of a glacier, but NOT the melting of glacier ice worldwide.
I notice you don’t deny being funded by the Koke Brothers, Grover Norquist, Tea Party and Big Fracking.
trafamadore says:
December 30, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Thanks… for a big ROFL….. if you’re going to “concern-troll” here at least skip the fatuous “I don’t mean to be critical….” C’mon that’s just too insulting to all here. I haven’t had any personal contact with Heartland but they seem like paragons compared to a lot of people on The ClimateScience-TM Team.
As long as you are sooooooooo concerned, why don’t you work on getting climate science to distance real science from “slimy” propagandists Mann, Gleick, Hansen, Briffa, Phil Jones, Karoly and Gergis, Lewandowsky, Algore, et al.
Speaking of wiki[pedia], I think this should be in the article on agitprop:
Where’s your lawsuit against Gleick?
Went to the “story” and saw their list of “helpers”:
“…The following people contributed to this effort: Angela Fritz, A Siegel, Eli Rabett, Emilee Pierce, Gareth Renowden, Greg Laden, Joe Romm, John Abraham, Laurence Lewis, Leo Hickman, Michael Mann, Michael Tobis, Paul Douglas, Scott Mandia, Scott Brophy, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Tenney Naumer…”
Stephan Lewandowsky? Really?
Hmmm… Google found links to sites for a Greg Laden, including a blog that has the tag line “Science as Culture, Culture as Science”. Doesn’t seem to be in the top 10 sites on the net, or top 100. Alexa says scienceblogs.com (hosting site for scienceblogs.com/gregladen) has site rank of 15,972, and there’s a gregladen.com with rank somewhere down the list below 1,000,000.
Also found a Greg Laden who’s a blogger (independent and for Nat Geo) and also a “Travel and Research Coordinator with Bushrock”, and an assistant professor at U Minnesota.
Is this the same Greg Laden? If it is, I’m glad that he and trafamadore reminded me that I still have time to make a tax-deductible contribution to Heartland for 2012.
[snip. Invalid email address. — mod.]
Die Zauberflotist,
I didn’t know you were a fool. But then you commented…
They get help from sock puppets??
“How many people died because of delayed action due to Heartland’s ad campaign on second hand smoke?”
I haven’t been following the research in the last few years, but, before that, every new study seemed to show that the threat of ‘second hand smoke’ was more and more overblown. Has that changed since?
Ah, “trafamadore” the concern troll is back. Trafamadore could not care less about anyone dying from second-hand smoke. In fact, he cannot name one such person. And he is so ignorant that he cannot even spell names correctly [“Tilsdale, Monchton”].
“trafamadore” asks: “Do you have a problem with the published literature?”
Aside from the proven fact that “Pal Review” controls most journals, the concern troll should note the fact that Anthony Watts is a published, peer reviewed author, as are many WUWT commentators. But trafamadore is a troll who only believes his cherry-picked pal reviewed sources, and ignores the fact that the planet is falsifying his climate cult beliefs, like the completely non-existent catastrophic AGW.
Heads-up to trafamadore: Peter Gleick is a dishonest, conniving weasel, while Heartland is a stand-up organization that fights the dishonesty that “trafamadore” admires.
And, if his pseudonym is intended to be a reference to a Vonnegut novel, he can’t spell that right either.
Mr Bast,
You and your good fellows at Heartland may not always be right. No human is. However you are not willfully wrong, like some I could mention. I am thankful you exist.
If you stand for the truth then Truth stands by you. Many seem to have an odd fear of Truth, as if it is a foe. It is not. Truth is our friend. Over and over for over a half century I have seen it is not Truth that gets me, my friends, and mankind into trouble, but rather slyness, trickery, and dishonesty.
Keep up your good work. I will help in every way I can.
trafamadore, I still remember the very first peer reviewed paper I ever read. It explained, through extensive analysis of the physics, that there was a barrier to building single platter 5.25 inch hard disk drives that could store more than 5 megabytes. The paper investigated possible techniques for circumventing this barrier than might allow that limit to be exceeded, but that they in turn had limits of their own and exceeding 10 megabytes was clearly impossible. A broad range of physicists at the time scoffed at the paper, suggesting that even approaching 5 megabytes was ridiculous.
Please keep this in mind when you next visit your favourite electronics store as those 3.5 inch, 4 terabyte hard drives they are trying to sell you obviously do not exist. Thank GOODNESS you were forewarned by the peer review literature.
Greg Laden:
“Sometimes I’m hard on an entire state. Like Texas. Or, recently, West Virginia.”
“It’s funny when the slack jawed yokels who live in these god-forsaken shitholes get annoyed at that”
“…..wait for some major natural disaster to mostly wipe you out, like happened in Louisiana.”
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He has gone beyond Parncutt.
[Snip. Invalid email address. — mod.]
@trafamadore
Research is great.
Agenda-outcome driven research not.
In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out.
One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation.
http://www.data-yard.net/2/12/1440.pdf
The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers.
In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk.
This confirmed Sir Richard Doll’s own comment in 2001: “The effects of other people’s smoking in my presence is so small it doesn’t worry me’.
‘In each case, the sponsors tried to suppress the results, which were only with difficulty made public (the fact that Enstrom and Kabat, both non-smokers, could only get their results published with help from the tobacco industry was inevitably used to discredit them, even though all their research had been financed by the anti-tobacco cancer charity).’
Joe.
Keep focused on the truth, in spite of all the money the CAGW crowd are losing ground for the hearts and minds of normal people who are getting sick and tired of their lies, doom and gloom predictions.
“■We have never tried to “prove that cigarette smoking was not bad for you.” We do argue that taxes on smokers are too high and second-hand smoke is not the public health threat that anti-smoking zealots claim”
A silly crazy stance to take by Heartland if you ask me…an opening for criticism if ever ther was one!
Who thought that foolishness up!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9776409?dopt=Abstract
The strongest and the only statistically significant result of this study appears to be that exposing children to secondhand tobacco smoke helps protect them from lung cancer later in life. Has there been another study that directly contradicts this result?