 Part six of a series.
When The Heartland Institute pulled down their billboard comparing actual climate realists to terrorist Ted Kaczynski, Heartland president Joseph Bast published a brief press release explaining why he ran the advertisement. At the end of the largely unrepentant release, Bast wrote “We do not apologize for running the ad.” Since then, Bast and James M. Taylor, managing editor of the Heartland periodical Energy and Climate News, have gone on the attack instead of apologizing for making a dishonest comparison.
However, the new attacks are just as dishonest, deceptive, and hypocritical as the original billboard and its accompanying essay were. Full story »
Part five of a series.
In his essay supporting Heartland’s Unabomber global warming billboard, The Heartland Institute’s president Joseph Bast wrote that “most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”
Peter Sinclair, creator of the Climate Denial Crock of the Week video series, has a second video project at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media called This is Not Cool. Today, Sinclair released his latest video, Full story »
Over the last week and a half, a column titled “Astronauts cool to global warming” by right-wing columnist Deroy Murdock has been making the rounds of editorial pages. Murdock’s column is filled with ad hominem attacks on actual climate realists (those who agree that there’s an overwhelming amount of scientific data supporting human-driven climate disruption), straw men, red herrings, appeals to emotion, and more. Essentially, the column is nearly 700 words of fact free inflammatory language and logical fallacies.
But since Murdock’s column came out a couple of weeks after the original media flurry had subsided, there are few if any responses to the column. Instead of writing a massive post debunking the legions of fallacies and factual deficiencies in Murdock’s column, I’ll simply point the reader to my earlier post on the letter that inspired Murdock’s screed: Serious errors and shortcomings void climate letter by 49 former NASA employees.
 Part four of a series.
On May 3, 2012, the president of The Heartland Institute Joseph Bast wrote an essay originally titled “Our Billboards” to accompany the Chicago billboard that inaccurately suggested actual climate realists (those who accept the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting human-driven climate disruption) were the same as the terrorist Ted Kaczynski. The essay, since moved from the website of the Heartland-organized seventh International Climate Change Conference to the main Heartland website and renamed, contained multiple dishonest claims and examples of both Heartland’s and Bast’s hypocrisy. It also contained a great many examples of distortion and deception, both large and small. Three significant examples of this will be addressed in this article, namely the claim that global warming “believers” are a “radical fringe,” that two published climate disruption consensus studies are supposedly meaningless, and that claims of a general scientific consensus on climate disruption are all wrong. Full story »
Update 5/15/2012: On either May 13th or 14th, The Heartland Institute moved the “Our Billboards” essay and an associated press release from the website associated with Heartland’s seventh International Climate Change Conference to the Press Releases portion of the main Heartland website. The essay was also renamed from “Our Billboards” to “‘Do You Still Believe in Global Warming?’ Billboards hit Chicago.” In addition, both documents have been backdated to May 3rd and 4th, the dates when they were published at their original home. The original link remains in the original post below, but the new links have been added here: “Our Billboards” essay and the billboard take-down press release.. In addition, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been identified as the author of the essay.
Part three of a series.
When The Heartland Institute launched their perverse billboard comparing climate realists to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, they published an accompanying essay titled Our Billboards.” The essay continues their long history of dishonesty by repeating well-known errors as if they were true. In the process, Heartland demonstrates that they are being dishonest about Climategate, about the state of climate science and the IPCC, and even about Ted Kaczynski’s own views about human-driven climate disruption. Full story »
Update 5/15/2012: On either May 13th or 14th, The Heartland Institute moved the “Our Billboards” essay and an associated press release from the website associated with Heartland’s seventh International Climate Change Conference to the Press Releases portion of the main Heartland website. The essay was also renamed from “Our Billboards” to “‘Do You Still Believe in Global Warming?’ Billboards hit Chicago.” In addition, both documents have been backdated to May 3rd and 4th, the dates when they were published at their original home. The original link remains in the original post below, but the new links have been added here: “Our Billboards” essay and the billboard take-down press release.. In addition, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been identified as the author of the essay.
Part two of a series.
Since The Heartland Institute came to the attention of Scholars & Rogues in early 2010, S&R has documented a pattern of double standards and institutional hypocrisy in Heartland’s activities. While the Heartland’s billboard advertisement comparing climate realists to terrorist Ted Kaczynski is perverse on its own, an essay explaining Heartland’s rationale is worse, albeit less obvious. That essay, titled “Our Billboards”, continues Heartland’s long history of hypocrisy. Full story »
Update 5/15/2012: On either May 13th or 14th, The Heartland Institute moved the “Our Billboards” essay and an associated press release from the website associated with Heartland’s seventh International Climate Change Conference to the Press Releases portion of the main Heartland website. The essay was also renamed from “Our Billboards” to “‘Do You Still Believe in Global Warming?’ Billboards hit Chicago.” In addition, both documents have been backdated to May 3rd and 4th, the dates when they were published at their original home. The original link remains in the original post below, but the new links have been added here: “Our Billboards” essay and the billboard take-down press release.. In addition, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been identified as the author of the essay.
Part one of a series
On Thursday, May 3, The Heartland Institute ran a digital billboard advertisement featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski that implied climate realists who accept the reality of human-driven global warming are terrorists. According to their explanation of the billboards, Heartland planned on comparing climate realists to dictator Fidel Castro, lunatic Charles Manson, and possibly Osama bin Laden. But by late Friday, a backlash from Heartland’s critics, allies, and onetime supporters had forced The Heartland Institute to remove the advertisement from the billboard. Full story »
 On April 29, a paper about how wind farms affect surface temperatures was published online by the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors of the paper found that wind farms increase the nighttime surface temperature within and immediately downwind of the wind farm because the turbines mix up cold surface air with warmer air from up higher off the ground. What the authors did not find, however, was that wind farms were having any global effect on climate disruption. But if you only read articles and blogs from Forbes, Fox News, The Star Ledger, the UK’s Daily Mail, The National Review‘s Planet Gore blog, The Free Republic, etc., you’d never know that.
In fact, if those were your only sources of information, you’d believe that the paper was all about how wind farms were yet another cause of global warming, when in fact it says nothing of the sort. Full story »
 On March 28, 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts, scientists, engineers, and administrators sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. The letter requested that NASA in general and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in particular stop publishing the scientific conclusions about the human-driven causes of global climate disruption. The letter was filled with no less than six serious errors regarding the science, data, and facts of climate science. The errors, in turn, exposed that the signers had confused their fame and/or their expertise in unrelated fields with expertise in climate science. And in response, NASA’s chief scientist politely suggested that the letter’s authors and signers should publish any contrary hypotheses and data in peer-reviewed scientific journals instead of trying to censor the publication of scientific conclusions from NASA climate scientists. Full story »
 To read other articles in this series, click here.
There are people who say that heavy snowfall means that human-caused climate disruption must be wrong. This is a misunderstanding on their part. Fortunately, it’s quite simple to correct the misunderstanding.
You can live nearly anywhere and have personal experience of how hotter air has more water vapor in it. It always feels much more humid when it’s hot than when it’s cool. My personal experience with this was visiting Connecticut in late August, when it was 95 degrees out with unbearable humidity.
It’s also the case in the winter. There’s a reason why the Front Range of Colorado (where I live) gets more snow from an upslope flow than from any other weather condition – the warm air from the Gulf of Mexico has a lot of water vapor in it, and when that air cools down as it’s forced to higher (and colder) elevations by the Rocky Mountains, the excess water vapor freezes and falls as snow. Full story »
 I just love serendipity.
Seemingly unrelated events: For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been wracking my brains over my next post on the subject of critical thinking. In email a while back, I had an exchange with someone over the importance of identifying the actual issues. Regarding recent posts at Scholars & Rogues, I’ve been on the brink of reply but left grasping at some inchoate…something. There was a word. Right there. At the tips of my tongue and fingers. And it was gone, along with the sense or structure of anything I might add. Then tonight it hit me. I searched. As luck would have it, this gold nugget from almost exactly five years ago popped up, only to reveal itself as perhaps the most generally relevant thing I’ve read in a fair while.
First Chapter: Framing the Debate by Jeffrey Feldman Full story »
 Earlier this morning Chris offered up a post entitled “Why are environmentalists missing a mild-weather opportunity?” It raises a pragmatic point about how the climate “debate” plays out in the public sphere and is well worth a read. Go ahead – I’ll wait.
Predictably – and by “predictably,” I mean that last night I e-mailed our climate guru, Brian Angliss, and said “when Chris’s post lands, here’s what’s going to happen,” and it has played out as though I had scripted it; the denialists have jumped on the post in an attempt to cast Chris and the rest of the S&R staff as “hypocrites.” One prominent anti-science type wants you to believe that the message is “we know weather isn’t climate, but let’s lie to people anyway!”
Like I say, as predicted.
The truth is that Chris’s post is part of a larger context. Full story »
 [Update When I corrected the number of documents that Heartland authenticated on March 15 from eight to seven, I missed a few other places where minor corrections and updates were needed. I've updated this first section to make it clearer that Heartland authenticated the seven internal documents that were published.
See also the 3/19/12 Editor's Note at the bottom of the post.]
Today is March 16. 31 days ago, on Valentine’s Day, eight seven internal Heartland Institute documents that revealed the Institute’s 2012 budget, 2012 and 2011 donors, and their plans for climate disinformation for the coming year, were published without permission. 21 days ago, Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey, ranking member on the House Committee on Natural Resources, gave Joseph Bast of The Heartland Institute a deadline of today to authenticate those eight seven documents.
[Correction: When this post was written, Heartland's response to Markey had not yet been published. However, Heartland did respond to Markey's requests. The following section has been updated accordingly.]
Bast and The Heartland Institute refused to comply with Markey’s request and deadline. As such, we can now assume that Heartland’s silence means that
On March 15, Bast and The Heartland Institute responded to Markey’s request. Their response confirms that:
- the seven internal documents are authentic;
- those documents are accurate and correctly describe the subjects contained within the documents; and
- those documents have not been changed since they were obtained and published.
Full story »
 Figure 1 – The carbon cycle Update: To read other articles in this series, click here.
Over the last few decades, scientists have learned a lot about how life interacts with the air, land, and sea. And in the process, they’ve made observations that have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the increasing carbon dioxide in the air is from people burning coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
So how did the scientists put together all the pieces to make a complete conclusion? They started with an understanding of how plants use carbon during photosynthesis. That knowledge showed that the increased carbon dioxide in the air was from plants. Then they formulated some guesses as to where that much plant-based carbon dioxide could come from and, by process of elimination and careful accounting, determined that the source was human consumption of fossil fuels. Full story »
It’s now been 17 days since confidential Heartland Institute documents describing the Institute’s budget and fund raising plan for 2012 were published on the web. In that time, Heartland has steadfastly refused to authenticate the content of the published documents even as they have implied the documents’ authenticity with email screen captures and multiple claims that the documents were stolen. It’s difficult to steal a document from someone if they’re not in possession of the document in the first place, after all.
Over the last 17 days, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been very busy, what with all the emails, interviews, blog posts, and detailed analyses of allegedly fabricated documents. So why hasn’t he officially acknowledged the authenticity of the Heartland documents? Has he simply been too distracted by begging for donations and threatening journalists to execute on his responsibilities as the head of The Heartland Institute? Full story »
 On February 24, 10 days after multiple internal documents from a Heartland Institute Board meeting were published on the web, The Heartland Institute posted redacted screen captures of some of the emails that had been sent to Peter Gleick’s spoofed email address. These emails show that there are some discrepancies between the files Heartland transmitted and those that were later published. The emails also show how easy it was for Gleick to impersonate a member of Heartland’s Board. Full story »
On February 24, The Heartland Institute published a press release from Heartland’s president Joseph Bast announcing that they’d published screen captures of several emails. While I’ll have more to say about the emails themselves in the next day or so, I wanted to briefly focus on a different point.
Toward the end of the release, Bast writes
We repeat our request that the fake climate change strategy memo be removed from Web sites and blogs such as DeSmog Blog, Think Progress, and the Huffington Post, along with documents that were stolen from Heartland. It is the ethical thing to do. [emphasis added]
Given The Heartland Institute’s history of unethical behavior, calling on others to behave ethically is the height of chutzpah. Full story »
 As of three days ago, The Heartland Institute began delivering letters/emails to bloggers and journalists who reported on the confidential Heartland documents that were published on Valentine’s Day. The letters demanded that any copies of Heartland’s internal documents be deleted, all comments on the contents of those emails be purged, and full retractions be issued, under threat of legal action.
Last night, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, admitted on the Huffington Post that he was the anonymous source for those documents and that he’d claimed to be someone else to get them, in an attempt to verify information that was leaked to him from someone unknown via postal service mail. Gleick wrote that his behavior constituted a “serious lapse of [his] own professional judgment and ethics.”
The admission of responsibility by Gleick – taking responsibility for his actions and owning up to an ethical failure – draws a sharp contrast to Heartland’s own lack of ethics and history of misrepresentation, deception, and dishonesty. Full story »
On Valentine’s Day, someone obtained a number of internal documents from the Heartland Institute including IRS records from 2010, the agenda and meeting minutes from the January 17 board meeting, and proposed 2012 fundraising plan, among others. On the 15th, Heartland claimed that these documents had been stolen and that one was a fabrication, and they announced plans to “pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation.” Earlier today, Greg Laden posted the threatening email he received on his blog, and Heartland’s demands are as follows:
[W]e respectfully demand: (1) that you remove both the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents from your web site; (2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (3) that you remove from your web site any and all quotations from the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings; and (5) that you remove all such documents from your server.
Brendan DeMelle of DeSmogBlog.com was sent a similar email which is posted online as well. Full story »
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