Posts tagged as:

climategate

On Fakegate, Science and Ideology

To me, science is a process of continuous discovery.  So when casted alongside of ideology let alone political ideology it doesn’t exactly pass the smell test. Science ebbs and flows with new ideas, innovation, technology, intellect, verve and excitement, and passionate curiosity.   It requires an openness of mind and heart and debate is its most trusted ally.

Among The Heartland Institutes’ many recent disappoints is any prominence that Peter Gleick (and ostensively his supporters and sympathizers) once received as a thoughtful scientist(s) will be forever tainted.  More is the pity, thoughtful debate took a nose dive.

Heartland values rigorous and honest debate. Gleick’s action clearly did not demonstrate a retaliatory frustration in opposing scientifically challenging literature rather it promulgated a vulgar immaturity.

Too often organizations are attacked for preserving the privacy of its donors, and crying foul over anonymity is nothing more than a “Red Herring” when either fearing or ignoring debate, and only serves to reduce the space where legitimate refuting science can be heard from both sides of the issue.

[click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Fakegate versus Climategate

Peter Gleick, disgraced by Fakegate

Peter Gleick, disgraced by his own actions in Fakegate

On February 14, environmental groups and sympathetic journalists reported that confidential documents were stolen from The Heartland Institute. It soon became apparent that one of the documents, a supposed memo describing Heartland’s communication strategy on climate change, was a fake document, leading British journalist James Delingpole to label the affair “Fakegate.”

On February 20, Peter Gleick made a partial confession, saying he stole the documents but claiming he received the fraudulent emo “in the mail” from an anonymous source. An international search is underway to identify the true author of the fraudulent memo.

Surprisingly, Gleick has defenders. Those willing to use their real names on blogs and in comments to articles include James Garvey, Tyler Hamilton, Mark Alan Hewitt, John Horgan, Greg Laden, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patrick Lockerby, and Michael Tobis. For a summary of their comments, see Donna Laframboise’s excellent post.

Several of Gleick’s apologists say Heartland has no right to cry foul, since Climate Change Weekly, Environment & Climate News, and other Heartland publications have reported extensively on the two Climategate scandals.

“I still can’t get over how hypocritical Heartland Institute is being about this, given how it delighted in seeing climate scientists’ e-mails hacked in the 2009 ‘Climategate’ non-scandal,” wrote one Gleick partisan, Tyler Hamilton, at theenergycollective.

While Fakegate and Climategate have some things in common – most obviously, both expose the moral and intellectual corruption of the global warming movement – there are also important differences that clear Heartland of any claims of hypocrisy. Those differences include:

[click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Understanding Climate Science and Why You are Being Deceived

When we discuss global warming and its effect on the planet, we have past and present temperature and carbon dioxide measurements to contend with. To predict the future we need to rely upon global climate models(GCM) which are monstrous computer programs that are used to predict the future. These programs, I believe there are now 22 in existence, require the largest computers to do the calculations.

None of them can calculate the correct temperature distribution in the upper atmosphere across the earth. They all calculate a giant hot spot from about the range 30 degrees S to 30 degrees N. All experimental data confirms this does not exist. The GCMs don’t work and will never work because we can not predict what the sun will do. I think the GCMs leave out the sun as having influence on future climate.

A Forbes December 1, 2011 article by Peter Ferrera discussing the results of the Berkeley examination of global temperatures and the conclusions that can be made. He also looks at climate models and their failure to show the same temperature distributions that are measured. This is a good summary of experimental temperature measurements world wide and their showing burning fossil fuels has no effect on climate.

[click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Heartland Institute Mentioned in Climategate Emails, Rounds 1 and 2 (Part 1)

And we couldn’t be prouder. The Heartland Institute, which has hosted six international conferences on climate change since 2008, has gotten under the skin of some who have now been exposed by Climategate of rigging data, hiding declines, and blacklisting peers who don’t toe the line of catastrophic orthodoxy.

This new search engine at EcoWho of the Climategate emails  HT: Jo Nova and Anthony Watts), shows five mentions of Heartland in the scandalous email threads. Let’s take them in order …

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Very Dark Side of Global Warming Activism

[NOTE: Listen to me talk with the authors of this book on "Extension 720" on WGN in Chicago with Milt Rosenberg in the audio player embedded at the bottom of this post.]

The book blurb for a new book called The New Universe and the Human Future urges humankind to gather together to write a new, globally-unifying story of the universe and our place in it, an endeavor the authors say is enabled by advancements in a branch of astrophysical science called cosmology.

Intriguing, I thought, though a bit vague. So I bought the book, read it, and read up on the co-authors.

As it turns out, there is a dark side, a very dark side, to the story the co-authors urge upon us.

[click to continue…]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

{ 2 comments }

You Call This ‘Consensus’ on Climate Change?

 

Contrary to what you read repeatedly in daily newspapers or hear on television, most scientists do not believe there is a “scientific consensus” that man-made climate change (often labeled anthropogenic global warming, or AGW) is or will be a catastrophe. Unfortunately, the old/mainstream/dead media will be the last folks to acknowledge this, so people who dispute the “consensus” will continue to be slandered and abused for years to come.

It is important to distinguish between the statement, which is true, that there is no scientific consensus that AGW is or will be a catastrophe, and the also-true claims that the climate is changing (of course it is, it is always changing) and that most scientists believe there may be a human impact on climate (our emissions and alterations of the landscape are surely having an impact, though they are often local or regional (like heat islands) and small relative to natural variation).

[click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

Al Gore’s Rolling Stone Rant is Devoid of Facts to Back his Panic

As I did the other day, Heartland friend and Q&O blogger Bruce McQuain saw Al Gore’s panicked and juvenile rant in Rolling Stone about how the world has moved on from his obsession and just couldn’t not comment.

Bruce observes:

What is conspicuously missing from the rant are any facts.  Other than a few of the same old assertions, and an attempt to tie weather events into his alarmism, he offers absolutely nothing new in the way of science nor does he even attempt to rebut the damning reports that have surfaced since “An Inconvenient Truth” and badly discredited his and other alarmist’s credibility.

A good addition to the debate — which we will be picking up at Heartland’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in DC on Thursday and Friday. Bruce will be there. If you can’t make it, watch it live here.

And if you can’t do either, read all of Bruce’s post.

(Follow Heartland’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change on Twitter: #ICCC6)

{ 0 comments }

Al Gore Calls Opponents ‘Pseudoscientists’; So Come Prove It, Big Guy

Al Gore’s timing is perfect. We here at The Heartland Institute are just now finishing off the last preparations for our Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC, June 30 and July 1. (It’s still not too late to register, and you can also check out the live-stream).

And, wouldn’t you know it! Al Gore emerges from his palatial, energy-sucking estate for a media blitz (here, here, and here) in which he peddles his usual hokum: ”If you don’t do what I say … we’re all doomed. DOOMED, I say!!! Why won’t you LISTEN TO ME!!! YOU FOOOOOOLS!!!!” (Blah, blah, blah … and paraphrasing)

We couldn’t ask for a more timely example of why we put on these conferences. Thanks, Al. By the way, the invitation for you to speak and/or debate at our climate conference still stands — if you’re up for it. And the offer is real.

[click to continue…]

{ 2 comments }

Reality: Global Warming Alarmists Left Out in the Cold

When the term “global warming” is bandied about the table in campaign debates and in the mass media, there is the implication that the world is, to some degree, getting warmer.

But while the upcoming United Nations climate negotiations strive to address what The Guardian in the UK calls a “record leap” in greenhouse gas emissions, a recent article by James M. Taylor at Forbes.com points out that there has been no corresponding rise in global temperatures over the last decade.

Most powerfully, global temperature trends during the twentieth century sharply defied atmospheric carbon dioxide trends. More than half of the warming during the twentieth century occurred prior to the post-World War II economic boom, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions rose minimally during this time. Between 1945 and 1977, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels jumped rapidly, yet global temperatures declined. Only during the last quarter of the century was there an appreciable correlation between greenhouse gas trends and global temperature trends. But that brief correlation has clearly disappeared this century.

Taylor goes on to dispute a principal tenet of alarmist dogma — a reliance on the assertion that the Earth is highly sensitive to minute changes (like the amount of moist air) in atmospheric gases. This, the crux of the alarmist doctrine, is the subject of much dispute within the scientific community, not to mention its conflict with the climate conditions of the real-world.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Global Warming Charlatans Feel the Heat

[Editor: Don't miss The Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC July 30 - July 1. Register here, media and bloggers get free admission.]

The University of Virginia, after vigorously resisting a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request for data related to the emails of Michael Mann, was the subject of a court order to make them available. While global warming is known worldwide for its claim that manmade warming would doom the Earth, the names and machinations behind the fraud are far less well known.

Mann, a climatologist, was part of a relatively small clique of charlatans who, working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), conjured up all manner of “proof” that the Earth was on dangerous trajectory, heating up. Mann invented the “hockey stick” graph that demonstrated this bit of climate magic.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries