Author archive
It’s been a good week in the federal courts for the Obama Administration.
On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency – and against a legion of state Attorneys General and industry groups – on the EPA’s greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding. The states and industry groups had asked the appeals court to overturn the Endangerment Finding based on a host of arguments ranging from “there’s too much uncertainty in the science” to “the EPA abused its authority” to “the EPA misread the Clean Air Act.” The court disagreed, emphatically and occasionally sardonically, and dismissed every one of 26 separate petitions that the various states and industry groups had filed. S&R is analyzing the 82 page opinion in detail and will be publishing several posts about it in the coming weeks.
And today, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. Full story »
 That’s the takeaway from a NYTimes Green blog post today. The blog reports that Dr. Craig Allen, a USGS research ecologist, says fire pattern has changed from frequent and large ground fires to infrequent crown fires that utterly destroy the landscape. And climate disruption plus natural climate cycles are combining in such a way that grasses and shrubs are replacing the forests.
In related news, the InciWeb site (the interagency site that collects wildfire information in one place to help track and fight wildfires) reports that parts of the High Park fire area near Ft. Collins, CO have been so hot that “mosses and lichens are burning on granite rock.” Full story »
 Following the unauthorized publication of confidential Heartland Institute documents by Peter Gleick on February 14, 2012, Heartland’s president Joseph Bast identified one document that he claimed was forged. Starting on February 16, Heartland employed Protek International, a firm that conducts digital forensic investigations, to investigate whether or not the allegedly fabricated “2012 Climate Strategy” memo (aka the Memo) had been authored at The Heartland Institute. On May 1, 2012, Heartland published Protek’s investigation report and that the report supported Heartland’s claim that the Memo had not been created by anyone at The Heartland Institute.
While Protek’s report does provide some very limited support for that announcement, the short press release goes far beyond what the report actually says. The press release, taglined to Bast but almost certainly written by Heartland’s communications director Jim Lakely, falsely and repeatedly claims that Protek’s investigation points to Peter Gleick as the author of the allegedly fabricated Memo. Full story »
 The Pacific Institute just issued a press release announcing the reinstatement of Peter Gleick to his position of Institute president. Among other things, the press release states
An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute.
According to Nancy Ross, the Pacific Institute’s Director of Communications, the Institute will not be releasing the details of the independent investigation. [update 6/7/2012: Ms. Ross provided additional clarification to S&R this morning, writing that the report would not be released "because it is a confidential personnel matter."] The press release goes on to say that “The Board of Directors accepts Dr. Gleickâs apology for his lapse in judgment.” Full story »
 On May 1, 2012, The Heartland Institute published a digital forensics report from Protek International, a computer and information forensics and security firm based out of Chicago. Heartland hired Protek to investigate whether there was evidence that anyone from Heartland had written the “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” memo (aka the Memo) that Heartland claims was fabricated by Peter Gleick when he falsified his identity in order to acquire and then leak confidential Heartland documents in February, 2012.
As a result of their investigation, Protek concluded that the Memo had not been created on Heartland’s computer system and didn’t exist there or in Heartland’s email system prior to its publication on February 14, 2012. An S&R analysis of Protek’s investigation report finds that this broad conclusion is not supported by the details of Protek’s investigation. Full story »
 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 »
Ever since my family cut the cable, I don’t watch a lot of ads on TV. We watch nearly everything streaming via our Roku these days, and we save a lot of money in the process. But some of the newer series we watch are available only on Hulu+, and that service still has advertisements. I have two main issues with this. First, I pay a monthly fee to watch Hulu+, so I shouldn’t also be forced to watch ads too. Second, Hulu+’s ads play over and over and over again, a problem that Hulu+ shares with the free Pandora service. But everyone once in a while, Hulu+ runs an ad that is not just annoying, but that I find creepy.
Like the following Hulu+ ad for Yakult. 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 »
[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 »
 I have to ask – what mathematical ignoramus came up with the term “partial zero emission vehicle?” Partial means a fraction, and you can’t divide zero by anything without getting zero again. Divide zero in half? You get… zero. How about 10% of zero? Yup, still zero. Divide zero by a million and – it’s a shocker, I know – you still get zero. Divide zero by any number you can think of except zero*, and the answer is zero.
I get that the “Partial Zero Emission Vehicle” is a class of low emission vehicles defined by the state of California. I get that. But that just makes this even scarier. 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 »
|
