Ethical conundrums confound Monty

The Gleick affair continues to bound around the blogosphere. James Garvey in the Grauniad asks whether Gleick's ethical lapse could be offset by the positives from exposing Heartland's dirty dealings.  I'm circumspect because we really need to see how climate scientists view this. But Andrew Montford is not so shy, boldly denouncing it as  Garvey's "OK to lie" article.

When I point out to Monty that Garvey said nothing of the sort Monty retreats to note that Garvey actually said 'it depends'

Well if Monty cannot see the difference between the two positions I'm really not sure he is cut out for ethical punditry. Of course the self styled Bishop is a newbie to ethical questions . Despite squeezing the word 'climategate' onto the subtitle of his book nowhere in the Hockey Stick Illusion did Andrew Montford examine the ethics of drawing conclusions from hacked material nor criticize the hacker.


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Email exchange between myself and Harold Ambler

For clarity here is the exact correspondence between myself and Harold Ambler :

Subject :  A couple of questions raised by your book

Hi Harold, Ive read the first chapter of your book (in PDF form), very interesting. I was intrigued by your statement about Antarctica that "the record maximum value for the ice occurred in 2007." Please could you tell me where did this fact come from? What do you mean by value, coverage or volume or some other measure ?

You also tell us that "One day, anywhere from ten years from now to 10,000 years from now, the inevitable slide back into full glaciation will occur" . Where does the estimate that glaciation could start as soon as 'ten years from now' originate ?

Salutations

Hengist McStone

Subject Re:  A couple of questions raised by your book

 Dear Sir,

You have not read the first chapter of my book. You have read a chapter of my book, the fourth.

Neither of these facts is controversial or difficult to locate. In this one instance I have done your homework for you, but will decline future requests.

Thank you,

Harold Ambler

for Antarctic sea ice:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png

NSIDC shows same thing

for length of interglacials, there many sources, but the most widely cited one is

Petit et al. 1999

Did Heartland Insider write the accompanying email?

How come Keith Kloor's account of how the Heartland documents came to be made public is at odds with every other account?

The story was broken on Valentine's Day by Brendan DeMelle of DeSmogBlog who wrote "documents obtained by DeSmogBlog expose the heart of the climate denial machine".  DeMelle also writes "We are releasing the entire trove of documents now" Later that day Richard Littlemore (also of DeSmogBlog) wrote a post saying that the anonymous source of the documents used the pseudonym Heartland Insider. DeSmogBlog host the documents. The story was picked up by the fringes of the MSM mostly crediting DeSmogBlog , I have yet to see an MSM account which quibbles that DeSmogBlog broke the story, exclusively.

Keith Kloor breaks the story on his blog the following day after it had already garnered some MSM coverage and he speculates that the Heartland Insider was 'a recently fired employee or someone still there [..] not feeling a lot of love for [Heartland President] Bast'. This is Kloor's account of what happened next :

'The whistleblower/insider sent an email around to a bunch of folks yesterday, which got forwarded to me. While the documents have been disseminated on the internet, nobody reporting on this appears to have mentioned the accompanying email' 

Dear Friends (15 of you):

In the interest of transparency, I think you should see these files from the Heartland Institute. Look especially at the 2012 fundraising and budget documents, the information about donors, and compare to the 2010 990 tax form. But other things might also interest or intrigue you. This is all I have. And this email account will be removed after I send.

There's no header information or metadata. We don't even know who the 15 original recipients of that email are. We do know that Kloor was not one of them.  We don't know whether this email contained attachments or links to the docs. And we don't know when this email was originally sent to it's original recipients. When pressed to reveal more his response is "Alas, as I mentioned in my post, just the email itself was forwarded to me. And because I’m at a conference, I don’t have the capacity to dig into this."

Alas without seeing the email on Keith Kloor's hard drive neither do we.

I should caution that it's plausible that Kloor's and DeSmogBlog's accounts simply differ by omission in which case these differing accounts show a wide gulf between what each blogger feels relevant. The email might have been from Heartland Insider, but it could equally be from someone drawing attention to what he/she had read on DeSmogBlog.

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Heartland . Astroturfing ?

Taken a peek at the Heartland documents yet? Of course you have.

The most interesting of the Heartland documents appears to be the Fundraisng Plan which mentions Major Projects.  Page 19 appears to indicate an astroturfing operation .

"Heartland has been one of the most outspoken defenders of fracking in the U.S., using
Environment & Climate News, its Web sites, and its PR and GR operations to comment repeated on the issue and reach large audiences. "

The document goes on to state that Heartland plans to raise money from businesses with an interest in fracking in 2012.

We also learn in this document about the funding of Anthony Watts weather station project and numerous references to the Anonymous Donor. Heartland's ambition to get their curriculum for pseudoscience into schools through the work of Dr David Wojick, is discussed at some length.  So the question 'what shall we tell the children?' has already been asked and answered for us by right wing U.S. think tanks.

• Link to DeSmog Blog post by Richard Littlemore exposing the story
• Link to DeSmog Blog post by Richard Littlemore confirming Heartland emailed these documents
• Link to Heartland's IRS 990 form hosted by DeSmog Blog
• Link to the Heartland Fundraising Plan PDF
• Link to Fake Science, Fakexperts, Funny Finances Free of Tax by Dr. John Mashey

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The Ice Age Cometh warns pseudoscience book (without supporting facts)

I've asked the author of a new book to substantiate a couple of his claims (which can be found in this PDF). Here's his bad tempered reply :

Dear Sir,
You have not read the first chapter of my book. You have read a chapter of my book, the fourth.
Neither of these facts is controversial or difficult to locate.In this one instance I have done your homework for you, but will decline future requests.
Thank you, 
Harold Ambler

Harold's quip that he's done my homework for me doesn't quite hit home. A claim that runs contrary to conventional wisdom needs to be supported by the author, so discovery of that support is Harold's homework not mine.  And I have to suggest Harold's indication that he will decline future requests is not irritability, it's because Harold is unable to support all his claims. And Harold knows it.

So let's look at how he supports his claims. I wrote to Harold "I was intrigued by your statement about Antarctica that "the record maximum value for the ice occurred in 2007." Please could you tell me where did this fact come from? What do you mean by value, coverage or volume or some other measure ?" And his response is to cite this graph.  I note that Skeptical Science has an answer to that point, but let's move on.

Harold's book also contains these words  "One day, anywhere from ten years from now to 10,000 years from now, the inevitable slide back into full glaciation will occur"  I asked Harold how he arrived at his estimate that the next ice age could could be due as soon as 'ten years from now' ?  His response is Petit et al. 1999.  From the abstract of Petit we can see that it is a reading of the Vostok Ice Core, observational, not predictive. Petit et al 1999 does not support Ambler's assertion that the next ice age could begin as soon as ten years from now.

This is exactly what skeptics should be looking for. Climate change alarmism, based on misrepresentation of science.  

Earth to Harold : You're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts.

I should add that so called skeptics like Watts and Montford have both puffed Harold's book lending credence to pseudoscience again. And unsupported pseudoscience at that.

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You've heard of fast food now it's fast ethics.

I normally steer clear of animal welfare issues but McDonald's are always a deserving target of anybody's ire.

McDonalds are stopping the use of gestation stalls have asked suppliers to outline their plans to phase out the use of sow gestation stalls (quite beastly cages for pregnant sows if you must know).  They tell us so in a press release here.

The take home point here is that gestation stalls were fine for McDonald's until now. But the moment McDonalds express concern about gestation stalls is the moment they garner good publicity for themselves. Before they've actually changed anything. This isn't a corporation with a conscience it's a corporation with a very clever PR strategy. It's a strategy worth emulating by making a blogpost expressing my instant distaste for McDonalds. 

H/t Grist


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First denialist review of Mann - published without actually reading it

Publication of Dr Michael Mann's long awaited new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines sends the deny-o-sphere into a spin of kneejerk punditry. First out of the traps is blogger Tom Nelson who only manages to blog that a keyword search on Kindle yielded hits for "denier" "Morano" "McIntyre" and "Watts".Yup Tom, it's a book, got words in it.

Quite how that constitutes a review is anyone's guess. But it's good enough for Watts Up With That who then urge readers not to review the book without reading it. But Anthony - that's precisely what Tom has just done.

This nonsense is continuing to barrel round the echo chamber with multiple negative reviews on Amazon from the same reviewer. Contrary to Amazon rules. A practice this blog notes climate deniers have form on.

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Wow : The Night Sky in the Atacama

An Astronomer's Paradise from Babak Tafreshi on Vimeo.

H/t Grist

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Where are the skeptics ?

A stage magician cuts his assistant in half.  A skeptic would reason that some kind of visual trick is at work, that the girl has not really been chopped in two.

The climate blog-o-sphere is quite different though.  Andrew Montford makes a Freedom of Information request to the Met Office asking for Sir John Houghton's emails relating to AR3. The respondent answers that they do not hold any such emails. Monty then writes a blogpost concluding "it appears that Sir John has deleted historic records".

Observation nothing - conclusion scandal.

I've tried asking "How can you be sure that he holds emails relating to AR3 ?" Needless to say Monty meets that line of questioning with a stony silence.


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