Exclusive footage as the last of Heartland's donors reconsider their position
Enough of Nazis already ? Time to watch Lee Camp's new Moment of Clarity on the way the world really is . It is Cool.
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Showing posts with label Heartland Institute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heartland Institute. Show all posts
Monty turns the Unabomber ads Upside-down
"Is there one rule for upholders of the climate orthodoxy and another for dissenters?" asks blogger Andrew Montford. Since Monty routinely deletes any comment I post on his blog and even attempts to block me from viewing it I'll have to offer my answer here.
Monty's gripe today is that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is a climate denier. No, to be more precise Monty's gripe is that Graham Readfearn's blog supporting the consensus has noted Breivik's manifesto actually cites the work of Lord Christopher Monckton, Alex Jones and Steve McIntyre and echoes the beliefs of many climate change deniers. Whilst what Graham Readfearn writes in DeSmogBlog happens to be perfectly true Monty isn't shy to argue for it to be censored.
This is of course in response to, and to detract from, Heartland's notorious Unabomber ads splashed over the Eisenhower Expressway Illinois.
But there are four important differences between Readfearn's commentary and Heartland's ads which have passed Montford by:
Advertising in a public context requires standards of decency, half the story here is how Heartland lack that. The other half is not the overlap between a mass murderer's views and Montford's; it's Montford's demand that other bloggers should recoil from noting that.
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Monty's gripe today is that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is a climate denier. No, to be more precise Monty's gripe is that Graham Readfearn's blog supporting the consensus has noted Breivik's manifesto actually cites the work of Lord Christopher Monckton, Alex Jones and Steve McIntyre and echoes the beliefs of many climate change deniers. Whilst what Graham Readfearn writes in DeSmogBlog happens to be perfectly true Monty isn't shy to argue for it to be censored.
This is of course in response to, and to detract from, Heartland's notorious Unabomber ads splashed over the Eisenhower Expressway Illinois.
But there are four important differences between Readfearn's commentary and Heartland's ads which have passed Montford by:
- The Breivik story is contemporary. The minutiae of his 'personality' are being picked over by the mass media. Whereas the Unabomber has been on the inside of a Federal Penitentiary for 16 years now.
- Breivik's climate denial leanings are co-incidental to his crimes . Readfearn is careful not to imply that a trait of mass murder is to be on the wrong side of the climate debate.
- By contrast Heartland make exactly that claim in their commentary . The ads put forward no science whatsoever so they can't really be called skepticism. Heartland say in their press release: "The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen"
- The Unabomber ad intends to make an empirical argument to the public, whereas this particular blogpost by Readfearn is largely preaching to the choir and is confined to commentary not scientific argument.
Advertising in a public context requires standards of decency, half the story here is how Heartland lack that. The other half is not the overlap between a mass murderer's views and Montford's; it's Montford's demand that other bloggers should recoil from noting that.
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Letting The Think Tanks Do The Thinking
First out of the traps when the Heartland docs were posted online was new darling of the skept-o-sphere Megan McArdle. Indeed the Washington D.C. based hack has penned 9732 words on the Heartland document dump , and not a single one of them actually examining the shady antics of Heartland exposed in the documents.
In February Megan claimed "I don't blog about the science" and then went on to assert that "the science is so uncertain". Earth to Megan: scientists quantify their uncertainty, that is part of science, so the bald statement "the science is so uncertain" would disqualify her claim not to blog about the science. But that isn't the only absurdity in Megan's stance
"I not only believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but also support stiff carbon or source fuels taxes in order to combat it." MEGAN MCARDLE FEB 16th
"I've basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels " MEGAN MCARDLE Feb 28th
Okay let's forgive the management speak. What kind of ardent advocate of carbon taxes picks this likely trio as experts on anthropogenic global warming?
Ron Bailey holds a degree in philosophy and economics, he is the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse published by the Cato Institute . Jonathan Adler worked for the Competitive Enterprise Institute for nine years,and before that was an intern at Cato , his area of expertise - Law. Pat Michaels the only actual scientist amongst Megan's 'experts' needs no introduction, oh, he's a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute . So all three of them have close ties to think tanks, all three of them have ties to the Cato Institute.
So Megan's claim to believe in global warming can be likened to supporting Arsenal, but having all your favourite players from Spurs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Megan has outsourced her rationale to the Think Tanks.
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In February Megan claimed "I don't blog about the science" and then went on to assert that "the science is so uncertain". Earth to Megan: scientists quantify their uncertainty, that is part of science, so the bald statement "the science is so uncertain" would disqualify her claim not to blog about the science. But that isn't the only absurdity in Megan's stance
"I not only believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but also support stiff carbon or source fuels taxes in order to combat it." MEGAN MCARDLE FEB 16th
Okay let's forgive the management speak. What kind of ardent advocate of carbon taxes picks this likely trio as experts on anthropogenic global warming?
Ron Bailey holds a degree in philosophy and economics, he is the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse published by the Cato Institute . Jonathan Adler worked for the Competitive Enterprise Institute for nine years,and before that was an intern at Cato , his area of expertise - Law. Pat Michaels the only actual scientist amongst Megan's 'experts' needs no introduction, oh, he's a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute . So all three of them have close ties to think tanks, all three of them have ties to the Cato Institute.
So Megan's claim to believe in global warming can be likened to supporting Arsenal, but having all your favourite players from Spurs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Megan has outsourced her rationale to the Think Tanks.
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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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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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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'
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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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 .
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.
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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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What are Fox Expert's Scientific Qualifications?
There's not much I can add to this excellent little video , but I notice that Fair and Balanced Fox calls on Chris Horner's expert opinion (at about 3 mins in). He has a Juris Doctorate, which sounds fancy but it's a legal qualification. I wonder what his scientific qualifications are.
Dear Dr Horner,
I am a Wikipedia and Sourcewatch editor and was wondering if you could supply me with a little information about yourself that is relevant to our profiles of you.
What are your scientific qualifications? Which Institutions awarded them, when?
I’ve viewed both your Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute profile pages and neither of them list any scientific qualifications at all. Your frequent contributions to Fox News on such subjects as global warming would, I suggest, carry more weight if your scientific qualifications could be added to the context of what you have to tell us.
Salutations and thanks in advance,
Hengist McStone
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