It started when a small group of key journalists and investigators received a mysterious package in the mail.
It seems that an anonymous source opened a gmail account, dropped in a zipped file of internal documents from the leading vector of climate denial information, the Heartland Institute, closed the gmail account, and disappeared.
The contents quickly bounced around to a small group of astute observers, and the general consensus after close exam of the files was that they were genuine – although Heartland now has a statement out claiming at least one of the files is a hoax.
One of the first to receive the package was John Mashey, the relentless investigator who helped uncover the plagiarism and distortion that lead to the withdrawal of a key climate denial study last year.
At the present time numerous avenues are being pursued to establish the authenticity of the newly released documents. In a statement, Heartland Institute has stated the following:
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
Mashey has used the release of the new documents to add a final flourish to his most recent investigations, which have now been released online. Mashey’s allegations, relating to Heartland and senior climate denialist scientist Fred Singer, include:
1. Climate denialist Fred Singer committed perjury in his tax filings to the IRS by claiming that Fred Seitz continued to chair Singer’s own tax-protected SEPP for two years after Seitz death in 2008.
2. Singer made other representations in his 990 tax filings that either skirted the rules or, at the very least, let him shelter his own investments from taxation.
3. Singer is a lobbyist, not a scientist (at least, he has not produced any significant work of science in several decades) and is therefore in violation of limits to undeclared lobbying activity.
4. The Heartland Institute has a long-established reputation as an organization dedicated to providing legitimacy to industries that want to confuse the public about science. For example, Heartland’s President Joe Bast has been a leading defender of such things as the “Joe Camel” campaign to encourage children to take up smoking – even while the tobacco industry was funding Heartland’s operations. This was corroborated by the Heartland budget documents which show that both Phillip Morris and Reynolds American continue as Heartland donors.
It would be interesting to offer the Heartland small fish amnesty in exchange for divulging the nature of their assignments from Koch, ExxonMobil, RJR, etc., and make them publicly testify as to their willful knowledge of spreading misinformation and deceit, to apologize to the community of climate scientists, health and cancer scientists, etc. Only then will the denialist madness be threatened. If the current set of Heartland puppets are prosecuted they will simply be replaced with a new set with better internal security and confidentiality agreements.
Obviously, somebody there has pangs of conscience, and a shred of humanity.
It is hilarious to read the very same folks who decried the Climategate leaks as “thefts” deserving criminal prosecution, even though the leaked Climategate documents were all publicly-funded work products (paid for by taxpayers), are now cheering the theft and perhaps forgery of private documents from Heartland.
Hypocrisy, thy name is “warmist.”
Now, if someone would just release Anthony “Seven Years of College Down the Drain” Watts’ college transcript! I’ll bet that Watts’ GPA was somewhere south of “Animal House”…
Fascinating to get a glimpse into the climate denial movement’s strategies and money channels. It’s denialgate!
So, where are these supposedly leaked documents, anyhow?
Inquiring minds want to know.
linked here
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine
Doesn’t seem to work.
You have to compile it first.
What? The desmogblog.com link doesn’t work.
Never mind — too many browser windows open — posted in haste to wrong thread (w/o reading carefully first).
88K for Anthony Watts to do absolutely nothing with the temperature data, and I’ve been giving away my code and results for free!
You call surfacestations.org “absolutely nothing?” That’s almost as silly as calling Anthony Watts “discredited.”
NASA spends $15-20 billion each year. NOAA spends $5-6 billion. Yet somehow nobody in these illustrious institutions can manage to come up with the scratch to do the most basic quality control checks on our surface temperature measurement stations.
Compared to what the taxpayers fork out for those institutions to not do the job, $90,000 is an astonishing bargain.
The problem with the surfacestations project is that the surfacestations team has performed *no* analysis of the temperature data collected from the stations they surveyed.
If the surfacestations effort were serious, here’s what the surfacestations team would have done. They would have computed updated temperature average results as additional stations were surveyed in order to see what impact the siting issues really had on temperature trend estimates. They would have been doing this continually, in “real time” during the station-survey process.
They would have regularly recomputed results for “well-sited” vs. “poorly-sited” stations and compared the long-term trends for the two sets of stations as new station survey results came in.
Had they done that, they would have found that local siting issues have little impact on computed temperature trends. Urban stations that read consistently higher than nearby rural stations will typically produce very similar long-term temperature *trends*. I have confirmed that with my own software — I processed raw data from “well sited” and “poorly sited” temperature stations separately, and got very similar results from both sets.
The bottom line is, a competent programmer/analyst can confirm, with just a few days of work, that siting issues have minimal impact on long-term temperature trend estimates.
The fact that the surfacestations team has in its several *years* of existence failed to perform the *days* of programming/analysis work needed to evaluate siting issues tells me that the surfacestations project is not a serious effort.
I’m disappointed that you apparently don’t know what the purpose of the surfacestations.org project is. Its purpose isn’t to evaluate the temperature data, it is to evaluate the measurement stations!
The surfacestations.org teams examine the stations, one at a time, to determine what the siting issues are. That’s fundamentally important information which simply did not exist prior to the surfacestations.org project. It is impossible to compare well-sited with poorly-sited stations (as you suggest ought to be done) if you have no way of knowing which is which!
NASA GISS couldn’t be troubled to do that hard work. Instead, they used satellite images to get a very rough idea of what areas were urban and what were rural, and then fudged the data accordingly. Of course, that completely ignores the siting issues identified by the surfacestations.org teams.
I look forward to the expansion of the surfacestations.org project internationally. The USA is not the only place where the surface temperature record is adulterated or of dubious quality. For instance:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
And who told you, daveburton, that the most basic quality control checks weren’t being done?
Was it Anthony Watts?
Perhaps you could explain to us why then, after years of bluster, slurs and insinuation about the trustworthiness of the US temperature record from Mr Watts, he found that – and I’m quoting his paper…
“To address such problems, climatologists have developed various methods for detecting discontinuities in time series, characterizing and/or removing various non-climatic biases that affect temperature records in order to obtain homogeneous data and create reliable long‐term time series”
…and…
“The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has recognized the need for a climate monitoring network as free as possible from nonclimatic trends and discontinuities and has developed the United States Climate Reference Network
(USCRN) to fill this need.”
Applying statistical tests to mixtures of good and poor quality data, to try to detect discontinuities and guess at their cause, is all well and good, but it is a poor substitute for actually examining the sources of the errors in the data.
In the computer biz, we have a very old saying: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).
“In the computer biz, we have a very old saying: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).”
Once more daveburton. Lets join the dots shall we.
Who told you that stations aren’t checked?
Can you tell us why it is then, that Anthony has to report that NOAA scientists HAVE created a reliable long term temperature series?
Why do you think NOAA is not showing due diligence in establishing an all new US Climate Reference Network?
I’ve a sceptical nature – I require evidence, not insinuation.
This story stinks to high heaven of sloppy leftist disinformation. For instance, consider this shocking claim:
Among the key documents… are a 100,000 dollar plan to “dissuade teachers from teaching science”…
That’s a lie, a phrase deliberately taken out of context to convey the opposite of its meaning. The proposal was to support the development, by a highly qualified expert, of a 20-module global warming curriculum which tells the truth about the topic, as a counterweight to inaccurate alarmist propaganda. The purpose is dissuade teachers from teaching as settled science that which is actually controversial and uncertain.
No. “Hide the decline” was taken out of context. The whole document from Heartland is there for anyone to see on desmogblog. The intent is clear to me. They want to undermine settled science and claim it is uncertain.
“Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project.
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. … His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. ”
At what point was this taken out of context?
The “settled science” lie, you mean — that certainly deserves to be undermined. Children should be taught what is true, not taught dishonest propaganda from the likes of Al “million degree magma” Gore.
The Climate Movement wants schools to teach lies. That needs to stop.
I can see that you’ve bought in the climate change denial propaganda campaign without giving it the same level of skepticism you give to real climate science.
What if you put your hate for Al Gore aside and just look at the research done by scientists? Compare real research side-by-side with the arguments from the contrarians. How does it stack up?
Science curriculum for public schools should follow standards set by official science organizations not anti-science propaganda machines like the Heartland Institute.
right. lies like evolution, gravity, causation,and physics.
“The purpose is dissuade teachers from teaching as settled science that which is actually controversial and uncertain.”
but why didn’t they say that? its not like a dashed off email that’s taken out of context. its a carefully written policy statement that you can read fully in context.
Now Heartland is saying the the strategy memo is a fake.
“One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. ”
http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-responds-stolen-and-fake-documents
Interesting. It is a rather odd document:
1. It is the only document with no indication given of who it is supposedly to or from (even though it is written in the first person).
2. It is also the only one scanned with an Epson scanner.
3. The embedded metadata indicates that the scan was done just two days ago, and the computer was set to PST: 2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00
That’s odd because Heartland is in Chicago, and none of Heartland’s director’s are in the Pacific time zone, nor even in a State adjacent to the Pacific time zone.
4. Some of the prose is very odd. “Anti-climate?” Who uses that kind of terminology? Nobody on the Right that I’ve ever heard.
“That’s a lie, a phrase deliberately taken out of context to convey the opposite of its meaning.”
Can’t you see the hypocrisy in this statement?
It seems that the Righties don’t like it when the Lefties start to use their own tactics against them and start whinging “It’s not fair!”
That’s not a Rightie tactic. It is, unfortunately, a common tactic from politicians of almost all stripes, though it is more commonly employed by the Left, perhaps because most Lefties feel unconstrained by quaint Christian notions of morality and truthfulness.
It is typical Rightie trait to fail to recognise their own behaviour as that which they deplore when it is employed against them. It was you and your ilk who moved the goalposts and now you cry foul when your opponents start playing by your rules. Wah, wah, wah!
If you understood science you you would know that at this point the basic facts are settled. The only uncertainty is the timing of future tripping points. The $100,000 was to dissuade the teaching of real science. Controversy is only for those who have a non-scientific cognitive framework which precludes their understanding the subject.
Rubbish. The notion of “future tipping points” is wildly speculative, highly controversial, and unsupported by any real-world evidence. The Heartland Institute supports teaching accurate science, not Al Gore’s propaganda.
this is the institution that says second hand smoke is safe, and hybrid cars are dangerous –
http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/23410.pdf
Thanks for the link; it’s excellent. But you need to be careful not to overstate your case. Nobody says that secondhand tobacco smoke (SHS) is a good thing. In fact, the opening sentence in the article you’re talking about is:
“Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is an unpleasant experience for many nonsmokers, and for decades was considered a nuisance.”
But the science tells us that, contrary to popular belief, there’s actually no statistically significant epidemiological support for the supposition that second-hand tobacco smoke exposure causes disease. Which is right.
As my mama the chemist used to say, “The dose makes the poison.”
That doesn’t mean SHS does not ever cause disease. Rather, it means we cannot say whether it does or does not.
It is quite possible that the incidence of disease caused by SHS is non-zero, but simply too low to be detected by studies which achieve statistical significance. If the number of cases is sufficiently small, then there’s no way that statistical studies are going to demonstrate that SHS is the cause.
Heartland’s position is simply that government agencies should tell the truth. Which is right.
Uh, everybody agrees that government agencies should tell the truth, but Heartland also has strong positions on issues such as second-hand smoke that fly in the face of epidemiological evidence gathered by real scientists.
As for “cognitive frameworks,” let’s see how scientific yours is, fredeliot. Answer me a hypothetical question:
Q: If all the water in all the world’s oceans and seas were to warm by enough to reduce the water’s density uniformly by 0.02%, then what would happen to the depth of the ocean…
1. where the depth is about 5000 meters?
2. where the depth is about 500 meters?
3. where the depth is about 50 meters?
4. where the depth is about 5 meters?
5. where the depth is about 0.5 meters?
Note: This is an unrealistic scenario, simplifed for ease of understanding. I am, of course, aware of the fact that nothing happens uniformly in the oceans. I am also aware of the fact that, in the real world, density changes deep in the ocean are likely to be much smaller than in water near the surface, for two reasons:
1. temperatures far below the surface in the deep ocean are much, much more stable than surface water temperatures; and
2. at the low temperatures found far below the surface, seawater density changes less for a given temperature change than is the case in the warmer surface waters.
Dave Burton
“…. temperatures far below the surface in the deep ocean are much, much more stable than surface water temperatures …”
So we should be even more concerned that Purkey and Johnson found that these deep waters show measurable warming?
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1
Or shouldn’t we.
Thanks for the link, adelady. Here’re a few quotes from the paper:
From the abstract:
“The authors 1) compute warming rates [along] hydrographic sections that have been occupied two or more times between 1980 and 2010;”
Wow, two or more samples over a 30 year period. Well, some data is better than no data, I always say, but that’s not far from no data.
From page 1:
“Highly accurate satellite measurements fromOcean Topography Experiment (TOPEX)/Poseidon and Jason altimetry have reported an average rate of SLR of 3.1 mm/yr between 1993 and 2003”
Why do you suppose that a 2010 paper uses only the first 10 years of satellite data, stopping with 2003? Why don’t they mention that more recent satellite measurements from newer satellites (Jason-1 and Envisat) show much lower rates and sharp deceleration in SLR?
In case you don’t know, here’s some satellite-measured SLR trend data for you:
Topex/Poseidon 1994-2006 = 3.12 mm/yr (nearly linear, very slight deceleration apparent)
Jason-1 2002-2012 = 2.26 mm/yr (marked deceleration apparent)
Envisat 2004-2012 = 0.45 mm/yr (very little SLR, and slight deceleration apparent)
Jason-2 2008-2012 = 0.87 mm/yr (just 4 years of data, trend unclear)
BTW, here’s a page where you can download data and get pretty graphs and trend calculations for the satellites:
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/products-images/index.html
Here’s the only actual actual temperature change number from Purkey and Johnson’s study which is mentioned in their paper:
In the Weddell Sea, the deep water has warmed at a rate of 0.0098C/yr between 1990 and 1998, followed by a period of cooling
Setting aside the matter of the post-1998 cooling (would you call that confirmation that the climate ceased warming during the Clinton administration?), do you see where that decimal point is, and how tiny the measured warming is??
Now, I ask you, do you trust comparisons of temperature measurements from ship-based thermometers to that level of accuracy, which were:
taken at 10-20 year intervals,
over huge distances,
at different locations (though on nearly the same hydrographic planes),
perhaps at different times of year (though that’s not mentioned),
from different ships (with different instruments)?
Seriously?
So, in answer to your question, no we shouldn’t be concerned.
NASA GISS couldn’t be troubled to do that hard work. Instead, they used satellite images to get a very rough idea of what areas were urban and what were rural, and then fudged the data accordingly…
Here’s what a *competent* programmer/analyst would do if he had doubts about the NASA satellite night-lighting analysis procedure. The competent analyst would select a few dozen rural GHCN stations scattered widely around the globe and then copy/paste their lat/long coords into Google Earth.
Now, the lat/long values in the GHCN metadata file go to 2 significant decimal digits — not enough to pinpoint exact locations to the meter, but certainly sufficient to identify enough 100-percent-certain rural stations to proceed with the analysis.
The competent analyst would then compute global-average temperature estimates from his Google Earth certified 100 percent rural stations and then compare his results with the NASA land-temperature index results. He would then discover that his results match the NASA results pretty closely, confirming the fact that UHI is a complete non-issue.
If you tried to tell any practicing meteorologist that UHI is non-issue, he’d surely laugh at you. They see it every day.
But UHI is also a digression. We weren’t talking about the UHI effect, we were talking about the surfacestations project. Have you even bothered to look at http://www.surfacestations.org ? Do you understand that it’s not primarily about the UHI effect?
When someone paves a dirt road with blacktop near a temperature measurement station, or installs an AC compressor near it, it doesn’t matter whether the station is urban or rural, the damage to the integrity of the temperature record is done. That’s not UHI effect, it is a different issue, and the only way to detect that kind of problem is by actually looking at all the temperature stations.
That’s what the surfacestations project is doing, and guess what they’ve found?
A well-sited temperature measurement stations should be located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. But the reality is that over 70% of the U.S. surface temperature measurement stations have artificial heating sources less than 10 meters away from them!
I urge you to take an hour or two to look at the surfacesations.org web site. You’ll learn a lot.