Tagged: Climate change

Heartland Institute claim anti-science document is a fake


Deutsch: logo der tageszeitung the guardian

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The Heartland Institute, reports the Guardian, are claiming that the internal memo which appears to show that they are working on plans to “dissuade teachers from teaching science” is a “total fake”.

Heartland had earlier admitted that other documents published alongside the memo were genuine, but later backtracked on that.

They then went on to refuse to discuss the matter – including, it would appear, the issue of whether the controversial memo was a fake – any further.

Much of the material in the memo is similar to that in the other documents that Heartland had earlier admitted to be genuine. But only the memo contains the statement that the ultimate aim of Heartland is to cripple science teaching through fear.

The original publishers of the leaked documents, the DeSmog blog, are standing by their story.

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Climate change deniers aim to scare teachers off science


Reconstructions using multiple climate proxy r...

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The usual claim from the climate change deniers is that they are merely pointing out that climate science is controversial or disputed. But their internal documents reveal what this is really all about (emphasis added):

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. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. 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.

The above is a direct quote from an internal strategy document of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago based promoter of – it is now clear – superstition: as that is what we are left with without science.

All of this is funded by a mystery figure known as the “Anonymous Donor”. It is tempting to make a song and dance about Microsoft’s role in funding the shamans too – but it seems their money goes on a project called “ITTN” – which mainly seems to be about stopping US regulators injecting some competition into the telecoms and ICT market over there.

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The truth is not democratic


English: Michael E. Mann

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A group reportedly funded by oil and coal interests in the United States has launched a truly shocking attempt to stop a noted and respected climate scientist from delivering a lecture because they say his views are “extreme” and part of a “radical agenda”.

In reality the views of Michael E. Mann are consensus science and the claim by the mysterious “Common Sense Movement” that Mann is a “disgraced academic” would probably be a good start for a defamation action if they were organised from the UK: because they are lies put around by liars.

Happily Penn State is refusing to buckle to the campaign as someone with an interest in science I just wanted to post my support for that.

As always the bottom line is that scientific truth is not democratic. If people do not like it that is their problem.

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Can science ever win the argument?


Garden, 1 OctoberThe UK is enjoying a very unseasonal heatwave at the moment and, supposedly, today is set to be the warmest ever October day. I am writing this in the garden (see photograph) and the heat is high and the humidity higher – and it will be warmer yet.

All the global warming deniers who crowed over the statistics that showed Summer 2011 was the coldest in twenty or more years all suddenly seem to have gone quiet – an opportunity to give them a good (intellectual) kicking?

No, not really: tempting though it is.

Apart from a tiny handful of genuine scientific sceptics, the deniers are, to a man, driven by ideology and not any sort of scientific concern. In that sense they are more like those who denied Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler than anything else. Then the claim was the scientists must be wrong because they sought to defile the perfection of God’s creation, today it is because the scientists dare to print results that show that markets are dysfunctional.

The scientists should stick to science – and that means a focus on climate and not weather. Climate change means that the UK could actually get very much colder in the future, at least in winter, if changes disrupt wind and current patterns in the North Atlantic.

Scientists need to win on the science. But they should not enter into the debate as innocents abroad either. When publishers or broadcasters highlight this or that change in the weather and ask for scientific comment then scientists should engage – but primarily to explain that the media have got it wrong and are playing the deniers’ game.

And that should also be the case when some of the more apocalyptic predictions are being made too – the claim that half the UK would be under water as a result of melting ice caps caused a sensation back in 1989, but in the long term it has only damaged efforts to get policy makers to take the science seriously.

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Roy Spencer – a thought


Roy Spencer – the former NASA employee who wrote the paper that has now led to the resignation of the editor of Remote Sensing also obviously fancies himself as an economist and has a book out: FUNDANOMICS: The Free Market, Simplified

Of it, he says (his emphasis):

Best-selling author Roy W. Spencer looks at the fundamental driving force that propels a society to ever higher levels of prosperity, generation after generation: People having the freedom to provide as much stuff as possible to each other that is needed and wanted…no matter what that stuff happens to be. Everything else in economics is details.

Speaking entirely personally, I don’t think giving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a big lump of fissionable uranium – even though I know they want it very much and are likely to pay top dollar – is going to propel me or anybody else to “ever higher levels of prosperity”.

For a book that purports to tell one of the “fundamentals” of economics that looks to me like a fundamental flaw.

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Climate change paper “should never have been published”


Scientific literature

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You won’t be reading this on a lot of the websites that trumpeted the paper, so I thought I’d do my bit to get the message out there…

…If you are interested in the issue of climate change you may remember that in July the scientific journal Remote Sensing published a report that was said by the usual suspects to show that the scientific consensus on climate change was wrong.

Well, now the editor of Remote Sensing has resigned and stated that the paper should never have been published. Serious issues have been raised about the paper’s methodology and whether it met the standards that should be expected of a scientific paper.

Read more here.

Always pays to remember that the truth is not democratic and just because you want something to be true – and you are very rich – that does not make it so.

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