“Sixteen scientists have moved to ramp up scepticism over climate change with a weekend opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.”
This introductory line from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation article contains one core piece of information that’s essential to understand the latest Cold Earther effort to convince people that there is no urgent need to address global warming: It was published in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal.
It was not published in a scientific journal. It was not subjected to review by outside scientists. The only thing that qualified the editorial to be published was an approval by the editors of a corporate-aligned newspaper that is operated by right wing publisher Rupert Murdoch.
The Wall Street Journal opinion piece was designed to gain attention because it was designed by “16 scientists”. Once a person starts to look into the qualifications of these sixteen signers, the article begins to look less impressive.
For example, one of the signers, Harrison Schmitt, is indeed a scientist, but he’s a geologist, not a specialist in a climate-related field. Schmitt has never published any peer reviewed articles in any scientific journal on the subject of climate change.
In spite of his lack of expertise on the subject, Schmitt has been very politically active for years in anti-environmental circles. Schmitt is the former chairman and president of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, which advocates against action to protect the environment, and is still active with the Annapolis Center as chairman emeritus. The Annapolis Center has accepted nearly a million dollars in from ExxonMobil.
Schmitt has also been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, a political organization that has taken tens of millions of dollars from the oil industry.
Schmitt promotes the conspiracy theory that environmentalism is really just Communism in disguise, having declared, “I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely Communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.”
Another signer, Jan Breslow, is a scientist, but he runs a lab that studies hardening of the arteries, not climate. Does Breslow have some data showing that we can understand global climate by examining blood vessels? If so, he has yet to release it.
Michael Kelly specializes in the electronic structure of metals and semiconductors, as well as the development of microwave technology. These fields are not related to climate science.
James McGrath is a chemist who studies polymers to help in the development of adhesives. That sounds like useful work, but it’s not at all related to global warming.
Another one of the “16 scientists”, Burt Rutan is not a scientist at all. He’s an engineer who admits that, on the subject of climate change, “I have a clear bias. My bias is based on fear of government expansion.”
I don’t know these people, and I don’t mean to insult their general intelligence, or professional accomplishments. What I am trying to point out is that they don’t have qualifications in the area of science in which they are being quoted as scientists.
If the sixteen signers wanted to make a significant contribution to our understanding of global warming, or climate more generally, they could have done an analysis of scientific data and submitted a paper for peer review in a scientific journal. The fact that they did not, but chose to write a letter to the editor in a newspaper that is politically aligned with Wall Street’s anti-regulation slant, is telling.
There’s nothing wrong with publications that have a political slant. America is the better for them. The American people, however, should be wise enough not to regard such publications as reasonable primary sources on scientific research.
If you want a better understanding of what’s happening with global warming, look at peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. Overwhelmingly, these papers indicate that global warming (along with other aspects of climate change) is taking place, is caused primarily by human activities, and is resulting in significant harm to economies around the world.
Where did you get the “tens of millions” from the oil industry to The Heartland Institute? Let me guess: You made it up put of thin air. Not even most groups that spread lies about Heartland make up a number that big.
Our influence would be MUCH greater if we had that kind of money — the kind of money the alarmists throw around every year.
Jim Lakely
Director of Communications
The Heartland Institute
Mr. Lakely, just out of curiousity, how much does Heartland’s subscription to ReputationDefender cost?
Jim, when you speak of the money that people “throw around” to prove that global warming is real, is due to human activities, and is caused by human activities, are you referring to money spent on scientific research?
You know, Jim, maybe if the Heartland Institute did more actual research, instead of just pushing political propaganda of the sort published in the Wall Street Journal, you might be taken a little more seriously.
From 1998 to 2006 alone (not counting more recent years), Heartland received nearly a million in cash alone (not counting staffing and in-kind support) from ExxonMobil alone (not counting other members of the oil industry).
Source.
Communications Principle #462: When you find yourself in a hole with a shovel, stop digging.
You simply don’t know what you’re talking about, but you sure like to make assumptions. Dig your own holes for all I care.
http://heartland.org/funding
http://heartland.org/reply-to-critics
Best,
Jim
Charmed, my deah. Raise your pinky now.
The link I provided is sourced, and none of your links actually deny the veracity of those sources’ claims regarding ExxonMobil funding.
The links you provide document the following two facts:
1. Starting about six years ago, the Heartland Institute began to hide the identity of its funders because people were noticing and talking about the dependency of Heartland on Exxon Mobil, the Koch brothers and others, and Heartland found that accountability to be distressing.
2. IRS Form 990 documents that in 2010, the Heartland Institute raked in $6.0 million. In 2009, Heartland Institute raked in $6.5 million. It refuses to say where that new money has come from.
You still haven’t absorbed Communications Principle #462.
Hole, bigger. Keep digging?
P.S. Since we’re communicating, Mr. Lakely, why don’t you communicate an answer to this question?
Across all the years it has accepted contributions, has the Heartland Institute received more than $10 million from oil industry corporations, foundations funded by oil industry corporations, or oil industry corporate executives in monetary, staffing, loans and in-kind contributions?
A) Yes
B) No
C) Refuse to answer
I’ll take that as
C) Refuses to answer.
Thanks so much for this article; you have gotten it exactly right. As a card-carrying scientist myself, I was appalled and embarrassed when I read the WSJ letter. I hate it when ‘scientists’ (especially also-rans, as most of the signers are) claim some special insight into subjects they know no more about than any other Joe-Six-Pack. It’s like a plumber saying “I’m a tradesman…I know exactly how you should wire that circuit!” You may be a tradesman, but if you ain’t an electrician then your opinion regarding electrical work is no more relevant than anyone else’s. So STFU.
The letter was an embarrassment to scientists everywhere in part because of the pride the authors take in their specious logic. Among many other absurdities the authors wrote: “The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle.” Oh, well, colorless and odorless…no worries then! And each of us excretes it, and it’s a component of the biosphere. Just like…oh, I don’t know…feces…so you shouldn’t have any objection if I and a few billion of my closest friends come over and sh*t on your front porch every day, right? Just as a weed is a plant in the wrong place and the wrong amount, so too a pollutant is a chemical in the wrong place in the wrong amount. Similarly, the authors raise the hoary old distraction of pointing out that “Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.” “Often” is a word seriously open to objection here, but let it go; the real issue is that advancing the argument that some (not all) plants grow faster (not ‘better’) at slightly elevated CO2 levels is, in the face of the immensely multi-dimensional and complex topic of the impacts of climate change, a little like a fireman just standing around watching a house burn down while saying to the owner “Look at the bright side…your heating costs are going way down.” True as far as it goes, but absurdly…one might even say criminally…beside the point.
Captains of industry have gotten away with a titanic scam for over a hundred years now: not factoring into their financials the full costs of their activities, particularly the costs to society, to the environment, and to a sustainable civilization. This is the same absurd ‘logic’ which enables the nuclear industry to call nuclear power ‘clean’ and ‘low-cost’, because conventional economics permits it to simply ignore the whole issue of the deadly nuclear waste which piles up and can never be disposed of, the highly radioactive plants which must eventually be decommissioned and secured at huge cost, and the occasional but inevitable ‘oopsies!’ which render whole geographic regions uninhabitable. Factor those important costs into the equation and nuclear becomes the most expensive energy source known to man. The same goes for the carbon-fuel industry. But because that industry’s ignored costs are “colorless and odorless” they have been especially easy for the industry, and society, to completely ignore. Until now. Now, as we begin to enter the climate change end-game, extreme weather becomes more extreme every year, huge areas of once-productive farm and ranch land are parched and baked by record-setting drought and heat, and ‘winter’ is fast becoming nothing more than a recollection we’ll regale our grandchildren with. The bummer (for the carbon-fuels industry) is that these hidden costs are hidden no longer…everybody can see them. So now it is time to regroup, trot out a few lackey contrarian Ph.D.s, and start trying to argue the problem away.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
P.S.: It might be interesting if someone hacked into the WSJ letter signers’ email accounts and we learned who paid them how much to sign this letter. I mean, hey…sauce for the goose.
Jim Lakely,
To set the record straight, exactly how much money HAS the Heartland Institute received from the oil industry?
Why all the red herring? Yes, it appears the earth is warming. Maybe it’s a result of man’s activity. But please notice that NASA data shows that every planet in the solar system is experiencing similar warming over the same period. It seems hard to make a case that terrestrial activity can be responsible for such widespread results. Further study is clearly needed to establish a tentative hypothesis regarding causality.
Every planet in the solar system has grown one degree F hotter over the last century? That’s a very interesting claim. You don’t quite make that claim though, because of the use of the word “similar.”
What is your source of information to back up this claim?
W., EVERY planet in the solar system is experiencing similar warming? What peer-reviewed scientific paper do you have as a source for that? I can’t find any such document.
What I have found indicates that:
1. On Mars, the south polar region is undergoing changes in seasonal ice patterns that MIGHT be indicative of regional warming, or might not. There is no indication of global warming on Mars.
2. Some outer planets haven’t even gone through an entire cycle of seasons since their discovery, so it’s impossible for us to know whether any warming or cooling is due to seasonal variations on those planets.
3. Some planets appear to be cooling, rather than warming,
4. The energy output of the sun has actually decreased over the last 50 years, even as the atmospheric temperature on Earth has increased.
Your assertions don’t hold up, Mr. Hughes.
Funny how global warming skeptics will say the weather data on earth is sketchy and incomplete and we don’t have the whole picture (when the data doesn’t support what they want). Then they’ll claim that weather data from all the planets in the solar system–which is FAR more sketchy and incomplete–is relevant.
Arriving at a conclusion first and selecting data later is junk science.
Must…stop…laughing (milk shooting out of my nose).
It’s a matter of record that ExxonMobil contributed to The Heartland Institute over the course of about a decade, then stopped in 2006, BEFORE we ramped up our activities on global warming (climateconference.heartland.org). Walt Buchholtz, an Exxon VP, served on our board during that time and left in 2006.
At issue are three things: (a) whether Exxon’s support ever amounted to a significant portion of our income – it was never more than 5%; (b) whether our position on global warming changed from what it was before Exxon started funding us or after it stopped – it did not; and (c) whether Heartland had policies in place regarding the influence of donors over its program that preserved the independence of its writers, as newspapers have “fire walls” between advertisers and reports – it did.
That’s the truth, if you care.
Jim Lakely
Director of Communications
The Heartland Institute
Mr. Lakely, the question wasn’t about just ExxonMobil.
You have yourself attempted to reframe the debate to focus just on ExxonMobil. Why?
The question whether you will disclose the total amount of donations (monetary, staffing, loans and in-kind contributions) that the Heartland Institute has taken from the oil industry (corporations, foundations funded by oil industry corporations, and oil industry corporate executives).
You aren’t answering that question.
Why?
Chaaaaanging the issue!
Jim Lakely, you’ve come over here and called someone else a liar. Strong claims take strong evidence.
It’s just like Green Man said. You should document the amount of all moneys, loans and in-kind contributions coming to Heartland from oil corporations and their executives and their surrogate organizations, or you should apologize.
… or you can keep digging that hole. Your choice.
Bill Clinton, depending on what the definition of “is” is, could learn a thing or two about responding to questions without answering them from you, Jim Lakely.
The question: Have you received more than ten million dollars from the oil industry? Yes or no?
The answer: Exxon’s support was never over 5%, our position on global warming hasn’t changed, and we have policies in place regarding the influence of our donors.
Now is that a truthful answer? Well, it’s “the truth,” but it’s not an answer. It’s a slick evasion of a very simple question–the kind of half-answer we’re getting all too much of in politics.
The reasons we used to disclose all donors (which no non-profit is required to do), but no longer do so, is explained here … for now the second time.
Cheers!
Jim Lakely
Summation of that link: when you publicized your funders, people had the gall to talk about who the funders were. So now you keep your funding secret.
Your answer to the question:
Across all the years it has accepted contributions, has the Heartland Institute received more than $10 million from oil industry corporations, foundations funded by oil industry corporations, or oil industry corporate executives in monetary, staffing, loans and in-kind contributions?
A) Yes
B) No
C) Refuse to answer
Is C) Refuse to answer. Let’s just be clear on that, Jim Lakely.
So, Jim Lakely is refusing to provide any information about how much money the Heartland Institute is taking from the oil industry, its lobbyists, its shell organizations, and its top executives.
For the record, we here at Irregular Times don’t take money from any industry, from any lobbyists, from any shell organizations, or from any corporate executives.
You’ve got to admire the slickness of the deception:
Step 1: Hide information (the amount recieved from oil complanies).
Step 2: Respond to accusations with an indignant “Where did you get your information?”
Step 3: When asked for the information in order to resolve the issue, respond with three OTHER pieces of information, then indignantly say “That’s the truth, if you care.”
Step 4: Lather, rinse, repeat.