Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Heartland Institute Documents Reveal Opposition To Science
New submitter bheerssen writes with an excerpt from an article by The Bad Astronomer: "The Heartland Institute — a self-described 'think tank' that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle 'Heartland Insider' has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute's strategies, funds, and much more."
At least one site has the documents in question.
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 a 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. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.
Wow, they didn't even bother to put the "science" in quotation marks. Guess they *really* never thought these documents would get out. Pretty dumb to use that kind of language, even in purely internal communications. About all they can say at this point is that it was a poorly-proofed typo (that they *meant* to say "bad science" or something). But even that would qualify as a Freudian slip of the fingers, methinks.
Even creepier is the way they capitalize "the Anonymous Donor." Makes me think of a guy petting a cat in a secret island compound somewhere.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's pretty much what FOX News will say.
Who am I kidding? FOX isn't going to run this at all.
bah.
Ha, you'll be lucky if *CNN* even runs it. They're way too busy showing important interviews with Whitney Houston's maid to fit such silly science news in.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We've all known these groups were anti-science. While seeing it spelled out on paper is amusing, and satisfying, I doubt that very many minds are going to be changed by this information. The people that populate and fund these groups ignore anything and everything that conflicts with their ideas as it is.
These people are used to the extreme mental acrobatics necessary to deny the reality right in front of them. This will be written off as "liberal lies and smear tactics" pretty much immediately. It's not so much that they believe the crap these groups spew, a lot of people simply take the opposite stance of their political opponents regardless. Since climate change is a "liberal" thing, it's all a lie, because all "liberals" are liars.
Still, like I said, it's nice to see what we've all already suspected confirmed in writing. These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit.
Just to point out that the real incriminating evidence comes from the "2012 Climate Strategy" document that could be falsified. The other documents, like the budget, look pretty legit but the document you are citing is a page and a half. Wouldn't take much for me, someone who is ultra opposed to the Heartland Institute, to dream that up in a short afternoon with a six pack. I'm poking through the rest of them and am not finding the same sort of evidence. So it's possible that someone could have gotten their hands on a few legit documents (like the budget) and created this one and added it to the group. The metadata on the meeting agendas and such read "jbast" while the metadata on the climate strategy document reads "Joseph Bast." Entirely possible they were created two different ways but then why does the climate strategy document appear photoscanned? Is he photoscanning his own internal documents? Why? Or did someone want this to look legit, photoscan it and then write "Joseph Bast" as the author to make it look authentic?
I'm just pleading for people to exercise caution. I think that the best approach for this is to put forth questions towards Dr. Wojick about his funding and move forward with caution. This is the internet. This is an area where I require a lot of verification before I believe something. The climate strategy document is awful convenient and as someone who's use to corporate bullshit, I can tell you my manager could easily produce a 15 page document on our team's "vision" and "mission statements" or "strategy." Mostly to prove he's worth something but also because that just seems to be how they roll. Two pages can be made up and I would imagine the real thing would have a lot more fluff and a lot more boring in it. I'm not saying this document is a fake, I'm just urging everyone to exercise caution before you look like a rube.
My work here is dung.
Wait, NOW context matters? Where were you when your fellow "skeptics" (I put that term in quotes, because most of your fellows who call themselves that are lousy skeptics) were pulling out half-sentence quotes from emails to prove a vast and global conspiracy?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The difference being that ID has maybe two or three actual scientists who work in fields related to biology backing it, and the most important one of those, Michael Behe, doesn't even publish peer reviewed articles that deal with his ID claims. AGW on the other hand, is widely accepted by most researchers in climatology and related fields, the debate being more about the degree of influence of human activity or the speed at which changes will occur.
In other words, it isn't the same thing at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
this is red hands evidence of private interests brainwashing people, and doing it through private whores who pose as 'science' institutions.
if you undermine and rationalize the impact of this, you serve their interests and justify them.
Read radical news here
I agree with you on why Climate Change is science and ID is not. In the context of the email, I would think that if the Heartland Institute did not consider Climate Change as science, they would have referred it as such. Of course we don't know what was in the mind of the author, but my reading is that they do consider it science but are opposed to it being taught. Thus they are anti-science in this regard.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The big argument about this being a "smoking gun" is one sentence, where someone typed "dissuading teachers from teaching science" instead of "dissuading teachers from teaching this lousy excuse for a science?"
With just 5 minutes scanning the documents, I saw that. And also the fact that Fred Singer is paid $60,000 per annum to "regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message." Now that's quite a bonus given that his employer is the University of Virginia. This isn't paying a professor to do research, this is paying a professor to do propaganda.
This is the real smoking gun. There are a handful of scientists worldwide that deny the AGW consensus. The question is why? The assumption used to be that they were handsomely paid to do it. That is now fact.
As a Brit reading this, I see it as deliberately trying to diminishing the capability of the US work force. How many great accomplishments would have been impossible if it were not for your nations commitment to science. To be able take the sum of the worlds knowledge and put a man on the moon is wonderful. China (or any other industrial nation) isn't going to put itself back into the dark ages and I'm sure they'll be happy to take advantage and will continue to invest in as much science as they can. /rant over.
So regardless of religion, at some point (or at what point does) the doctrine have a detrimental effect to a nation and become Anti-american or unpatriotic ?
I really hope British cynicism will keep such topics confined to awful daytime TV discussion shows and not in the real world.
Climate science indicates that the world is warming. Whether the globe is warming to human activity or excess flatulation from aardvarks is immaterial.
The best models indicate that the trend will continue. The best theoretic models predict that this will cause the polar ice caps to change: some cause it to melt, others to increase in size. Both outcomes are dire, massive increase in ocean levels resulting in New York becoming New Venice or a mile thick wall of ice rolling down over the Northern Hemisphere.
I'm a software engineer. I don't pretend to understand climatology, however I do know how to manage risk. When the evidence is pointing to a potential disaster, be it projects running late, major requirements being added at the last minute or something akin to the end of the world as we know it, I don't waste time with the "finger of blame". I ask, how do we mitigate the issue?
Since we don't know the root cause (or if there is even a single root cause), lets take action on all fronts and use this as an opportunity to make our lifestyles more sustainable and less impactful on the planet. Legislate lower vehicular emissions and mass transit use. Use incentives to get people to cycle or walk. Require companies to institute work-from-home plans. Slap taxes on pollution from industries to force them to reduce their emissions. Bar import of goods from countries that don't adhere to the global standard. Humans (and the companies they run) are adaptable, they'll find other work.
If we're wrong and global warming isn't actually happening, at least we'll have some positive outcomes. If we're right, maybe we can prevent a total catastrophe. Inaction, garners little or no benefit if human-caused GW isn't actually occurring, but will be a direct contributor to disaster if it is.
The Canadian fishing industry is a good example. Those folks who lost their jobs are hurting, but they are alive and there is some chance that the fishing will reopen. If GW is real, millions if not billions will die from starvation, be displaced into refugee camps as their towns are flooded or be impacted by regional conflicts as countries struggle to deal with the changing climate.
Wait, NOW context matters? Where were you when your fellow "skeptics"
Context always matters.
If somebody tells you that context doesn't matter, then you should consider that that person probably is lying to you or at least isn't giving you the full truth. Whatever side they're on.
It's also not fair to beat somebody up over what somebody else who may or may not have similar beliefs said. If one person who supports cause X says something, and somebody else who supports cause X says something else -- that's not evidence of hypocrisy. It's evidence of disagreement, and if you really do think that everybody who supports cause X agrees on everything, the problem is with you, not them.
And yes, this is just one sentence. It could be exactly what they meant, or it could just be a miswording of things -- it certainly wouldn't be the first. One will have to look at context to figure out what they really meant.
By revelation of these emails, Fred Singer's respect in peer reviewed literature has dropped to slightly lower than the asshole liars who used to publish "peer reviewed" studies backed by tobacco companies claiming that tobacco smoke isn't related to cancer...
Wow, denier funding is peanuts. These documents contradict the constant claims of 'well funded climate denialism'. It shows they were never true, alarmists simply made them up.
For years I never really knew if deniers were well funded or not. Now I know they were never well funded.
Its the greenies who have been well funded all along.
Thank you Desmogblog. Nice work
Somehow, I always manage to be impressed at how bad people are at reading noisy graphs and at computing trends.
The fact is that this is terrorism by any other name. This is Charles Manson directing the activities of his Family. The Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and all the rest of the rogues gallery of Koch Instruments are effectively building a bomb - a bomb named inaction- that will kill every one of us and our children, and they are fully intent on setting that bomb off.
These individuals are a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and they need to be dealt with within that defining context and no other. It is directly because of their actions that steps needed to preserve our civilization against catastrophic climate change have not been taken despite the fact they're well within our ability:
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
I understand that many reading this will not see advocating for provably suicidal policies and conspiring to influence society to take suicidal steps as a crime. To them I say- the definition of what is criminal does and must change because criminals adapt and change. The means they have to effect their ends change and the scope of devastation they can effect enlarges. The purpose of a system of laws is to protect society against the self chosen behaviour of criminals, whatever that behaviour may be. Criminals should not expect that they can evade justice by gaming the law.
It's criminals themselves who force society's and and decide what laws will come to exist. In a free society that seeks to protect the greatest freedom for each individual and which values liberty, the rule of law is by nature reactionary. But that cannot mean that society will permit criminals to leverage that permissive attitude into an act of world wide homicide.
There is ONE objective reality, not many. This conservative Post Modernist bullshit whereby YOU have YOUR reality but conservatives get THEIR OWN version of reality is cultural and planetary suicide.
There is ONE reality and human caused climate change is a fact of that reality.Continued inaction will lead directly to the extinction of civilization. Those are facts. Anyone advocating for that course of non-action is acting as a terrorist against everyone in every nation who is alive now or will be at all times forward.
That is a fact, not an opinion.
Remember, it really didn't matter that the Nazis "really believed" their load of scientific crap they used to justify their genocidal policies. We still prosecuted them in Nuremberg , then we found them guilty and then we hung them.
This is exactly what needs to be done with the individuals and funders of these denier organizations. No one cares if you *really believe* your bullshit or you know you're lying through your teeth. Neither does it matter that in your view your *rights* include to the *right* to yell "no fire!!" in a burning theater.
It's amusing to see that people who are attempting to implement policies which we know will lead to mass death on a scale which will dwarf the body count and social upheaval of WWII think they can get away with it because they've found a worm hole in the rule of law to squeeze through on the other side of which no one can touch them.
In Nuremberg, the Allies faced a similar problem. Because the victims of the Nazis were not enemy troops, the Geneva Convention did not apply.
Similarly because the victims were under Nazi rule at the time, they were subject to German law and no Nazi broke any German law.
This was the first thrust of the defense the Nazis raised- "hey, we broke no law..."
And what was the solution the Allies came up with in Nuremberg? We just made up- ex post facto- the crimes we decided the Nazis had committed- something we called Crimes Against Humanity .
Then we tried them for those crimes. Then we found them guilty. Then we hung them.
Before Nuremberg the concept of Crimes Agains
AGW has this.
You've just been living under a rock and not paying attention to the overwhelming number of papers confirming it.
...the debate being more about the degree of influence of human activity or the speed at which changes will occur.
Yes but some of the debate, and I think the more salient debate, is about what effect (if any) mitigation efforts will have and what they will cost. Some self-professed 'skeptics' dont take issue with GW or even AGW but more with the cost/benefit ratio, something that gets precious little rational discussion. Those who are skeptical of spending obscene amounts of money with at best fuzzy promises of any tangible results arent 'deniers' by any stretch no matter how convenient it is to label them as such. No matter which side of the debate you fall into we have to recognize and accept that the issue is an economic one, not a scientific one and not a religious one (and radical green-ism is certainly a religion). The only interesting voices in the debate (IMHO) are the economic skeptics on both sides that truly embrace workable cost-effective courses of action.
Looking past even economics, the 'debate' is also a sociological one, since at its core AGW comes down to this: how do we reverse humanity’s relentless pursuit of comfort.
I wonder if the Hearland is going to revise it's positionon the release of the so called "Climategate" emails.
"The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly."
I must have missed the link where they correct this and admit the entire Climategate "controversy" was proven false, and that no deliberate manipulation of data was actually found. I am sure they are still working on that release...
"But this one goes to 11!"
No, its not fact at all. Yes, SOME may have been paid to be deniers, but some were simply questioning the"science" (see what I did there?) behind AGW, as they still do.
Fred Singer is one of the top 3 denialists in the world. We now know he's paid $60,000 per annum to do propaganda. Not research. Propaganda.
As for getting paid, wasn't all that long ago that a respected researcher could get drummed out of the academy for denying agw
Be specific.
Some of the mitigation fits with other looming problems; namely the end of cheap oil. Sooner or later (some say sooner, some say later) we're going to run out of cheap oil, and it isn't just energy that's going to take the hit. The value of long-chain hydrocarbons to a multitude of industrial, fabrication and industrial processes cannot be minimized. People don't seem to understand that it isn't just the price of a gallon of gas that will skyrocket, a large portion of the things that make the industrialized world go round will suddenly become much more expensive.
So, the potential mitigation of AGW and the solution to peak oil are the same. Stop using oil and other fossil fuels as fuels. The sooner the better. Invest in alternative energies, even if the costs are very high, because the costs when everyone finally agrees peak oil has been reached will be far worse in every possible way. There is every reason to begin to switch from a fossil fuel based economy, and no reason other than laziness and contempt for future generations to continue on the course we have chosen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So, it's bullshit.
You're really comparing being given grants to do research that leads to peer reviewed papers with being paid to spin a specific line and suppress science?
Really?
And the denier camp likes to call those who listen to the vast majority of the scientific community on this one "faith based"...
Check your premises.
That's because of the availability heuristic and cognitive dissonance on your part. The real problem is with your mind not with PhDs. You have built yourself a self supporting bullshit machine that unrealistically weighs "facts" that support your preconceptions and discounts things that disagree with what you think. You saying that PhDs don't have to defend their ideas is the height of self incrimination. Do you have a PhD? I seriously doubt it.
In addition I see from your later posts that you bring up the whole "grant money" argument. This clearly identifies your as out of your mind. Just in case you missed the memo fossil fuel extraction is the MOST PROFITABLE endeavor in human history bar none. If you think that thousands of squabbling academics who's only ability to move up in their world is by gotcha and disproving each others ideas are going to magically join forces to create a false theory and data in order to what? Seriously what the fuck do they have to gain, grant money? What world do you live in? Grant money? The combined oil industry must make 100x all the academic grants in the US each quarter. You are so self deluded that is makes me wonder how you can operate a keyboard.
Wow, you really can't read.
Let's try this again... GP said "You're really comparing being given grants to do research that leads to peer reviewed papers with being paid to spin a specific line and suppress science?"
Did you get it this time? Think really hard. You'll understand it eventually.
Just in case, let me spell it out for you. One side is paid to do research. The other side is paid to suppress research. It's not the "being paid" part that is being criticized here. Can you comprehend that?
The sociological problem isn't comfort. Its having a talking head in a little box tell you what you need to get comfort. Worse because these things only gratify and virtually never satisfy, you have to get today's "Turd Neuvo" to maintain that 1 minute and 14 seconds of comfort. Pavlovian consumption as economic raison d'etre. We don't need this crap. There are DOZENS of nations that consume a tenth of what America consumes and THEY ARE HAPPIER than we are. They save more money than we do. They have better health than us. Their children are getting better educations. People, who among you can't see that obsessive hoarding and anorexia are the opposite ends of the same shitty stick?
This is that religion thing again. Grow a free mind, READ dammit!, Our appetite is not our best friend. Its time to take the profit motive out of living and breathing. I know I just committed the foulest of blasphemies and I'll be forced at gun point to say 1000 hail Wallstreets, but this little experiment in grotesque consumption has run its course and is bloody close to destroying everything we love. Just yesterday I heard they want to strip mine coal in Bryce National Park. That kind of says it all. Enough people. We're turning the world into a toilet. Its like some horrible existential scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", whatever you do, don't eat that last wafer thin mint.
Its time for us to elect representatives who aren't permanently attached to Corporate America's teat. Its time to muzzle Corporate America, and surgically separate them from state, while we're at it rescind their personhood, they've abused the privilege. Its time to teach our kids that they are responsible for the future, that it will only be as good or as bad as they make it, and we who are already here, should spend the rest of our ill begotten existences cleaning up the fscking mess we made, instead of viciously grubbing for more. So a little dignity please! Let's have a little compassion. Grow a pair, and demand that we put our attention to cleaning up the mess. That's a future worth having. That's a purpose worth living for. This knee jerk, pavlovian self satisfying, needs to come to a crashing halt now. It is so time to find out what's important, and let me be the first to let you know its not Axe Spray-on Deodorant, or minty fresh breath, or even the right feminine hygiene product. Perhaps then, we'll all discover the true nature of real comfort and lasing happiness. Being at home in our skins and being able to look in the mirror without shame, or the quiet self loathing at what little we've left our children.