Gillard finished as Australian Prime Minister?

19 February, 2012 by

Finished?

The governing Labor party is in turmoil. Polling shows an election now would sweep Tony Abbott’s conservative Coalition into power in a landslide. Julia Gillard has lost the trust of the public, and her own MPs, after a string of high profile embarrassments.

Labor really has nowhere to go. Some are talking of a return of Kevin Rudd, who was unceremoniously stabbed in the back in the mid-2010. But there is no obvious alternative candidate. If they dump Gillard, there will need to be an election. Australia may still dodge the bullet of the carbon tax, due to come into force in the middle of the year.

JULIA Gillard faced a revolt last night by marginal seat MPs who publicly called for her to resign as Prime Minister.

For the first time, marginal seat MPs including Victoria’s Darren Cheeseman went public with a demand she quit to save the party.

“There’s no doubt about it: Julia Gillard can’t take the party forward. The community has made its mind up on her,” he told the Sunday Herald Sun.

“Certainly, it would be in the interests of the party for Julia to stand down and allow (the) Government to select a strong candidate.”

One of Ms Gillard’s senior ministers also urged her to “resign now”, as Cabinet erupted into open warfare over a leadership showdown.

“For the good of the party, for the good of the Government, she should stand down,” the senior minister, who declined to be named, said.

Some supporters predicted yesterday the Prime Minister might yet be forced to spill the leadership and fight, but this was ruled a high-risk strategy because it would expose Kevin Rudd’s support levels.

But the Gillard camp has not ruled out sacking Mr Rudd as the Foreign Affairs Minister.

The Gillard camp maintains she has more than 65 votes in the 103-person ALP caucus, but even her supporters concede a ballot is high-risk because it is likely to show that more than a third of MPs want her gone.

Her supporters say Mr Rudd has between 30 and 34 votes, while six are unknown.

A Labor powerbroker warned Mr Rudd was destroying the party, driving down the primary vote with relentless destabilisation.

“He’s taken ALP caucus hostage,” they said. 

“His message is, ‘I’ll shoot the Prime Minister if you don’t give me the job’.“

But both sides believe Ms Gillard will not resign. (source)

And while Labor fiddles with its own internal wrangling, Australia burns – no direction, no focus, no plan for the future. Time for a grown-up government again.

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Josh parodies warmists' open letter to Heartland

19 February, 2012 by

Josh is on fire:

Click to enlarge

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UK: £1.5bn foreign aid wasted on tackling climate change

19 February, 2012 by

Pissing aid money up the wall

This is the brutal reality at the pointy end of dangerous climate policies concocted in ivory towers, insulated from reality. Precious resources, which should rightly be directed towards alleviating poverty and disease, are being frittered away on pointless attempts to tackle climate change. We have suspected for some time that such policies will benefit wealthy countries and damage developing nations, and now it appears we have evidence to back up that suspicion:

Nearly £1.5 billion has been spent tackling man-made climate change by Government department responsible for fighting poverty abroad, it can be revealed.

The Department for International Development (Dfid) has spent the total on projects which they say will either reduce carbon emissions abroad or attempt to deal with the effects of predicted changes in the earth’s climate.

In the past four years Dfid has spent £900 million on climate change projects with nearly two thirds of that being spent in the past financial year under the Coalition. A further £533 million has already been committed up to 2013.

The biggest recipients of the climate change aid are India and Indonesia, two countries considered to be rapidly emerging economies.

The disclosures – made under the Freedom of Information Act – will raise fresh questions over how foreign aid is spent, and comes after an Indian minister described British aid to the country as “peanuts”, which ministers in London had begged Delhi to continue accepting.

Dfid is one of only two departments not affected by the Government’s austerity drive, with a budget last year of £8.4 billion.

The figures released by the government reveal that total spending on tackling climate change overseas has increased from £61 million in 2007-08 to more than £883 million in 2010-11.

During that time, Dfid saw the biggest increase in spending on climate change with funding available for projects now 45 times higher than four years ago. The department now also employs 66 specialist climate and environmental advisers.

Among the aid provided by Dfid was a £4.7 million project in Indonesia aimed at helping the government there provide “more effective leadership and management of climate change programming”.

Another project aimed at encouraging Indian farmers to use manual foot pumps to draw water from underground for their fields rather than using diesel powered pumps – a technology that could be considered a step backwards in terms of the labour required.

In Africa, six businessmen were given financial support to help them produce and sell solar powered lights.

…

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is sceptical about man-made global warming, also questioned the effectiveness of the money going abroad to tackle climate change.

He said: “A lot of money is wasted on schemes that don’t actually help country’s develop more resilience that would be good regardless of climate change.

“These handouts often come with conditions that appear to be pressure foreign governments into sighing up to global emissions policies.” (source)

A scandalous waste of money when the global economy is in such a dire state, and a heartless betrayal of the most disadvantaged people on the planet.

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Heartland: headbangers flogging a dead horse

18 February, 2012 by

The headbangers and Heartland

It’s little short of hilarious to watch the headbangers desperately trying to keep the Heartland leak alive, when it’s falling about their ears (and, in all probability one of their own will be exposed as the faker of the key document, given sufficient time).

MeDog’sGob is hanging on for all it’s worth (not much) spruiking an open letter in The [Lefty] Guardian from some of the big names in “The Cause” (including Australia’s very own über-headbanger, David Karoly) and chastising Heartland for alleged double standards (a la Revkin):

As scientists who have had their emails stolen, posted online and grossly misrepresented, we can appreciate the difficulties the Heartland Institute is currently experiencing following the online posting of the organization’s internal documents earlier this week. However, we are greatly disappointed by their content, which indicates the organization is continuing its campaign to discredit mainstream climate science and to undermine the teaching of well-established climate science in the classroom.

“Well-established propaganda”, you mean, surely? Hang on, that was in the fake document wasn’t it? The reality is that Heartland wanted to remove the politics and provide a balanced educational perspective for children, but that’s not good enough. Nothing short of total indoctrination is acceptable, right?

Unfortunately, the Climategate emails were all genuine, and showed that consensus scientists (let’s repeat it again, because no amount of repetition of these examples of disgraceful scientific malfeasance will ever be enough):

  • fudged and massaged inconvenient data;
  • threatened journals that dared publish sceptical papers;
  • suppressed dissent at every turn;
  • minimised uncertainty in order to keep a consistent political message;
  • deleted emails and avoided FOI requests in breach of national legislation;
  • smeared anyone who dared disagree.

In the present case, on the other hand, the main Heartland document was FAKED by one of their own, and the rest showed how much Heartland really managed to achieve on a relatively meagre budget compared to the massive warmist swill trough. So you can take your patronising faux sympathy, guys, and shove it. Er, sorry about that.

Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science is, pitifully, still banging on about it, trying in vain to make a few million at Heartland over several years look somehow substantial when stood next to the hundreds of millions swallowed up by Greenpeace and WWF each year, and, bless their little henna socks, they’ve helpfully illustrated the whole thing with a laughably crap “infographic” (no really, that’s what they call it), lumping together several years of donations to make them look bigger – yep, they are that desperate – whilst at the same time remaining silent on the billions spent on the consensus. Hypocrisy much?

Whereas those with a brain capable of rational thought, on the other hand, are starting to dig into where that fake document came from (thanks to WUWT for the link):

The climate blogs presumably relied so heavily on the memo because the quotes were punchier, and suggested far darker motivations than the blandly professional language of the authenticated documents–and because it edited the facts into a neat, almost narrative story.  

In the first 24 hours, I saw a lot of comments along the line of “See!  They’re really just as amoral and dangerous as we thought they were!” based on a memo which I now believe to have been written by someone who, well, thinks that AGW skeptics are amoral and dangerous.  (And judging from his update to the original document dump, Littlemore’s fellow blogger, Brandon Demelle, is also unsure of the memo’s “facts”.)

For me, this leaves the most fascinating question of all: who wrote it?  We have a few clues:

1)  They are on the west coast

2)  They own or have access to an Epson scanner–though God knows, this could be at a Kinkos.

3)  They probably themselves have a somewhat run-on writing style

4)  I’m guessing they use the word “high-profile” a fair amount.  

5)  They are bizarrely obsessed with global warming coverage at Forbes, which suggests to me that there is a good chance that they write or comment on the website, or that they have tangled with writers at Forbes (probably Taylor) either in public or private.

6)  The last paragraph is the biggest departure from the source documents, and is therefore likely to be closest to the author’s own style.

7)  I have a strong suspicion that they refrained from commenting on the document dump.  That’s what I’d do, anyway.  A commenter or email correspondent who suddenly disappeared when they normally would have been reveling in this sort of story is a good candidate.

8)  They seem to have it in for Andy Revkin at the New York Times.  There’s nothing in the other documents to indicate that Heartland thinks Revkin is amenable to being . . . turned?  I’m not sure what the right word is, but the implication in the strategy memo that Heartland believes it could somehow develop a relationship with Revkin seems aimed at discrediting Revkin’s work.

Unfortunately, I’d imagine that this is still a sizeable set of people, and it will be hard to identify the author.  I suspect that it will be easier to do if the climate-bloggers–who may well know this person as a commenter or correspondent–get involved in trying to find out who muddied the story by perpetrating a fraud on their sites. (source)

Who in the realist camp would refer to themselves as “anti-climate”? It’s as meaningless as saying someone is “anti-weather” or “anti-seasons”, and just as ridiculous. And who would say they would “discourage teachers from teaching science”? Only a dimwitted headbanger would include something so blatantly false in a faked document.

Interesting times!

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Heartland: Fairfax hypocrisy

18 February, 2012 by

The cartoonist gets the irony

Fairfax, part owner of the Earth Hour farce and propaganda machine for climate alarmism, publishes yet another article on Heartland today in the Sydney Morning Herald, and instead of hyperventilating about the perpetrators of the leak being brought to justice a la Climategate, breathlessly questions the motives of anyone who doesn’t submit to the AGW religion:

THE paper trail connecting the climate change sceptic movement in Australia and the conservative US expert panel the Heartland Institute goes back at least to 2009, documents released on the internet this week show.

The Heartland Institute, a leading group that funds activities designed to sow doubt about climate change science, was embarrassed this week when its strategy and budget documents found their way to a US blog.

The institute described the leak as a theft and said a police investigation was under way, while apologising to the 1800 companies and individuals whose identities were revealed as donors

Documents from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show that a group funded by the Heartland Institute, via a thicket of other foundations and think tanks, provided the vast majority of the cash for an anti-carbon price lobby group in Australia in 2009 and 2010.

The Australian Climate Science Coalition, an offshoot of a conservative lobby group called the Australian Environment Foundation, received virtually all its funding from the International Climate Science Coalition, which has been financially supported by Heartland. (source)

The sums are trivial, around $50 or $60,000, and the fact that Ben Cubby gets so steamed up about them when Greenpeace and WWF have budgets in the hundreds of millions reveals the desperate desire of the alarmists to smear the sceptics. Why aren’t the motives of Big Green ever discussed at Fairfax? Because they have the politically correct moral high ground, perhaps?

Cubby also hints that the opinions of the scientists advising the ACSC were influenced by the funding, an allegation that Bob Carter regarded as “offensive”. Presumably, since Cubby cannot comprehend why anyone could possibly hold views contrary to his own, it must be down to financial incentives.

More importantly, Heartland stated on their press release that a key document in the bundle was faked, a fact which Cubby also fails to mention.

Typical Fairfax spin, as usual. But I’m very glad the cartoonist hit the nail squarely on the head.

(h/t Marc H for cartoon)

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Un-Scientific American's global warming lesson

17 February, 2012 by

Scott McNally

After the fizzer that was “Deniergate” (a crap name for a non-event) [UPDATE: “Fakegate” – much more appropriate], back to the usual run of the mill nonsense, this time from Scientific American that bravely sets up a string of straw men and blows them over in a patronising piece entitled “How to explain climate change to a moron skeptic”. This is for presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s benefit, since he has had the temerity to question the alarmist BS being churned out daily.

It gets off to a less than auspicious start:

The majority of evidence presented by skeptics is anecdotal – evidence that is based on non-scientific observations or studies that may sound compelling in isolation. One example is “It is colder today than the average for this time of year; therefore global warming is not true.” Those who cite this clearly don’t understand the difference between weather and climate. You may have also heard someone say, “The climate is cyclical, and we are just on a warming trend.” Or “The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo has changed the climate more than we have.”

Count the misrepresentations in that paragraph. We continue:

I am not saying that volcanic eruptions, or solar flares, or natural changes in the biosphere don’t change the climate. They do. Sometimes significantly. But that is not the argument. The argument made by skeptics is whether humans are changing the climate.

In order for the anthropomorphic [cringe, it’s actually “anthropogenic”, anthropomorphism is attributing human characteristics to something non-human – Ed] (human caused) climate change ‘theory’ to be true, there are two corollary truths that must also be proven. Find failings with one and you have broken the climate change theory. Prove them both, and human caused climate change must be true.

Corollary #1 – Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

The ‘theory’ that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas has been tested and confirmed thousands of times. But if for some reason you don’t believe it, here is an experiment that you can do at home, courtesy of NASA. 

[ridiculous “fill a soda bottle with CO2” experiment omitted for my readers’ sanity – Ed]

This is just one way to show that CO2 acts as a blanket that traps heat. There are dozens of other ways to show that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and if you put this blanket around the earth, the earth will get warmer.

Corollary #2 – Humans are putting more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yes, there is a finite amount of carbon in the biosphere. Humans can’t add to that, but what we can do is convert carbon from a solid or a liquid to a gas. As a gas, it goes into the atmosphere, rather than staying underground. We know that we are doing this because we dig up lots of coal and oil, materials that are mostly made up of carbon, and convert that carbon to a gas. On a large scale, this gas can be measured as it is released from power plants. We can also simply measure the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. We have measured that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing by about 2 parts per million every year for the past several decades.

[The rest of the post repeats the above in “blind-em-with-science” mode]

And there the prosecution rests, m’lud. That’s it. Sceptics are dumb and can’t understand the difference between weather and climate, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and humans are putting more of it into the atmosphere, ergo humans cause climate change. Case closed. See, the science really is settled!

I don’t really know where to begin with this, since the arguments so utterly simplistic as to beggar belief, even from Scientific American. You all know the points, but let’s go through them anyway:

  • CO2 is a greenhouse gas – agreed
  • Humans are putting more CO2 in the atmosphere – agreed
  • Humans are changing the climate – also agreed
  • But the question which the author fails to raise is “by how much?”
  • How much do natural drivers compare with the human fingerprint?
  • Where’s the acknowledgement that catastrophic warming is a result of computer-modelled positive feedbacks which have not been adequately tested or proven?
  • Where’s the acknowledgement that if catastrophic warming isn’t happening, then we are wasting billions of dollars that could be used for other, tangible, benefits to humanity?
  • Where’s the acknowledgements that mitigation is highly unlikely to be effective, and adaptation to whatever climate change (human or natural) befalls the planet is a far better option in terms of cost/benefit?

Just embarrassing.

Read it here.

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Heartland Roundup

17 February, 2012 by

Quality journalism

Some great articles on Fakegate (the Heartland document release) from around the blogosphere (illustrated by Josh).

Should we be surprised that the main document referred to at the Big-Green-funded smear blogs was a fake? No. Faking stuff is what the headbangers do:

Alan Caruba at WUWT:

The New York Times article is a case study in bad journalism and bias on a scale for which this failing newspaper is renowned. The Times reported that “Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming part of the nation’s culture wars.”

Wrong, so wrong. Polls have demonstrated that global warming is last on a list of concerns by the public. It barely registers because the public has concluded that it is either a hoax or just not happening. Teaching global warming in the nation’s schools constitutes a crime against the truth and the students.

Daily Bayonet:

What the Heartland documents show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed.

Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF, the Sierra Club, The Natural Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.

Yet they’ve been thwarted by a few honest scientists, a number of blogs and a small pile of cash from Heartland.

Here’s a clue for DeSmog, Joe Romm and other warmists enjoying a little schadenfreude today. It’s not the money that’s beating you, it’s the message.

The Air Vent:

So when it is shown that the ‘primary’ leaked Heartland document with the main message is a complete forgery, where are the media reporters now?    Where are the retractions?  How about a simple investigation of the headers?

In the same place that the nefarious act of publishing the NOAA temperature data is.  In the circular bin or the janitorial closet of the New York Times where it won’t see the light of day.  There is no need to apologize to conservative groups after all, only to groups that push the correct politics like Media Matters or GreenPeace.

William Briggs:

Much of the stink over these documents are from people like Huffington Post’s Shawn Lawrence Otto whose major point of emphasis is that Heartland is biased towards their own point of view. Well, this is true. This is not of course proof that this point of view is false, though. It is no different than saying that Greenpeace screeds (i.e. press releases) are biased towards their point of view. And yet we never hear arguments like this.

Lubos Motl:

I find it amusing. The Heartland Institute has organized several conferences of climate skeptics and everyone who observes the debate at least at a superficial level must know that the folks in the think tank are skeptics and they have some – modest – amount of money to be used.

Roy Spencer:

Only fringe lunatic save-the-Earth-by-killing-everyone-but-me types could really believe that any organization would actually promote “dissuading teachers from teaching science”. The person who wrote this obviously fraudulent Heartland goal clearly knows little about science or what kind of organization Heartland is.

That so many media outlets (especially the Guardian) ran with the story without checking its veracity is another black eye for what passes as journalism these days.

I know Joe Bast, the president and CEO of Heartland. He is of the highest character and intelligence, and I would consider his motives on the climate subject to be at or above anyone I have met in this business, on either side of the issue. 

James Delingpole (who coined the phrase “Fakegate”):

Ready for your amazing fact, fruit loop eco-loons?

OK. Here goes.

We climate realists don’t think of ourselves as anti-science.

No, really. We think we’re pro-science. That’s what we want science teachers to teach kids in schools: hard science – physics, chemistry, biology. Stuff that’s empirical. Theories that are falsifiable. Not the kind of junk science they teach in places like the school of “environmental” “science” at comedy institutions like the “University” of East Anglia. Because that’s not science at all. It’s computer-modelling, projection, which is more akin to necromancy.

So, next time you try to fake your Protocols of the Elders of Climategate document, guys, at least try to credit the people you’re trying to smear with a bit of integrity. Not everyone is like you, you realise?

Jo Nova:

The hypocrisy is flagrant. The Sierra Club listed a category for $1,000,000 donations by “anonymous donors” in their 2010 annual report. Strangely DeSmog didn’t froth with anticipation. Their Sierra Club annual report mentions “Matching Gifts”, and apparently supporters who matched gifts include the evil Exxon, not to mention GoldMan Sachs, Barclays, Google, Monsanto, Nestle, Yahoo, Bank of America, and many many more. But that’s alright then.

Jo Nova (again):

In the hours after the ClimateGate emails were released, skeptics asked about their authenticity (as we are want to do). In the hours after the Heartland Documents (including at least one complete fake) were released, the commentators on the other side did not even ask (just as they uncritically accept any weak report in favour of their pet theory).

They leapt to their defamatory conclusions in a smear-fest. At least one person out there has probably committed a criminal act. The rest are guilty of small brained unskeptical blind hatred, defamation, and ignorance. And will any of them apologize? I’ll be shocked if even one has the decency or manners.

We should not allow them to forget it. DeSmog=DeSmear. They are a group happy to promote lies with no compunction. They are not interested in the truth, just in the PR. Oh the fool journalists who think the paid hacks at DeSmog ever had anything to say on science that was not biased or deceitful. Richard Littlemore, where is your apology?

Watts Up With That:

All the above evidence, plus Heartland’s statement saying it is a fake, taken in total suggest strongly that the “2012 Climate Strategy” document is a fake. From my perspective, it is almost if the person(s) looking at these said “we need more to get attention” and decided to create this document as the “red meat” needed to incite a response.

Indeed, the ploy worked, as there are now  216 instances (as of this writing) of this document title “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” on Google at various news outlets and websites.

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1970s Reality Check: "The Coming Ice Age"

16 February, 2012 by

Check out Leonard “Spock” Nimoy presenting an episode of the “In Search Of…” series in the late 1970s about the changing climate – and the coming Ice Age. Stick with it to part 3 to hear the late Stephen Schneider spreading what one can only call Global Cooling Alarmism:

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Quote of the Day: Andy Revkin

16 February, 2012 by

Andy Revkin (NYT image)

Andy Revkin, on his Dot Earth blog, attempts to draw comparisons between Climategate and the Heartland release of documents, and chastises Heartland for not reacting to the Climategate release in the same way as to that of their own documents:

[Quoting from Heartland press release] “But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.”

Wouldn’t it have been great if a similar message had some from the group and its allies after the mass release of e-mails and files from the University of East Anglia climatic research center in 2009 and last year — documents that skeptics quickly and repeatedly over-interpreted as a damning “Climategate”? That hasn’t been Heartland’s approach. (source)

Whilst there are aspects we should frown upon in both cases (release of confidential documents without authority – although I note that the Liberal media, to which the NYT makes a substantial contribution, rarely get so steamed up about Wikileaks, but that’s another issue), there are huge differences.

Let me make a few obvious points:

  • Whereas the Heartland documents relate to a relatively small amount of funding for a handful of sceptics, the Climategate documents cast doubt on the integrity of “consensus” climate science as an entire discipline;
  • Funding for sceptics is literally microscopic compared to the massive swill trough available for the consensus, but more importantly, and irrespective of that, the suggestion that any reputable scientist can be bought for a few bucks is offensive (on both sides of the debate);
  • Whereas sceptics have minimal influence on policy (at present at least), the consensus influence is significant, since the majority of national governments have subscribed to the politicised, and alarmist, UN/IPCC process;
  • Whereas the Heartland documents reveal little of substance regarding the discipline of climate science, the Climategate emails reveal:
    • a concerted effort to manipulate and/or suppress inconvenient data;
    • a desire to minimise uncertainty in order to maintain a consistent political “message”;
    • attempts to subvert and corrupt the peer-review process; and,
    • evidence of destruction of documents and correspondence in contravention of FOI requirements.
  • UPDATE: A number of commenters have suggested (thanks!) another differentiating factor: UEA is a publicly funded institution, which, as a result, should be thoroughly transparent in its operations, whereas Heartland is a purely private organisation which does not draw upon the public purse.

Wow, they really are almost in the same league, aren’t they, Andy?

The eagerness with which these documents were seized upon by the smear blogs [by the way, from where does the funding for those come? – Ed] reveals the desperation at work behind the scenes.

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Heartland: key document "a fabrication"

16 February, 2012 by

Heartland

UPDATE: MeDog’sGlob is refusing to take down the fake document because “they haven’t heard from Heartland directly”. LOL. Hope they have good lawyers.

The key document, on which the smears and slimes of MeDog’sGlob and climate headbangers like Monbiot on Twitter are based, is a fabrication. The press release from Heartland explains:

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

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.

Heartland have requested copies of this document be removed, and my earlier post, a rebuttal to the allegations of smear sites (who themselves made no effort to ascertain the documents’ authenticity), has been amended to comply with that request. Heartland’s conclusion:

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

Mea culpa as well, I think, but my previous post was composed with the best intentions of defending Heartland from these baseless attacks, especially since the smear sites had already made the document public and used it to attack the credibility and intentions of Heartland.

As predicted, Fairfax have ignored the enormous sums funnelled to Al Gore (and even our own Tim Flannery) and pick up on a tiny payment to Bob Carter, confirming Fairfax as an integral part of the climate smear machine:

A PROMINENT Australian scientist has rejected as offensive any suggestion he is doing the bidding of a US climate-sceptic think tank that is paying him a monthly fee.

Confidential documents leaked from inside The Heartland Institute [including a link to MeDog’sGlob], a wealthy [compared to Al Gore?] think tank based in Chicago and Washington, detail strategy and funding for an array of activities designed to spread doubt [regain balance] about climate change science, paid for by companies that have a financial interest in continuing to release greenhouse gases without government interference. [and plenty that don’t]

Among the recipients of funding is Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University, a geologist and marine researcher who spoke at the ”convoys of no confidence” protests against the carbon price last year alongside the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and writes columns for News Ltd newspapers [get the Murdoch smear in quick]. (source)

Judith Curry has an excellent roundup of reaction here. Her sober conclusion is worth repeating in full:

A few weeks ago, I had a thread called ‘climate classroom‘ over at Climate Etc.  David Wojick participated extensively in the comments on the thread, see his own blog post here.  David Wojick engages extensively over at Climate Etc., he seems to have political views that are consonant with Heartland, but he does not come across as a propagandist.  I don’t know exactly what he is trying do with this K-12 project, I will ask him and maybe discuss this on the blog this weekend.

My summary comment on the blog post was:

Why am I giving a “raspberry” to the NCSE initiative?  This seems like propaganda, pure and simple.  Keep it out of the K-12 classrooms.

With regards to K-12 education, there is no particular reason to teach ‘climate change’ in the K-12 curriculum.  Climate change is a topic that is more suitable high school ‘science and society’ courses.  In such courses, teaching the controversy would seem to be of paramount importance.  Critical thinking and understanding the complex societal factors that are influenced by science and influence science itself would be of value in such a course, although intelligent and appropriate handling of such a course at the high school level is a challenge.

With regards to Heartland giving Wojick funds for K-12 education, it is not clear to me how this is different from the NCSE initiative.  State and local governments need to make judgments regarding what materials are taught in K-12.  If/how to teach climate change in K-12 remains an open issue.

With regards to Singer and Idso getting funds from Heartland, this is not surprising and they have never claimed not to be getting funds from such groups. I note that I read somewhere that Bob Carter has stated he is not receiving funds from Heartland. Some scientists receive funds from organizations such as WWW, Environmental Defense, etc., so this is not something unique to Heartland.  The funding that Watts is hoping to receive seems to be in a different category:  he is looking for private funds for a specific project, rather than to be on a monthly retainer such as the others.  This would seem to be similar to what Rich Muller pulled together to fund the BEST project (one of the donors was the Koch brothers).  Personally, as an academic, I religiously steer clear of such funding (not that any of it has ever been offered to me, other than travel funds to attend an event); it compromises your appearance of objectivity.  The problem is when a scientist receives such funds and does not declare it in a journal publication, review panel, or government advisory committee where there would be an explicit conflict of interest that should be declared.  I don’t see that as an issue for Singer or Idso; most people are aware that they receive funds from orgs such as Heartland.

Re Heartland’s funding, I did a previous blog post on this: Blame on Heartland-Cato-Marshall-Etc.   Much information about total amount and funding sources is publicly available from sourcewatch. The surprising thing is the paltry funding that the libertarian think tanks have relative to the green groups (e.g.  WWF, Greenpeace, etc.)  The more interesting question to me is how have these groups been so effective with so little funds, relative to the much larger expenditures by the green groups.

Re the parallels to Climategate. They are similar in the sense that they give us a behind the scenes peak at how the IPCC and Heartland works.  In terms of moral equivalence, what Heartland is doing is not surprising; seems to be no different than what other advocacy groups do.  The IPCC is a very different organization, and also the CRU/UEA, with explicit requirements for government accountability.  So in terms of a scandal, I would have to say that Heartlandgate is nowhere near Climategate.

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