Bishop Hill Heartland docs leaked
Feb 15, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Some documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, which detail its funding of various sceptics - Idso, Carter and Singer - together with some funding for Anthony Watts' temperature stations project. They're stolen documents, I tell you, stolen!
There are apparently nine or ten documents, which will no doubt be scanned for evidence of malfeasance. I haven't seen any serious allegations as yet.
There's coverage all over the place. Try here for starters.
Bishop Hill
Anthony Watts has sent details of the project that Heartland was involved in and his interactions with the Guardian on the subject. This I think is Heartland's description of the project.
Weather Stations Project
Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record – either high or low – has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous “climate change.”Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who hosts WattsUpwithThat.com, one of the most popular and influential science blogs in the world, has documented that many of the temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces. It is not uncommon for these stations to over-state temperatures by 3 or 4 degrees or more, enough to set spurious records.
Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications. Unfortunately, NOAA doesn’t widely publicize data from this new network, and puts raw data in spreadsheets buried on one of its Web sites.
Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011.
The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.
And here's Anthony's response to questions from Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian:
Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.
They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.
It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don't tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn't free and I could not do on my own. Compare the funding I asked for initially to get it started to the millions some other outfits (such as CRU) get in the UK for studies that then end up as a science paper behind a publishers paywall, makign the public pay again. My project will be a free public service when finished.
And then this:
DeSmog, as part of their public relations for hire methodology to demonize skeptics, will of course try to find nefarious motives for this project. But there simply are none here. It's something that needs doing because NOAA hasn't made this new data available in a user friendly visual format.
For example, here's a private company website that tracks highs and low records using NOAA data:
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/yesterday/us.html <http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/yesterday/us.html>
NOAA doesn't make any kind of presentation like that either, which is why such things are often done by private ventures.
Golly, aren't sceptics wicked? I wonder why the Guardian didn't mention Anthony's comments?
Reader Comments (123)
@ Henry 7:38 - If Alleagra had enough common-sense to understand irony, she/he/it wouldn't be a warmist. Another lost 'cause'.
I hope it's not a fake. That all these warmist hysterics have been elicited by the shock/horror discovery that the evil Heartland has an annual budget of $6.5m (c.f. Greenpeace's measly $310m) and has the temerity to fund people who share its views, illustrates perfectly their lack of confidence in the validity of their claims and in the real strength of their position. Why otherwise would they be so concerned about such a tiny, ill-funded organisation?
And as Heartland is, I believe, the only body of any significance promoting CAGW scepticism, this torpedoes those assertions about "a well-funded, highly organised denial machine".
This news has completely destroyed my sceptical world-view! It didn't take scientific evidence, or logic. Merely the "revelation" that some Institute, think-tank (or whatever), receives/donates/whatever some sort of funding. How could one argue with that?
"Couldn't do it on my own"
Whatever. Both myself and someone else who I won't mention wrangled up the HadCRUT3 data and plotted out graphs and maps less than a week after it came out. Not long after, I had an OpenGL app for viewing everything in an interactive form. When I say I, I mean I did it all on my own, without a university degree or any formal training in statistics, programming, or linear algebra.
If you need funding to do work like this, then you're clearly in it for the money and not for the love.
What a dumbass.
Big Oil should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves if all they can pony up is a measly $88,000 to pay Anthony.
That's the real scandal here
I hope someone give woodfortrees billions of dollars.
Mr Bliss
The real scandal is that I haven't had a penny!
...dissuading teachers from teaching science... ($100K)
...undermine the United Nations IPCC reports ...($388K)
...important to keep opposing voices out .... (Priceless?)
One of these is the new 'Hide the Decline'. But which one?
Schadenfreudegate.
Bishop,
Networking is the answer here.
Ask Anthony for an invitation to the next Big Oil expenses-paid exotic extravaganza, and make sure he introduces you to the right people :)
Big Oil do have expenses-paid exotic extravaganzas don't they? Or is it just climate conventions that can afford them?
Phil Clarke
“Which one is the new 'Hide the Decline'?”
The one which shows the intention to mislead - i.e. None of them.
No-one was paid to dissuade teachers from teaching science. They were paid to produce a teaching module which would demonstrate the fact that official climate science is controversial and uncertain.
Undermining IPCC reports is easily done. Donna Laframboise did it when she pointed out that 40% of their sources were non-peer-reviewed.
Opposing voices are to be kept out of a news magazine by the normal process of lobbying. Unfair, isn’t it? No British environmental editor would dream of keeping opposing voices out of his paper, would they?
Three Observations
1. The alarmists think that $6.5m is sufficient money to infer that legions sceptics are paid to be biased - but the unsubstantiated pronouncements by thousands of scientists and others, who rely for their livelihoods and status in life on alarmism, is not evidence of bias?
2. That 9 or 10 documents on funding is cause for great excitement, but thousands of emails containing strong circumstantial evidence that core climate science is far weaker, and more partisan, than its public image, is dismissed as inconsequential.
3. The Guardian shows, yet again, that it reports only one side of the argument. Another example was Chris Huhne's public letter to the GWPF - and lack of any reporting of the robust point-by-point reply by Lords Lawson and Turnbull.
Heartland is saying the key memo is a fake.
It doesn't really matter, Your Grace. The damage is done.
1. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
2. The Mandy Rice-Davies Manoeuvre applies.
A commenter at CIF says:
"$8 million dollars is a huge amount of money, no wonder the deniers are winning the propaganda war. The public seem turned off on the whole subject of climate change - now we know why.
If only Green organisations had that sort of funding, just think of the good they could do. They could turn the whole situation around tomorrow."
I had to check her profile to make sure she wasn't being ironic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/15/leaked-heartland-institute-documents-climate-scepticism?commentpage=2#comment-14678484
What a dumbass.
Feb 15, 2012 at 6:40 PM | Shawn Halayka
I don't suppose your PC gets 20,000,000 page views a year, does it?
There's an almost "Life of Brian" quality of comedy to this entire "climate" farce. We have Catholics (AGW) and Protestants (sceptics) and a vast excluded domain of people who would really simply like some coherent, verified facts. There seems to have been a mad scramble by "journalists," who apparently do not know either meaning of "investigative" nor "reporting," to fire off their version of events without either investigating or even bothering to interview anyone - or if they did, sadly leaving the responses out for some reason.
It now appears that at least one of the Heartland "documents" was forged, and not by anyone very literate either. Others may have been altered. Since we can expect that the thief who "Mitnicked" the documents with a social exploit (no world class hacker he or she) would not have toned down any perceived nefariousness, apparently they are sadly lacking in imagination as well.
Were those documents stolen from me, I would happily make them all public upfront, with the exception of donor names. The obvious embarrassment quality of the tremendous disparity between the use of funding by the (profoundly) inefficient AGW school which requires 100s of millions of dollars - or pounds, and the remarkable efficiency of the sceptic domain suggests that the science really IS on the side of the sceptics.
You can just imagine the fallen faces when the culprits first read those documents. "Well, we can key off Mike's trick. We'll just make up an agenda for them. They won't dare deny it."
Why embellish this leak by including a fake document? Surely to do so "undermines" the whole exercise.
If this document proves to be fake then that points to a coordinated dirty tricks campaign by green campaigners. Which if true be would more damaging to the warmist cause than Climategates I and II.
The Revkins and the Monbiots of this world suffer significant reputational damage if they are making arguements based on a fake document.
If Heartland can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the documents were faked, this could be very amusing and embarassing. Pro-AGW media falls for more dubious press releases from uncertain sources, but fact checking has seldom been a strong point.
The objections to the K-12 curriculum are rather ironic after the shameless promotion of AIT in our schools, or the activities of other lobbying groups like 10:10. They're active in my area with a novel fundraiser promoting "Solar Schools". Their T&C's make for interesting reading:
Prospective donors may hope that there would be some intial qualification process prior to accepting donations and avoid triggering clause (c), but then 10:10 wouldn't get donor's money to spend on other "green initiatives", like blowing up more kids. No pressure.
5) sounds like a simple kickback to get on 10:10's "approved supplier" list. Being MCS certified is not enough it seems.
"Whatever. Both myself and someone else who I won't mention wrangled up the HadCRUT3 data and plotted out graphs and maps less than a week after it came out. Not long after, I had an OpenGL app for viewing everything in an interactive form. When I say I, I mean I did it all on my own, without a university degree or any formal training in statistics, programming, or linear algebra.
If you need funding to do work like this, then you're clearly in it for the money and not for the love."
A few questions.
How configurable were the outputs by users?
How easy to configure were the outputs?
How easy to understand were the configurable outputs?
Did your site handle records of previously configured comparisons?
Were you able to handle a changing set of input data?
How was your web site hosted?
What was the backup and recovery for your hosting?
Was there a guaranteed up-time from your web host?
How many concurrent users could you handle? (I have no idea what's normal, 100/1000?).
Was your site able to handle commentary?
Was your site able to handle users comments?
How much do you think it would cost if you went to a small software engineering company and comissioned the above?
give us the URL, Shawn...let us admire your genius
Anthony Watts notes in a reply to the first comment on WUWT? relevant to this (Some notes on the Heartland Leak):
"... Also, and most important, the figure pledged thus far is $44K, not $88K, nor the roundup to $90K listed in news stories. – Anthony"
Well, I've read the documents and.....yawn.
Nearly all are trivial rubbish, including a memo confirming a meeting date, an agenda, some minutes and a few CVs.
There seem to be only two documents that contain anything substantive - the fundraising plan and the '2012 Strategy'. And Heartland have categorically stated the latter is a fake.
The fundraising plan shows HI have to work extremely hard to raise funds, and they secure money from many sources. The mystery 'Anonymous Donor' has clearly been pivotal to keeping HI going and no doubt the warmists would love to expose him. But what's wrong with giving anonymously to a cause one feels strongly about? The bigger picture is that Heartland secure their funding professionally, from a wide range of donors, and 'Big Oil' hardly gets a look-in.
I feel sorry for all those donors who have now had their privacy stripped by this act. But, on the bright side, knowing who they are has increased my appreciation of them. I shall be favouring a few different companies now and I'm off to buy a Pepsi.
The 'strategy' docco is the only one that smacks of anything remotely underhanded. HI are adamant it is a fake. If that turns out to be the case, there's going to be an awful lot of egg-face interaction. And possibly even legal repercussions.
Trebles all round!
"That all these warmist hysterics have been elicited by the shock/horror discovery that the evil Heartland has an annual budget of $6.5m"
Err.... their total budget has always been publicly available by visiting their website and clicking the "About" link at the top of the page.