The Real Story of Heartland: The Template of Lies
February 17, 2012
Take some time to view the video above, well worth it. Then read the post below.
Guest post by Kaitlin Alexander:
Exhibit A:
“There is no experimental data to support the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, or chronic bronchitis………any number of things can influence the onset of a disease. The list includes genetics, diet, workplace environment, and stress…….we understand public anxiety about smoking causing disease, but are concerned that many of these much-publicized associations are ill-informed and misleading……….the media continue to uncritically accept and vigorously promote an anti-smoking agenda…….after hundreds of millions of dollars spent on clinical research, and decades of screaming headlines, we have no more certainty today about smoking causing disease than we did decades ago……….if even a small part of the time and money spent trying to link smoking to cancer were spent instead on studying the other causes of cancer, millions of lives could be saved.”
Exhibit B:
“The claim that human activities cause climate change has not been scientifically proven……….it is a reductionist error and not keeping with the current theories of climate science to attempt to assign each temperature change to an exclusive single cause………..the use of results from flawed computer models to frighten people by attributing catastrophic future change to current human activities may be misleading and is highly regrettable……..that emotionalism can override objective analysis is illustrated by the headlines………..despite millions of dollars spent by the government on climate modeling and research, many questions about the relationship between human activities and global temperature change remain unanswered……….indeed, many scientists are becoming concerned that preoccupation with anthropogenic global warming may be both unfounded and dangerous – unfounded because evidence on many critical points is conflicting, dangerous because it diverts attention from other suspected hazards.”
Now read the originals.
Exhibit A
“There is no experimental data to support the hypothesis that increases in hydrocarbon use or in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing or can be expected to cause unfavourable changes in global temperatures, weather, or landscape…….any number of things can influence earth’s temperature. The list includes volcanic eruptions, variations in the amount of energy received from the sun, El Niños, and La Niñas – all of which are natural………we understand public anxiety about climate change, but are concerned that many of these much publicized predictions are ill-informed and misleading……….the media continue to uncritically accept and vigorously promote shrill global warming alarmism………after hundreds of millions of dollars spent on climate modeling, and decades of screaming headlines, we have no more certainty today about global warming prediction than we did decades ago………..if even a small part of the money spent trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions were spent instead on fighting hunger or disease in Third World countries, millions of lives could be saved.”
-from the various articles on the Heartland Institute’s global warming page
Exhibit B
“The claim that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer has not been scientifically proven………..it is a reductionist error and not keeping with the current theories of cancer causation to attempt to assign each cancer to an exclusive single cause…………the use of results from flawed population studies to frighten people by attributing large numbers of death yearly to smoking may be misleading and is most regrettable……….that emotionalism can override objective analysis is illustrated by the headlines………despite millions of dollars spent by the government on smoking and health-related research, many questions about the relationship between smoking and disease remain unanswered…………indeed, many scientists are becoming concerned that preoccupation with smoking may be both unfounded and dangerous – unfounded because evidence on many critical points is conflicting, dangerous because it diverts attention from other suspected hazards.”
-from Smoking and Health: 1964-1979: The Continuing Controversy, published in 1979 by the Tobacco Institute
If I hadn’t told you which set of quotes was unchanged, and which I had replaced words like “smoking” and “cancer” with “human activities” and “climate change”, or vice versa, would you even have known the difference?
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
February 17, 2012 at 4:47 pm
“You’ve come a long way, baby
To get where you’ve got to today
You’ve got your own cigarette now baby
You’ve come a long, long way!”
That I can today, at fifty-one years of age, remember the jingle to the Virginia Slims cigarette commercial, which must have disappeared from tv when I was nine, shows the power of advertising to make an impression on children. How much greater an impression must a cartoon camel have made on kids?
daveburton, by the way, is an idiot. Climate scientists have science on their side. All the deniers have is “Lord” Monckton and phony petitions. Pathetic.
February 17, 2012 at 6:37 pm
Repost
http://climateprogress.net/en/climate-progress-network-news/10-the-real-story-of-heartland-the-template-of-lies.html
February 17, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Is there a wiki already which list all climate villains?
February 17, 2012 at 7:12 pm
You could try Heartland’s very own ClimateWiki http://www.climatewiki.org/
February 17, 2012 at 9:27 pm
I wonder how long till the Provider gets sued for missleading claims, faulty science.
February 18, 2012 at 1:31 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
February 19, 2012 at 9:01 pm
The blogroll on the right-hand side of this page is a pretty good list of climate villains. 😉
February 17, 2012 at 7:20 pm
jason pettitt wrote, “You could try Heartland’s very own ClimateWiki http://www.climatewiki.org/”
That’s a sticky wiki indeed. See Guardian article,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jul/19/climate-change-wiki-heartland-institute?intcmp=239
February 17, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Reblogged this on Climate Force and commented:
Climate Villains..
February 17, 2012 at 10:28 pm
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February 18, 2012 at 5:00 am
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February 18, 2012 at 9:37 am
Dave Burton – Many words are spoken but very little is said.
With regard to the widely-debunked Oregon Petition and many others like it:
Hundreds of people with PhD’s believe that 9/11 was an inside job. That does not make them right. Out of a population of 310 million, it means nothing.
97% of climate scientists say climate change is a problem. Now that, I believe, is significant. All attempts to debunk this statistic (as opposed to a number) involve widening the pool of supposed experts to include Barry Bickmore’s dog astrologers and those who believe in alien abduction.
The time is well overdue that you dealt with the world as it is (rather than how we all wish it was).
February 18, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Re: “97% of climate scientists say climate change is a problem…”
Martin, the “97%” claim is significant, not for what it reveals about climate change, but for what it reveals about the Climate Movement spin machine:
1. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/
2. http://climatequotes.com/2011/02/10/study-claiming-97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-flawed/
Re: “All attempts to debunk this statistic (as opposed to a number) involve widening the pool of supposed experts to include [kooks].”
The 97% claim comes from a survey of 10,257 Earth Scientists, of whom 99.2% were excluded after their responses were received. The “97%” claim comes from the answers to just two questions, both of which I would answer “yes” to.
Nor is it clear that 97% of the 79 scientists even answered yes to both questions. For one of the two questions, 77 of 79 answered “yes,” and for the other question 75 of 77 answered “yes,” which seems to indicate that at least two of the respondants for the first question didn’t answer the second question.
It is disturbing that you classify more than 99% of Earth Scientists as kooks, Martin.
February 18, 2012 at 4:53 pm
You forget, Dave, (or have never bothered to check) that I am an Earth Scientist and both the AAPG and the GSL have endorsed the scientific consensus. To argue that they are part of some global conspiracy is just absurd: They, more than perhaps any other professional bodies, would have had good reason to, at very least, have continued to sit on the fence.
George Monbiot nailed you supposed “sceptics” 7 years ago, when he said:
“It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in your palm. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. “
February 19, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Occasionally Monibot gets something right. That wasn’t one of them, but this was:
“Confronted with [the ClimateGate] crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.“
More often, however, Monibot is about as wrong as it is possible to get. For instance, in 2002 he wrote:
“Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”
Well, it’s now 2012. Have you noticed the crisis that he predicted? Me, neither.
In that same article he wrote:
“The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.”
100,000 liters of water to produce one kg of beef? That’s about as silly as Al Gore’s claim that the Earth’s magma is millions of degrees hot. World beef production is about 10^11 kg/year. Multiply by 10^6 liters/kg = 10^17 liters of fresh water, or about twenty Lake Michigans.
February 19, 2012 at 9:55 pm
Monbiot has since admitted he over-reacted. He certainly does not believe now that Climategate 1.0 or 2.0 were anything other than mendacious attempts to undermine public confidence in climate science and scientists.
Your conspiracy is an illusion, I would respect you more if you told me the moon landings were faked or that 9/11 was an inside job.
February 22, 2012 at 2:29 am
Martin Lack wrote, “I would respect you more if you told me the moon landings were faked or that 9/11 was an inside job.”
I do not doubt that you would.
February 18, 2012 at 5:17 pm
“Fake skeptics of climate change won’t be swayed by good science” (BY STEPHEN HUME, VANCOUVER SUN ; vancouversun.com, 2/18/12).
February 18, 2012 at 10:49 pm
Uh, opinion pieces in a financial news paper or a blog don’t really sway the several peer reviewed papers on the subject of climate science consensus.
If the studies were flawed, then why not publish a rebuttal to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (for the Anderegg et al study example)?
Why claim the peer reviewed literature is wrong yet not attempt to participate in the scientific process to correct it?
February 19, 2012 at 2:35 pm
ooops!
that won’t be happening again anytime soon!
remember what happened to Watts when he had to stop lying and look at evidence…
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/05/anthony_watts_contradicted_by.php
February 19, 2012 at 9:45 am
I know Peter has covered the WSJ sixteen versus NAS 255 controversy at length but this is a very good summary by Peter Gleick. Good on Forbes for publishing it (no wonder the HI is angry with Forbes).
Cyberbullying Scientists: Using Threats in an Effort to Silence the Discussion on Climate Change (18 Feb 2012).
February 19, 2012 at 8:24 pm
I wrote: “The 97% claim comes from a survey of 10,257 Earth Scientists, of whom 99.2% were excluded after their responses were received. The “97%” claim comes from the answers to just two questions, both of which I would answer “yes” to.”
The above statement is in error.
10,257 Earth Scientists were invited to participate in the survey, but only 3146 actually did so. After the responses were received, all but 77 responses were excluded for one question, and all but 79 for the other.
I erroneously calculated that 99.2% of the respondents were excluded, because I used the number 10,257 instead of 3146.
76 of 79 (96.2%) answered “risen” to this question: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”
75 of 77 (97.4%) answered “yes” to this question: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
(3146-77)/3146 = 97.6% (not 99.2%) of the respondents were excluded after the responses were received.
Please forgive my mistake.
Of course, neither of the two questions addressed anthropogenic global warming.
The first question asked respondents to compare current temperatures to the depths of the Little Ice Age (“pre-1800s”), and asked whether it’s warmer now. Well, of course it is! What’s remarkable is that they didn’t get 100% agreement. 3 of 79 apparently didn’t agree even with that.
The second question asks whether any human activities significantly affect global temperatures. That encompasses both GHG-driven warming and particulate/aerosol-driven cooling.
Since just about everyone acknowledges that anthropogenic particulate/aerosol air pollution causes cooling, I would have expected just about everyone to answer “yes” to this question. Yet 2 of 77 apparently did not.
Here’s another good article on this bogus 97% claim:
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3684
Why do you suppose they didn’t ask an actual question about Anthropogenic Global Warming? Why didn’t they ask something like, “Do you believe that emissions of CO2 from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are causing dangerous increases in global average temperatures?”
Or maybe they did. The article mentions that “up to nine” questions were asked. So what were the other seven?
February 19, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Your time would have been more productively spent pissing in the wind.
February 22, 2012 at 2:35 am
Since you now know that the claim of 97% agreement with CO2-driven global warming alarmism is nonsense, will you cease citing it? Or will you continue to cite it, even though you know it is untrue?
February 22, 2012 at 4:08 am
Dave, next you’ll be telling us that 4 out of 5 doctors smoke camels.
February 22, 2012 at 4:21 am
How about you, Peter? Do you know what the other seven questions were?
February 22, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Ok Dave. If there’s a substantial number of real climate scientists — that is, scientists whose credentialed speciality is the study of climate — who say that anthropogenic global warming isn’t happening, then produce them for us. Give us a list of names with credentials and contact information.
The only trained climatologists I’ve heard quoted saying AGW ain’t real (and you can count them on the finger of one hand) always turn out to be energy industry prostitutes — taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and coal companies to say what these companies’ CEOs want to hear — or frothing-at-the-mouth right-wing anti-government types who would see the earth burn to a cinder before they would admit that there are cases where government intervention in and regulation of some part of the private sector might be in the best interests of the general public. Count out these jerks and the percentage is probably not 97 but 99.5.
February 22, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Kelly, the reason you’re so sure that there’s an overwhelming concensus for CAGW is that you’ve internalized deceptions like the 97% claim. The fact is that those two questions were only loosely related to the question of whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing dangerous warming of the Earth. Even I would have answered “yes” to those two questions.
Why do you suppose that they asked respondents to compare current temperatures to the 1700s (the depths of the Little Ice Age)? Remember, the Big Question is, what is the effect of anthropogenic CO2? Nobody thinks that anthropogenic CO2 caused the LIA to end, because anthropogenic CO2 emissions were very low until about the 1940s. So why didn’t they ask “since the 1930s” or “since WWII” or similar, to get an answer that has something to do with the Big Question?
I think you surely must at least suspect that the reason is they weren’t interested in the Big Question, they were interested in getting a Big Number.
Or maybe not. They apparently asked at least some of the respondents seven other questions, too. I don’t know what those questions were. Do you?
That info might be found in a much larger (also apparently not peer-reviewed) article, which was cited by Doran as, “Kendall Zimmerman, M. (2008), The consensus on the consensus: An opinion survey of Earth scientists on global climate change, 250 pp., Univ. of Ill. at Chicago.” I’ve not found it on-line anywhere.
February 22, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Again, daveburton, a list of reputable climate scientists, credentials and contact information attached, who assert that AGW is not happening. That’s all I ask.
And please, don’t point me to that ridiculous Oregon petition.
Trembling in anticipation . . . .
KCA
February 22, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Kelly, I interpret your dodging of the questions as, “no, I don’t know what the other questions were, either.” Is that correct?
February 22, 2012 at 8:16 pm
If you go back and read my original message today you’ll see that you are the dodger. Just produce these climate experts who question AGW. Who are they? Where are they? I’d be interested in hearing from them, in hearing some of their arguments, instead of the same old tired arguments that have been discredited time and time again.