Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Recently, the Wall Street Journal refused to publish a letter on the subject of climate change that was signed by 255 scientists—all of whom are members of the United States National Academy of Sciences. The WSJ chose instead to publish an opinion piece titled No Need to Panic about Global Warming that was written by 16 “other scientists.” It has been reported that the 16 “other scientists” include engineers, a physician, a retired airplane designer, a retired electrical engineer, and astrophysicists. Also included among the “No Need to Panic” authors are two men—one who questions whether smoking causes cancer (Richard Lindzen) and another who does not believe that asbestos is a health hazard (Claude Allegre).
According to Media Matters, most of the scientists who signed the WSJ op-ed do not publish peer-reviewed papers on climate research. In addition, more than a third of them have links to fossil fuel interests.
Peter Gleick, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow, wrote an article for Forbes descrying the WSJ’s actions.
Gleick wrote:
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”
Serious doubt has been cast on the actual expertise on climate science of the signers and on the accuracy of the content, here and elsewhere, and the strawman arguments and technical flaws of their opinion piece are evident to anyone actually versed in the scientific debate. For example, their op-ed has fundamental errors about recent actual temperatures, they use false/strawman arguments that climate scientists are saying climate change “will destroy civilization,” they launch ad hominem attack on particular climate scientists using out-of-context quotes, and so on. Formal responses are in the works, and will be available from a variety of groups in the next day or so. [Just as an example, as pointed out here previously, and at the Union of Concerned Scientists: the authors claim there has been a “lack of warming” for 10 years. The reality? 2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.]
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science, the letter that was signed by the 255 scientists, spoke of their concern about the recent escalation in assaults on scientists—especially climate scientists. They said that the assaults on both climate science and scientists came from climate change deniers who “are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.” The scientists called “for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”
Not long ago, I was disheartened to learn that climate scientists in the United States and in other countries have become victims of cyber-bullying. In 2010, Douglas Fisher wrote an article for Scientific American titled Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned. Fisher spoke of how climate researchers have to purge crude and crass emails that they find in their inboxes every day. Some consider purging such correspondence as a task they must deal with as part of the job of being a climate scientist. Others, however, “see the messages as threats and intimidation—cyber-bullying meant to shut down debate and cow scientists into limiting their participation in the public discourse.”
Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and academic said, “The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate.” Gavin Schmidt, a scientist who works for NASA, said that “organized, ‘McCarthyite’ tactics aimed at specific scientists by various groups can be stressful.” He added “‘Frivolous’ Freedom of Information Act requests can tie up considerable quantities of researchers’ time.” Schmidt claims that the worst things of all are the “‘intimidating letters’ from congressional members threatening dire consequences to scientists working on climate change.”
Last month, MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel, a Republican and the director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, received a “frenzy of hate male” after a video that featured an interview with him was published by Climate Desk.
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VIDEO LINK: Not all Republicans are climate deniers (In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, former Rep. Bob Inglis, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, and other Republicans talk about why climate action is a conservative value)
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Mother Jones reported that the emails contained “veiled threats’ against Emanuel’s wife—as well as other “tangible threats.” Emanuel said, “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.” He added, “What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all. I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”
The Guardian reported last June that Australian climate scientists had been receiving death threats. As a response to the large number of threatening emails and telephone calls, the Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra moved some of its “leading climate scientists to a secure facility…”
Ian Young, ANU’s vice-chancellor, said, “Obviously climate research is an emotive issue at the present time. These are issues where we should have a logical public debate and it’s completely intolerable that people be subjected to this sort of abuse and to threats like this.” Young added that “scientists had been threatened with assault if they were identified in the street.”
Canberra Times reported last year that more than 30 researchers in Australia—including ecologists, environmental policy experts, meteorologists, and atmospheric physicists—told the paper that they had been receiving a “stream of abusive emails threatening violence, sexual assault, public smear campaigns and attacks on family members.” Some of the scientists installed upgraded home security systems and switched to unlisted phone numbers because they were fearful that their homes and cars might be damaged.
One researcher even spoke of “receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change.”
One climate scientist, who did not want to be identified, told ABC News that a dead animal was once left on his doorstep. He said he now travels with bodyguards at times. David Koroly, a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Science, told ABC that he receives threats whenever he is interviewed by the media. He said, “It is clear that there is a campaign in terms of either organised or disorganised threats to discourage scientists from presenting the best available climate science on television or radio.”
Addendum: An Excerpt from Cowards in Our Democracy: Part 1, Written by James Hansen, Climatologist and Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.
Distinguished scientific bodies such as national science academies, using the scientific method, can readily separate charlatans and false interpretations from well-reasoned science. Yet it seems that our governments and the public are not making much use of their authoritative scientific bodies. Why is that?
I believe that the answer, and the difficulty in communicating science to the public, is related to the corrosive influence of money in politics and to increased corporate influence on the media.
SOURCES
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science (Science Magazine)
WSJ Publishes Op-Ed From 16 Climate Deniers, Refused Letter From 255 Top Scientists (ThinkProgress)
Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’ (ThinkProgress)
The rise of anti-science cyber bullying (ThinkProgress)
MIT Climate Scientist’s Wife Threatened in a “Frenzy of Hate” and Cyberbullying Fomented by Deniers (ThinkProgress)
Price Of Truth: Limbaugh Operatives Encourage Abusive Hate Mail At Female, Evangelical Climate Scientist (ThinkProgress)
Climatologist James Hansen on “Cowards in Our Democracies” (ThinkProgress)
Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1 (Columbia)
The Journal Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery (Media Matters)
Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal (Forbes)
Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned: Researchers must purge e-mail in-boxes daily of threatening correspondence, simply part of the job of being a climate scientist (Scientific American)
While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower (Discover Magazine)
WSJ War on Climate Science continues with 16 prominent (but not in climate science) Scientists (Firedoglake)
Australian climate scientists targeted by death threats (Climate Science Watch)
ABC World News: Climate Scientists Claim ‘McCarthy-Like Threats’ (Climate Science Watch)
Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers: ExxonMobil cash supported concerted campaign to undermine case for man-made warming (The Independent)
Scientists Who Had Emails Stolen Ask Heartland Institute to End Attack on Climate Science
UCS President Kevin Knobloch Calls Heartland Institute’s Strategy ‘Disturbing’
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/scientists-emails-stolen-heartland-institute-1372.html
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON (Feb. 17, 2012) – Seven leading climate researchers who themselves were the victims of an email theft which was promoted by the Heartland Institute have written an open letter to the organization, calling on it to refrain from spreading inaccurate information about climate science and attacking climate researchers.
The letter follows the publication of internal documents this week reportedly from Heartland that, if genuine, reveal that some of the nation’s largest fossil fuel interests are funding attacks to discredit climate science, including in public schools.
“Although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilizing and distorting emails stolen from scientists,” according to the letter.
All of the signers had emails that are part of a stolen archive the Heartland Institute has pointed to in an attempt to discredit climate science.
“We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to ‘think about what has happened’ and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy,” the letter reads. “The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.”
Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted in a blog post today that while Heartland is demanding integrity and fairness in the treatment of this theft, the group was silent and in fact actively exploited the theft of these scientists’ emails in an effort to discredit their climate change research.
Who funds the lobbyists?
George Monbiot
http://www.dawn.com/2012/02/22/who-funds-the-lobbyists.html
Excerpt:
SHOCKING, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the US, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.
It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. Insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the ‘controversy’ should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.
The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multimillionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial”.
The institute has claimed it is “a genuinely independent source of research and commentary” and that “we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors”. But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that “we are extinguishing primarily global-warming projects in pace with declines in his giving”.
The climate-change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website: “Of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It’s a completely absurd invention.” The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by coal company Murray Energy, the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol has been paying him $5,000 a month.
Robert Carter has claimed he “receives no research funding from special interest organisations”. But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month. Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph. The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.
Heartland Institute Documents Leaked
By Matt Benamy
http://news.yahoo.com/heartland-institute-documents-leaked-192200094.html
COMMENTARY | Last week a bunch of documents that were reportedly from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think thank that is infamous amongst environmentalists and scientists for their highly funded attempts to refute the well documented science on climate change, were leaked on to the internet by an anonymous source. Some speculated that they may have not been real, while others speculated that the documents may have been stolen.
According to The Guardian, on Feb. 20, after an investigation and much speculation, climate scientist Peter Gleick admitted to being the person who had leaked the documents, but in a interesting twist, it was revealed that he had used a fake name to work for and gain access to Heartland’s documents. Although this is illegal and Mr. Gleick should and will be punished to the full extent of the law, a look at the documents released gives us what can only be referred to as a disturbing insight into the small but lavishly funded group of think tanks, business interests, and politicians who want to not only create doubt in the almost unanimously agreed upon field of man made climate change, but want to create school curricula that undermine the well established findings of climate change, by either asserting that there is not consensus among climate scientists, or by just refuting it altogether.
This situation, although completely illegal, creates a muddied moral dilemma for those of us who have seen the effect these climate heretics have had on the majority of the poorly informed and easily manipulated voting public. Does the illegal action taken by Mr. Gleick justify the revelation into the corrupt and sinister business of climate denial? Given that the Heartland Institute is funded so well by industries that have a vested interest in the continued climate ignorance by the public, what they are doing is highly unethical by any definition of the word. The path this one enraged scientist took was against the law, but in the long term the unmasking of the conspiracy engaged in by climate change deniers was a necessity. If we ever want to be able to stop the undermining of real science and open our eyes and change our policy to be able to pass on a planet that is not in rapid decay on to our posterity we must look at the information he uncovered separately from his crime. I believe if we can correctly use the information Mr. Gleick will be punished for acquiring, we will create a better future for future generations and his crimes will be remembered. We must not let these findings be in vain.
Re-writing science to advance the agenda of America’s oil barons?
Thom Hartmann
http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2012/02/re-writing-science-advance-agenda-america’s-oil-barons
The right wing, coal-funded, climate change-denying think tank known as the Heartland Institute is desperately trying to cover up leaked documents containing budget and fundraising numbers and a plan to re-educate children in school with anti-climate-change pseudo-science.
After the documents were published on several online blogs – the Heartland Institute argued they were forged. But on Monday – climate researcher Peter Gleick admitted he was the source of the leak and that the documents are indeed authentic – and that the Heartland Institute was seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from people like the Koch brothers to re-write school curriculums.
I guess if 99.9% scientists disagree – then you just have to re-write science to advance the agenda of America’s oil barons.
Gleick apology over Heartland leak stirs ethics debate among climate scientists
Scientist Peter Gleick apologises for ‘serious lapse in judgment and ethics’, but supporters say Heartland remains the villain
Suzanne Goldenberg
21 February 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/gleick-apology-heartland-leak-ethics-debate?newsfeed=true
Excerpt:
The outing of the researcher who exposed the Heartland Institute’s efforts to discredit climate change has thrown the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates raging on Tuesday over whether to brand his actions heroic, or misguided.
Peter Gleick, a water scientist and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted in a blogpost on Monday night to using a false name to dupe the thinktank into sending him confidential board materials, which he then forwarded to campaigners and journalists.
He apologised for the deception – which he described as “a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics” – but added in the blog post published at the Huffington Post: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts – often anonymous, well-funded and co-ordinated – to attack climate science.”
Gleick’s admission – nearly a week after Heartland’s financial plans and donors list was put online – set off a fierce online debate about whether his actions made him a hero or a villain, and whether he had helped or set back the cause of climate change.
He suffered his first fallout on Tuesday, when he decided against taking up a new position on a board that fights for science education in schools. Gleick was to have headed a new venture defending climate science in classrooms.
The National Centre for Science Education said it had accepted his decision not to take up a board post, and that it did not condone his action.
For some campaigners, such as Naomi Klein, Gleick was an unalloyed hero, who should be sent some “Twitter love”, she wrote on Tuesday.
“Heartland has been subverting well-understood science for years,” wrote Scott Mandia, co-founder of the climate science rapid response team. “They also subvert the education of our schoolchildren by trying to ‘teach the controversy’ where none exists.”
Oh I know I’m just saying that I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Bdaman,
Now you’re quoting people who leave comments at Huffpo? You can do better than that!
Ms. Elaine I was reading the comments over at the link to Huffpo you provided. Below is a comment copied from their section. Kinda sums it up for me and I think well said. For you or anyone to paint or portray Peter Glieck as some type of hero is sad. By doing so you are condoning his actions and justifying what he did in the same manner Gene H did with Occupy by saying what Peter Glieck did was for the greater good. It could very well turn out to be that he is a hero in the long run but for the skeptics side. Taking a subject that appeared to be settled to a whole new level.
From the comment section at Huffpo
The Altantic has done an excellent job covering this affair. The story has already moved from the “fake ID” angle to the assertion that Gleik actually forged the document in question. Analysis of the memo’s writing style and the inconsistent timelines of the memo’s publication are offered up as evidence that Gleik was the forger.
Secondly, this scandal is different than climate gate in at least 2 key respects: 1) no one has claimed forgery in c-gate, and 2) the c-gate emails showed publicly-funded scientists conspiring to evade a FOIA request and slander their critics. Plus, there are more emails to come – we don’t yet know the scope of deception.
I am not qualified to assess the quality of the climate research. However, I am genuinely curious why the small priesthood of climatetologists has not shared their source data with others and indeed seems to be going out of their way to hide/fudge the data? Without reliable data, how can anyone assert what global temperatures are doing?
Off topic–but on the subject of science:
Transistor Single Atom In Size Created By Australian Scientists
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/19/transistor-single-atom-in-size_n_1288158.html?ref=science
Excerpt:
Just when you thought electronic devices couldn’t get any smaller comes word that Australian scientists have fabricated a transistor out of a single atom.
Transistors–semiconductor devices that amplify and switch electronic signals–are considered the building blocks of computers.
The researchers created the minute device–a phosphorous atom precisely positioned on a silicon crystal–using a scanning tunneling microscope inside a vacuum chamber. The transistor is not a commercially available product but is believed to represent an important step toward the development of next-generation “quantum” computers of unprecedented processing capabilities.
“This is the first time anyone has shown control of a single atom in a substrate with this level of precise accuracy,” Dr. Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication at the University of New South Wales and one of the researchers behind the breakthrough, said in a written statement.
How bout this. This is a link to a graph of the Antarctic Ice Core Data showing the reconstructed temperature of earth for the last 400,000 years. Can someone show me the difference between man made global warming and earths natural warming.
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/
Oh Peter, you’re going to jail.
The shadows high on the darker side
Behind those doors, it’s a wilder ride
You can make a break, you can win or lose
That’s a chance you take, when the heat’s on you
When the heat is on
Oh-wo-ho, oh-wo-ho
Caught up in the action I’ve been looking out for you
Oh-wo-ho, oh-wo-ho
(Tell me can you feel it)
(Tell me can you feel it)
(Tell me can you feel it)
The heat is on, the heat is on, the heat is on
Oh it’s on the street, the heat is on
and it now appears that Gleick, feeling the heat, again ROTFLMAO, had no choice but to confess as Ross Kaminsky over at the spectator just basically came out and accused Gleick.
For you’re listening pleasure
Here were the very first clues and could be why the gubment chooses to store tweets.
from the Atlantic
If you want to look for the author of the fake memo, then look for somebody who tweets the word “anti-climate”. you’ll find it. Look for somebody on the west coast ( the time zone the document was scanned in)
You’ll find somebody who doesnt know how to use parenthesis or commas, both in this memo and in other things he has written.
you’ll find he mentions himself in the memo
that’s all the clues for now. of course its all just speculation. Note, he’s not tweeted for a couple days. very rare for him.
damn SB writes
Anon Nurse thanks for the link to the Atlantic. I assumed becasue you were behind in the story that the link was to a story I had already linked to. Just finished reading it. There’s truth to one’s writing style. It’s amazing how one person’s analysis of how someone tweets and rights nailed or at least got everyone pointing at Gleick. Thanks, this shows you are someone with an open mind.
SB their
Ha Ha funny Raff, you have to be on the other side to be on the gravy train.
The funny part is that I have time on my side. The facts are becoming abundantly clear and there will be no way to “hide the decline”
Global temperatures are plummeting now hence the reason why the CRU revised there data in mid January and confirmed that we are somewhat in a cooling trend and the warmist/alarmist are feeling the heat. ROTFLMAO.
The proof will be indisputable over the next few years as atmospheric CO2 continues to rise unabated and IF the global temperature continues to fall. I say if because every doomsday article written always says that scientist say that IF we don’t act now it MAY be to late.
Also don’t know if you watch NBC Nightly News. I do every night. I mentioned this the other day and it is also becoming abundantly clear. Use to be that every weather related story Brian Williams or who ever did the story would link it to Climate Change. They don’t mention that word anymore. Savannah Guthrie did one on winters death grip on Europe and how the death toll exceeds 600. No mention of climate change. She made one error though she mentioned that it’s there second in a row. It’s there third. Brian Williams did one on the skiers that died in an avalanche, Said the NW U.S. is experiencing one of their worst avalanche seasons. No mention of Climate Change.
and how much at the expense of taxpayers did it cost to clean and patrol Occupy
NEW YORK (AP) – During the first two months of the nationwide Occupy protests, the movement that is demanding more out of the wealthiest Americans cost local taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services, according to a survey by The Associated Press.
however the actual cost is much higher.Verum Serum updated the total cost estimates on Wednesday.Total: $18,450,999
Occupy Asheville – $170,000
Occupy Atlanta – $652,000
Occupy Austin – $110,000
Occupy Boston – $575,000
Occupy Charlotte – $105,000
Occupy Chicago – $49,000
Occupy Cincinnati – $128,000
Occupy Des Moines – $7,800
Occupy DC – $870,000
Occupy Denver – $365,000
Occupy Eugene – $20,000
Occupy Fresno – $110,000
Occupy LA – $120,000 plus estimated $400,000 to repair the lawn
Occupy Long Beach – $40,000
Occupy Minnesota – $400,000
Occupy Nashville – $4,500
Occupy New York – $7,000,000
Occupy Oakland – $2,400,000 for police overtime alone
Occupy Philadelphia – $500,000
Occupy Phoenix – $200,000
Occupy Portland – $750,000 3.5 million + $50,000 to repair damaged parks
Occupy Providence – $9, 000
Occupy Raleigh – $60, 000
Occupy Sacramento – $300,000
Occupy San Diego – $2,400,000
Occupy San Francisco – $100,000
Occupy St. Louis – $2,200
Occupy Seattle – $625,999
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=32348
and they’re still not done.
Ignored 911 Call Turns Fatal In Berkeley; Police Busy With Occupy Protest
BERKELEY (KCBS) — Berkeley Police acknowledge they didn’t immediately respond to a call in the hills that would eventually result in a homicide this past Saturday.
Officers were preparing for an Occupy protest headed to UC Berkeley from Oakland and said it didn’t appear to be an emergency.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/02/21/ignored-911-call-turns-fatal-in-berkeley-police-busy-with-occupy-protest/
Hmmmmm. (scratching chin)