Just Who Has Bailed On The Heartland Institute?

Yesterday, I noticed this in the UK Gaurdian re. The Heartland Institute's ongoing travails:

A number of other experts meanwhile began cutting their ties with Heartland, according to a tally kept by a Canadian blogger BigCityLiberal.

But I noted that they just linked  to my blog front page.  So I thought I would work up a proper tally of those Heartland "experts" who have responded to my email re the now infamous billboard:

On May 11, Heartland Institute fellow Dennis Avery became the first to bite, penning this passionate if somewhat cracked defense of the institute.  You can see the form letter I've been using  underneath his  diatribe.

On Sunday, May 13th, well-known climatologist Chris Landsea became the first respondent to inform me that he no longer wished to be associated with Heartland.   Given his centrality to some aspects of the AGW debate, Mr. Landsea's renunciation generated a number of MSM stories, here and here.

On Monday, May 14th, both Miklos Zagoni of Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and well-known medical entomologist Paul Reiter asked that Heartland remove them from their list of experts.

On May 15th, I received stirring defenses of the Institute from Sonja A Boehmer-Christiansen, S. Fred Singer, and Brian Valentine, all of which I noted in this post.  I also had a brief contact I had with G. Cornelis van Kooten (discussed in the same post), who insisted that he had no idea what I was on about, but whose name was removed from the list somewhere between the 14th and 15th.  This was the first suggestion from any of the Heartland experts that the Institute might have volunteered them for the position without asking consent.  I would also note that Dr.Sonja A.Boehmer-Christiansen has since disappeared from the list, though this may be the result of an accident on HI's part.  I have emailed her regarding the matter but received no response.  


Later on the 15th, I was contacted by economist Henry "Jake" Jacoby, who told me that he would contact HI and have his entry deleted.  This is the first confirmed case where Heartland slapped up someone on their website as an expert without letting that person know in advance.

On May 16th, Joe Bast posted an open letter to all those scholars who had "abandoned" HI, in which he bitched at length.

On Saturday, May 19th, Economist Peter Cramton  informed me by email that he too would no longer be associated with HI.

So far, Mr. Cramton is the last person on the Heartland list to have contacted me.  In addition, I am informed that Roger Pielke Jr. has had his entry deleted, though this was not due to efforts on my part.  And Benny Peiser disappeared from the list way back on May 5th or so, presumably because of the billboards but well before my email campaign began.

So far that makes about 80 emails sent but unanswered.  I don't expect too many more responses, although I think some U.S. academic institutions may be in the middle of final exams, so perhaps when those are done  I might get another note or two.

Update: Sometime between about May 24th and 26th Bjørn Lomborg's name was removed from the Heartland list.  He confirms his removal here.

Roger Pielke Jr. Does Jesus

Roger Pielke Jr. has assumed his familiar martyr's pose, and accuses me (as well as others) of issuing threats against him. The occasion is his An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower Troposphere, co-authored with Pielke Sr. and several others, which purports to explain differences in long-term temperature trends as reported by satellite vs. surface readings. Now, a number of issues have already come up with respect to the paper (see, for example, here and here). At a more basic level, though, Pielke Jr. seems more than a little bit unclear of what the paper is supposed to be about. For example, Pielke Sr. has written a blog-post entitled New Paper Documents A Warm Bias In The Calculation Of A Multi-Decadal Global Average Surface Temperature Trend, and yet here Pielke Jr. appears to be contradicting his co-author:

No. The title of the post is "Evidence that Global Temperature Trends Have Been Overstated". It might have been more accurate to write "global atmospheric temperature trends" but it clearly does not say "surface temperature trend"...

What this starts to remind me of is the recent De Freitas and Co. paper, in which the co-authors began recanting their own result before other climate scientists while at the same time pushing that result to folks like Watts, Morano, and others of the same ilk.

In other words, is the purpose of the paper the paper, or is the paper merely a trigger for a dustup in the blog world, leading (hopefully?) to another "Global Warming is Enviro/Nazi Garbage" piece on the Glenn Beck show and in other friendly media outlets?

Which brings us to the so called "threats". I would not speak for Michael Tobis (whose a bit ticked at me this morning), but his point, that there should exist

...a mechanism to prevent authors from promoting public misinterpretations of their publications. That sort of behavior should have consequences.

...is well taken, although the odds of creating a rule that would prevent an author from publishing junk and selling it through the blogosphere as diamonds is vanishingly small. America has no law against bullshit, and will not for the foreseeable future.

My point, though, is that such behavior already does have consequences. If Pielke Jr. insists on treating the real actors in the scientific debate as mere walk-on players in a drama in which he is the star and the audience includes the Limbaughs and Beck's of the world, then he will find, if he has not already, that this stage will soon be the only one upon which he can play. His work will be ignored by the scientific community while simultaneously embraced by birthers, truthers, Ron Paul supporters, young earth creationists, people that think Jesus is coming in a UFO, and the like--America's right-wing fringe, in other words. Barring a catastrophe during next year's mid-term elections, this will be a impoverished and lonely place for scientists for a long, long time to come. Mr. Pielke risks consigning himself to the dust-bin of history.

And that's my advice to Mr. Pielke. If he thinks its a threat, then he is incorrect.

Oh, and Mark Bahner asks me in the comments: What do you see as scientifically incorrect about their paper?

Well, for one thing, even if the analysis proposed is 100% accurate, the use of the term "bias" is hugely misleading, and assumes that satellite readings are the gold standard to which surface readings must conform (or else be dismissed). But if you reverse that assumption without changing a single other thing in the paper, you could just as easily argue that that the satellite readings show a cool bias. In fact, neither line of reasoning is valid. If the paper explains anything--and it may not--it shows why the two sets of readings are different. No more or less than that.

Hottest July Ever?

Though Dr. Spencer tells us, via Roger Pielke Sr., that the readings might be skewed a tad high by satellite drift, nevertheless it looks very much as though July 2009 will go into the record books as the hottest July ever recorded on a worldwide basis. Note that the yellow line represents July 2005, and that the deep red line for July 1998 remains buried in the pack. These two years, depending on where the numbers come from, are generally considered to be the hottest on record.

Whatever the final July ranking, it seems pretty clear (as Roger Pielke Jr. suggests here) that the notion that the planet is going through a phase of global cooling is no longer sustainable.

Pielke Sr. Responds...

...to continuing record high temperature readings from the UAH satellite. Specifically, I asked him when we might know the result of this "short term test" of Roy Spencer's hypothesis (vs.the IPCC's, read through link). He responded::

Thanks for alerting me to your weblog. I contacted them [UAH], and they reported there is a drift in the part of the diurnal cycle that the AMSU sensor samples. I have urged them to write a weblog on this issue to clarify as all of us are comparing with their long term average.

In the July analyses of UAH and RSS (which is from a different set of satellites without the drift) we will see if this record warm anomaly appears. I have been informed that since 1992, the RSS and UAH data closely agree with each other. The differences that do occur provide us with a measure of the uncertainty in the assessment of these climate metrics.

All of us should follow this data closely (along with the upper ocean heat data) as I feel a much better consensus can be achieved if we focus on this information, rather than the use of a global average surface temperature trend to assess global warming.

And later:

On the two hypotheses, however, we need to go through the current El Nino to see if the heat remains elevated or returns to a long term average. The upper ocean heat data will also be key in this assessment.

Given the other side of El Nino: some time in 2010 or 2011.

Roy Spencer Refuted By Own Website?

As noted here, July 14th proved to be the warmest day on record, according to data at the UAH website, a website co-authored by none other than Dr. Roy Spencer. Until, it would appear, July 18th:

A particularly interesting take on this comes from Roger Pielke Sr. He wrote on July 16th:

This record event is an effective test of two hypotheses.

Hypothesis #1: Roy Spencer’s hypothesis on the role of circulation patterns in global warming (e.g. see) might explain most or all of the current anomaly since it clearly is spatially very variable, and its onset was so sudden. If the lower atmosphere cools again to its long term average or lower, this would support Roy’s viewpoint.

Hypothesis #2: Alternatively, if the large anomaly persists, it will support the claims by the

IPCC and others (e.g. see Cool Spells Normal in Warming World) that well-mixed greenhouse gas warming is the dominate climate forcing in the coming decades and is again causing global warming after the interruption of the last few years.

Only time will tell which is correct, however, we now have short term information to test the two hypotheses. The results of this real world test will certainly influence my viewpoint on climate science.

I guess the question is: how long must we wait for the results of this real world test? At this moment, it seems to be going against Mr. Spencer.

Who The Heck Is Roger Pielke Sr.?

Roger Pielke Sr. does not like to call himself a global warming denier, believing rather that CO2 is merely one of the forcings (even merely one of the human forcings) that are having an effect on recent increases in the global mean temperature, which beliefs put him within but at the conservative edge of the international consensus on the issue.

Until recently, however, Pielke Sr. ran a weblog heavily frequented by climate change deniers called "Climate Science", in which he offered his comments on recently released papers, his own and those of other researchers, pertaining to the various aspects of, well, climate science.

This site was discontinued in early September but, and here is the point of the post, it has now returned as an "information service" (comments section closed). Whatever your position on these issues, I would heartily recommend frequent visits. Pielke's personal obsessions aside, there is probably no better or more inclusive on-line source of links to/information about new papers, which are often extremely difficult to track down otherwise.

In his latest post, Pielke discusses some of the projects he and his research team have been working on lately, including:

...a preliminary poll of climate scientists, we have found that a significant minority disagree with the 2007 IPCC conclusions, either concluding that is it too conservative with respect to the risk of human-CO2 caused climate change, or overstates the relative role of this specific climate forcing.

I wrote about this survey here, where I took issue with the way Pielke and his co-authors claimed their findings demonstrated that the "science was not settled". If I were to give my own interpretation of the significance of their findings, I would say they show that:

1) within the community of climate scientists, there are no pure deniers.
2) while a small minority of climate scientists believe that the IPCC conclusions "overstate the risk" of AGW, about 75 per cent believe that the effects are going to be at least as bad as the IPCC position.

...which is the sound of settled science to me.

Is The Science Settled Or What? Notes On A New Survey

A new survey has appeared which claims to show that the notion of a "consensus" existing among climate scientists re the causes/effects of Global Warming is incorrect. This claim seems to be misleading.

The survey, conducted by Fergus Brown, James Annan (FRCGC), and Roger Pielke Sr. (University of Colorado), is entitled "Is there agreement amongst climate scientists on the IPCC AR4 WG1?". In their abstract, they put their findings this way:

An online poll of scientists' opinions shows that, while there is strong agreement on the important role of anthropogenically-caused radiative forcing of CO2 in climate change and with the largest group supporting the IPCC report, there is not a universal agreement among climate scientists about climate science as represented in the IPCC's WG1. Claims that the human input of CO2 is not an important climate forcing, or that 'the science is more or less settled', are found to be false in our survey.

The problem I have has to do with how the phrase "the science is settled" gets employed within the survey as opposed to how it has been typically been employed in the broader debate over climate change. Our three authors state their result in general terms as follows:

No scientists were willing to admit to the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having any significant effect on climate [0%]. In total, 18% responded that the IPCC AR4 WG1 Report probably overstates the role of CO2, or exaggerates the risks implied by focusing on CO2-dominated Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), to a greater or lesser degree. A further 17% expressed the opinion that the Report probably underestimates or seriously underestimates the consequences of anthropogenic CO2-induced AGW and that the associated risks are more severe than is implied in the report. The remaining 65% expressed some degree of concurrence with the report's science basis, of which the largest group [47% of all respondents] selected option 5. The exact response rates are given in Figure 1.

Well, okay, but I would argue that "the science is settled", as it gets deployed in the broader discussion, means something like it is settled that 1) the planet is warming, 2) it is warming because of rising C02 levels which 3) are primarily caused by human activity. In other words, within the broader context, if

Claims that the human input of CO2 is not an important climate forcing...are found to be false in our survey.

...then the science is more or less settled, and the rest is quibbling over detail.

And using my three part explication of "It is agreed that the science is settled." (making reference to the authors' Histogram of Responses), 77% of the survey respondents agree with all three of its parts (choose response number 5 or higher as being representative of their views). I don't know what exactly it takes to make a "consensus", but if over three out of every four climate scientists concur, I would argue that you have a consensus.

And of course the issue is that as the results of this survey play out in the larger political arena, the authors' claim that the "science is not settled" will be interpreted to be a refutation of the claim that climate scientists do not agree with the three elements of my definition (or something more like my definition than theirs).

Which is why, I would argue, that it is already getting quoted with approval in places like this.

(PS. James Annan has noted, in a personal communication that,

Of course the "science is settled" phase has a bit of a life of its own (settled for what purposes? I don't see climate scientists resigning in droves to do other things). For that very reason, I wouldn't have chosen this wording myself, but I didn't think it sufficiently wrong to veto it.

Well, the wording chosen has given hope and comfort to some in the denialist movement...)

Climate Change Skeptic And Creationist Has New Paper Out

Many people have noted the similarity between some of the tactics employed by Climate Change Denialists and Intelligent Designers. Specifically, sow doubt and demand that the media "report the controversy". But before hearing about Roy Spencer, who has guest posts on both Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science and Anthony Watt's "Watts Up With That Blog" , as well as a new paper out, I had never heard of a climate change denier who was in addition an acknowledged IDer. In 2005, Mr. Spencer wrote:

And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

Now, astrologers, water witches, La Rouchians...the ranks of the deniers is filled with their like. But a Creationist? Surely Climate Change Denialism is on the march!

And seeing this guy appear on Watt's site doesn't surprise me. What is strange is the connection with Roger Pielke Sr., who appears to have forgotten the old adage about laying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.

But since he's stooping to this level: yo Roger! I have a midget who insists its all down to C02, and a talking duck that taps out climatological equations with his beak. Can they do a guest post too?

h/t to Steve Bloom.

Pielke and Surface Stations: What Is The Connection?

Anthony Watts is a retired meteorologist and climate change skeptic who maintains a blog here. He is also the man behind the Surface Stations project, an attempt to provide physical site survey data for the entire United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN). Or, to put it less sympathetically, a cheap stunt to stir up muck and provide ammo to the forces of the Climate Change Denial movement.

In any case, last week Dick Little from the Paradise Post wrote as follows re the Surface Stations project:

[Watts is] challenging allegations from NOAA that temperatures are rising. He reports a number of weather stations he checked had thermometers in places that would record higher temperatures than the actual ground temperature. He has a Web site with pictures to back up his research.

Working with Penn State climatologist Dr. Michael Mann, Watts found most of the problems were in urban areas where temperatures are allegedly on the rise. He said rural temperatures appear to be about the same as in past years.

The first thing to note here is that, while Watts cast the goals of his project in neutral terms on his website, every right-wing columnist that comes within 100 feet of him (Hannity and Limbaugh, for example) winds up reporting that Watts is "challenging" the science behind global warming, and pretty darned effectively too.

The second thing to note is the claim in the second paragraph that Watts is collaborating with Michael Mann. I alerted Mr. Watts to this clearly erroneous statement about a week ago, and today Dick Little issued a correction:

One thing more: In my article last week on climate change I wrongfully attributed Anthony Watts working with Professor Michael Mann of Ohio University. He is working with Prof. Roger Pielke of Colorado State.

I e-mailed an apology to Professor Mann who graciously accepted it.

However, the correction itself raises a couple of issues, because although Roger Pielke Sr. has expressed his support for the Surface Stations project, he is a legitimate scientist, a respected climatologist who is probably uninterested in seeing his reputation suffer by being observed in close proximity to what seems to be fast becoming a Climate Denialist tar-baby.

So lets examine the claim Mr. Watts has put forward "working" with Dr. Pielke: temperatures are only rising at problematic "urban" stations, while "rural temperatures appear to be about the same as in past years. "

I wonder if Dr. Pielke would like to through his weight behind these claims, especially in light of the criticism raised against them here and here.

PS. It occurs to me that columnist Dick Little's name will appear in the Paradise, CA phonebook as "Little, Richard" or, even worse, "Little, Dick". But I guess we all have our cross to bear.

The Battleground Shifts...

These days, yet another screed from the NRSP's Tom Harris wouldn't normally be worth the effort of a post. He is merely a faux scientist, a low grade Denier, and his Natural Resources Stewardship Group a discredited front for the Canadian wing of Big Oil. (Unfortunately, I think that Green Party Leader Elizabeth May's decision to take him on in this set of battling Op Eds is likely to do more to maintain his profile than her own). However, in amongst the same-old same-old there are signals as to where the Denialist industry will next attempt to take the debate:

Activists maintain that “the consensus of world scientists agree” that our CO2 emissions are causing a climate crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Climate science is an immature discipline in which intense debate rages among experts about the causes of climate change. Variations in the brightness of the sun and “land use change” are the leading contenders believed to be responsible for most of the past century’s modest warming

Note the two "leading contenders": solar cycles...and a new one..."land use change" (or at least a quick search of the NRSP website and a buzz through Google shows that this term begins turning up more often in June of this year). Since the "Blame the Sun" crowd has suffered a major set-back in recent days, expect to start hearing more about "land use changes": about Urban Heat Islands, and how the instruments cannot be trusted to give accurate readings due to (incompetence, cover-ups, and) the ever increasing amount of paved space around our cities. In other words, "Land Use Change" will become what "Solar Cycles" has been: a vague theory to invoke as an alternative to the conventional science so it doesn't look like the Denialists are merely engaged in "negative campaigning".

And expect to hear the names Roger Pielke Sr. and Anthony Watts come up more frequently. Pielke Sr. is a real, honest-to-God meteorologist from Colorado State University, and I would probably call him the Alan Feduccia of climate science. His website is a mix of legitimate cautionary tales re climate change research (some glaciers aren't retreating!), and the center of a kind of personality cult where Deniers with some facility in math come to pray to his courage in the face of the "great swindle". As for Anthony Watts, he leads a gang of rogue "citizen scientists" who have currently fanned out across the lower 48 with their digital cameras in an effort to embarrass the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) with pictures of Al Gore BBQing in close proximity to temperature sensors, thus single-handedly creating an upward bias in instrument readings of the climate record. These pictures as they emerge are then posted on far-right websites where people who haven't a clue as to what they mean nevertheless comment knowingly on the failures of mainstream Climatology.

Unfortunately, this end of the science tends to be the "mathiest", and meeting or even understanding the arguments likely to come up will likely require boning up on some of the crap you slept through during college. But this is where I see the focus shifting over the course of the next six months. Get out your spreadsheets and your old stats textbooks, people!

The Surface Stations Project: Science Auditers or Enviro Vigilantes?

Anthony Watts is a climate change skeptic and member of what I would call the "Climate Audit" movement, in which citizens with some small grounding in the relevant fields attempt to bring mainstream scientists in the debate over Global Warming "to account". For example, Mr. Watts has launched Surface Stations, a website created to document deficiencies in the sites used by the United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN), which record changes in surface temperatures around the U.S. His goal is to call into question "the whole surface temperature record ", a project which would, if successful, put a good part of the foundation behind contemporary AGW science into question. To contribute to this project, you surf over Surface Stations, download the appropriate reporting forms, and traipse off to visit your local station, where you are expected to provide a photographic and written report.

Except that the NOAA/NCDC (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and National Climatic Data Center) have been "throwing up road-blocks"-- essentially banning Watts' volunteers from their stations, and pulling information on these stations from their website:

It sounds as though you’ve used the system enough that once you’ve located a station using the search, you’re clicking on the station name hyperlink and opening a separate station details window. The managing party for a station has always been visible by clicking on the “Other Parties” tab. In the case of NWS Coop stations (the USHCN research network relies upon a subset of stations in the NWS Coop program), this is usually the NWS office that administers the site. This information was previously included at the bottom of the Identity tab’s “form view,” but was removed from that view early this week because in some cases it also revealed the name of the Cooperative observer.

Cooperative observers are volunteers who donate their time in the interests of the public good with a reasonable expectation that their personal information will remain private. It is the NCDC’s policy to protect observer details, based upon Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Update, Vol.X, No. 2, 1989, which exempts the application of FOIA in certain cases and establishes privacy protection decisions in accordance with the Privacy Actof 1974 (2004 edition). This exemption applies when the personal privacy interest is greater than any qualifying public interest for disclosure.

Naturally Mr. Watts is "shocked, shocked" by this, and suspects a conspiracy.

However, if you look at past actions by the various participants in the Climate Audit movement, they have often crossed the line into the downright assholish. For instance, there's Steve Mcintyre's now famous inadvertant DOS attack on NASA, which was launched in an attempt to access GISS information that (it turns out) he could have just asked for, and which got him booted from NASA computers. Furthermore, both McIntyre and Pielke sling the term "cover-up" at pretty much any piece of research they don't like, and the wilder among their readers seem to think that Al Gore is ferried around in a black helicopter, and that the weather stations under investigation are likely to harbour a basement full of U.N. soldiers.

It is from this pool of readers that Mr. Watt's is drawing his volunteers.

So I for one take the NOAA/NCDC comments noted above at face value: they are simply attempting to protect their volunteers from harassment by the kind of fruit-loops that might come out of the woodwork to join Mr. Watt's project.


And I would make the following suggestion that might help Mr. Watts weed possible kooks from his pool of volunteers. Sir, while there is data on the various surface stations at your site, there is no information at all on your volunteers. It therefore does not seem possible for the operator of one of these stations to check names and contact information against a master list to determine (perhaps by a return call) whether or not the voice at the other end of the phone line is a member of your team or not. There also seems to be no process by which station operators can lodge complaints against your volunteers.

I don't know that making such changes will get your people onto the sites they wish to investigate. I do, however, think that will remove some of the stench of wingnuttery from your project, and will increase its credibility in the eyes of legitimate media sources (ie folks beyond Rush Limbaugh and Fox)