[Update Feb. 15. John Mashey has released a very timely report on Heartland and SEPP, Fake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax, at Desmogblog (PDF 5Mb) with summaries from Richard Littlemore, and Mashey himself.]
[Update Feb. 15. Several news outles (e.g. the Guardian) are reporting that Heartland has branded one of the Heartland documents, the 2012 Climate Strategy, to be a forgery. (See also the Heartland press release). Since its authenticity is in question, I have decided to remove quotes from it as well as the link to that particular document. The Heartland projects discussed remain the same. I have removed one paragraph quoting the "expanded communication strategy".]
DesmogBlog today released an archive of Heartland Institute budget and strategy documents apparently leaked by someone with high level access.
An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self “Heartland Insider” has released the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.
The documents give a clear picture of Heartland money flows, showing exact amounts being paid to Heartland employees, and more importantly, the scientists involved in the ongoing NIPCC effort to disrupt the forthcoming IPCC AR5.
Heartland’s list of major projects also includes a new K-12 “global warming curriculum”. The curriculum will promote the idea that anthropogenic climate change is a “major scientific controversy”, and seems to steer clear of the actual science.
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).
This “teach the controversy” approach (as opposed to teaching the actual science) seems similar to the anti-science effort of the Fraser Institute a couple of years back.
And most of Heartland’s funding sources have now been laid bare, with the notable exception of the tightly guarded identity of a single “anonymous donor” who has given $13 million over the last five years. Other donors range from the Charles Koch foundation down through several recognizable tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, and even Microsoft.
Here are three two of the most important released documents, with some highlights from each.
The Fraser Institute recently issued a report on Canadian air quality that achieved moderate coverage, but little critical scrutiny (apart from a devastating critique from the Suzuki Foundation). In Canadian Environmental Indicators – Air Quality, Fraser Senior Economic Researcher Joel Wood claims that concentrations of five major pollutants, including the particularly worrying duo of fine particulate matter and ground level ozone, are in decline. Wood even accuses ENGOs and the Canadian Medical Association of trying to “scare” the public with claims that are “exaggerated or outright wrong”, particularly in their concerns about ozone.
But in a shocking development (or perhaps not), it turns out that Environment Canada’s official air quality indicator for ozone shows a statistically significant worsening over the last two decades, while both fine particulate matter and ozone show no significant trend in the last decade. The Environment Canada indicators, the very existence of which appears to have been totally missed by Wood and the various reviewers of his work, are based on complete warm season averages weighted by population, and thus provide a much better indicator than Wood’s ad hoc analysis.
This same ineptitude can also be seen in Wood’s short climate policy analyses, where he gets the basics totally wrong, while questioning the validity of climate science itself. Thus the ignorance, incompetence and bias of Canada’s self-styled “leading public policy think tank” is demonstrated once again.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
Tagged air quality, Fraser Institute, Joel Wood, ozone, Ross McKitrick
Here are a couple of items currently in the news.
Fallout from the Wall Street Journal 16 op-ed continues. The Journal printed a response from actual climate scientists, apparently drafted by NCAR scientists Kevin Trenberth. Meanwhile Patrick Michaels weighs in at Forbes.
There are many other takedowns of the WSJ 16 piece out there; here is one from Media Matters.
There has also been a ragged rollout of the plan for a more rigourous oil sands monitoring program, with attendant confusion about whether there will be independent governance. As far as I can tell, Alberta is willing to go along with this in order to ensure the program’s credibility, but the federal environment minister Peter Kent seems cool to the idea.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
Recently I noted that planned expansion of the Alberta oil sands can not possibly be reconciled with the Harper government’s promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. (And Simon Fraser climate policy researcher Mark Jaccard apparently agrees). And I also exposed the ever mounting number of evident links between the Conservative government, including Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, and the pro-oilsands EthicalOil.org PR group (a.k.a the Ethical Oil Institute).
From: Quesnel Cariboo-Sentinel
Now Oliver has upped the ante on both contentions spectacularly. Answering questions from NDP environment critic Megan Leslie in the Canadian Parliament today, Oliver repeated a previously debunked claim that oil sands emissions (not intensity, but actual emissions) have fallen. And he implied that emission intensity (i.e. GHGs per barrel) continues to fall. Those same mistaken assertions were also made by former Ethical Oil executive director Alykhan Velshi in the ironically titled “Myths and Lies” section of EthicalOil.org, albeit with incomplete hasty corrections later on. And Oliver never did come clean on his understanding of climate science, doing little to reverse the impression that anti-science contrarians have gained a significant foothold in Ottawa, and that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have no intention of meeting their climate commitments.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
Tagged Conservatives, Ethical Oil, Joe Oliver, Megan Leslie, Stephen Harper
Mark Jaccard is arguably Canada’s foremost climate policy researcher. He was a key architect of British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell’s landmark climate change program, featuring North America’s first comprehensive escalating carbon tax. And he led a comprehensive 2007 modeling study, Climate Leadership, Economic Prosperity that detailed the path for Canada to meet, or even exceed, its GHG emissions target for 2020.
So when Jaccard has something to say, politicians and interested citizens on all sides of the climate policy debate generally listen. And Jaccard is speaking out against the Northern Gateway pipeline, stating in no uncertain times that ongoing expansion of the Alberta oil sands, including its proposed network of pipelines, can not be reconciled with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s promises and commitments to mitigate climate change.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
A couple of timely topics suggest themselves:
1) The Keystone XL application has been turned down by the Obama administration, but the applicant Trans Canada has been invited to reapply and will do so. In other words, a final decision has been delayed until 2013, which was the situation before the Republicans tried to force the issue.
2) Hansen et al have released their 2011 review, “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects”.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
As a once in a generation Canadian pipeline review process gets underway, the rhetoric around the massive Northern Gateway project has heated up noticeably. The Conservative government and the Ethical Oil pro-industry group seemed to take turns ratcheting up attacks on environmental groups opposing the project almost daily. Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver may have set a new low in his recent attacks on those who would “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda”, backed by “foreign special interest groups”, not to mention “billionaire socialists … like George Soros”. The eerie echoes of Ethical Oil’s recent advertising campaign and back-and-forth timing have led some to recall previously discussed ties between Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and key Ethical Oil figures Ezra Levant and former executive director Alykhan Velshi (now safely back in the PMO).
But it turns out there are other interesting ties behind the scenes. An examination of the web server hosting EthicalOil.org reveals a network of fifty or so websites, mainly on behalf of right-wing causes and politicians. The latter include two Conservative cabinet ministers, Velshi’s old boss immigration minister Jason Kenney and that scourge of foreign billionaire socialists, Joe Oliver. And it also points to the key involvement of Go Newclear Productions, a somewhat mysterious “full service digital agency with a focus on public affairs and politics”.
Go Newclear is headed up by none other than political wunderkind Hamish Marshall, already a veteran of both the PMO and the Conservative federal council – and husband of hapless Ethical Oil spokesperson Kathryn Marshall. The other Go Newclear directors /officers (and presumed principals) are linked to the Conservative PR machine known as the Conservative Resources Group; radio and TV advertising specialist Brendan Jones left the CRG in 2009, while developer Travis Freeman, astonishingly enough, is still with the group. Not only that, but the Ethical Oil cluster of websites and Joe Oliver.ca form a distinct sub-group within the Go Newclear network, with unmistakeable signs of common development and a deployment seemingly aimed at obfuscating the link to Newclear team. So there is more than just common ideology tying EthicalOil.org to the Conservative PR machine; they also share digital service providers – and a lack of transparency.
“Canada’s message: The world and its climate be damned”. That headline on Jeffrey Simpson’s scathing commentary on Canada’s pending formal withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol said it all. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Simpson touched on several themes that have become staples at Deep Climate: the Canadian government’s hypocritical excuses for lack of action, the intellectually dishonest “ethical oil” argument, and the continued sly pandering to a political base of “climate deniers and skeptics”. These are all worthy topics to explore in the coming months, especially that last one.
But I want to turn today to an analysis of the Conservative government’s putative alternatives to Kyoto, namely the 2009 Copenhagen agreement, as well as the GHG reduction plans put forth in 2008 by Canada and the province Alberta (home to the oil sands and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper). That analysis confirms the contention of Jeffrey Simpson and others that the government of Canada is “mocking” the 2020 target agreed to only two years ago; the promised 17% reduction in annual GHG emissions (relative to 2005) is already out of reach. A big reason for this is an Alberta target (itself very unlikely to be met) that calls for a rise in GHG emissions until 2020. Not only that, but Alberta’s 2050 target, predicated on massive expansion of oil sands operations, is only 14% below 2005 levels, and sets Canada on a path that can not possibly be reconciled with the Harper government’s own stated long-term target, let alone any reasonable goal compatible with Canada’s responsibilities.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
Tagged Conservatives, Copenhagen, Kyoto, oil sands, Stephen Harper, Turning the Corner
[UPDATE, Nov. 30: I have added at the end a response from Ross McKitrick (originally posted as a comment at Judith Curry's website), along with my additional commentary. Also the third paragraph has been slightly amended to clarify that the two out-of-context Phil Jones quotes, misleadingly juxtaposed and reversed by McKitrick, were originally three months apart.]
Son of climategate? SwiftHack 2.0? Dejavugate (as in “deja vu all over again”)? Whichever moniker one prefers for the latest release of stolen CRU emails, it is very clear that a new round of out-of-context quote mining and error-filled “analysis” is already unfolding. And the leader out of the gate, so to speak, appears to be Ross McKitrick, whose recent National Post piece on the IPCC and the latest batch of stolen emails is now being spread far and wide.
In one particularly outrageous and error-filled passage, McKitrick accuses IPCC AR4 co-ordinating lead authors Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth of selecting their team of contributing authors solely on the basis of whether they agree with the pair’s scientific views. He even goes so far as to accuse Jones of “dismissing” (i.e. rejecting as a contributing author) one qualified expert who, supposedly in Jones’s own words, “has done a lot, but I don’t trust him.”
But the record clearly shows that it was Trenberth who made that last comment, and that he was expressing misgivings about the quality of the researcher’s work, not whether he was on the “right side” of scientific issues. And the expert in question, climatologist Joel Norris, was in fact selected by Trenberth as a contributing author. Even worse, McKitrick has reversed the order of the Jones quotes (originally three months apart) , taken them out of context, and then juxtaposed them to make it appear as if they were part of the same exchange. Meanwhile, an examination of the two separate email discussions show chapter co-ordinators trying to fill out their team with authors who will be able to contribute effectively, in complete contradiction to McKitrick’s central thesis.
Posted in Climate science disinformation
Tagged IPCC, Kevin Trenberth, National Post, Phil Jones, Ross McKitrick
 | Deep Climate on Heartland Institute budget and… |
 | Holly Stick on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Deep Climate on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Deep Climate on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Holly Stick on Heartland Institute budget and… |
 | PDA on Heartland Institute budget and… |
 | rumleyfips on Heartland’s “Anony… |
 | Willis Eschenbach on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Deep Climate on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Holly Stick on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Holly Stick on Heartland’s “Anony… |
| Deep Climate on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Holly Stick on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Holly Stick on Heartland Institute budget and… |
| Willis Eschenbach on Heartland Institute budget and… |
