To get the ball rolling, here are a few stories that caught my eye recently.

• Environment-energy policy analyst Mark Jaccard and a dozen other protesters were arrested in southern British Columbia following a blockade of trains delivering U.S. coal to the port of Delta.
• Margaret Munro of PostMedia reported that “government media minders” had been sent to an international polar conference to “monitor and record” Canadian scientists’ interactions with media, an initiative described as attempts to “muzzle” and “intimidate” the scientists. (This story was also also covered by the CBC).
• Alexis Stoymenoff of the Vancouver Observer reported that Koch foundations gave a further $150,000 to the Fraser Institute in 2010. Greenpeace and others had previously noted donations of more than $350,000 up to 2009, bringing the total Koch contribution to Fraser to $500,000. There is no word yet if this funding of  a radical libertarian group by foreign special interests will be investigated by the authorities. Meanwhile, environment minister Peter Kent ratcheted up the Harper government’s  attacks on environmental NGOs even further, accusing them of “money laundering”.
• The Guardian reported that the Heartland Institute put up the first in a planned series of billboards comparing believers in global warming to mass murderers, terrorists and tyrants, but was forced to pull it down within 24 hours after even their own supporters and sponsors objected.
• And, finally, Steve McIntyre has broken his recent silence to renew his attacks on CRU paleoclimatolists, accusing them of making “untruthful or deceptive” statements concerning Yamal and related tree-ring chronologies. He even went so far as to accuse Briffa et al of withholding an expanded Yamal-Urals regional “composite” from publication because it was not “in accordance” with “previous results”.

But in a shocking new development,  it turns out that two problematic overview articles by Wegman and his protege and congressional report co-author Yasmin Said in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics (WIREs CS), have been completely revised. Those revisions saw the  removal or rewriting of  massive swathes of copy-and-paste scholarship, as well as correction of many errors identified by myself and others. In each case, the comprehensive revisions came “at the request of the Editors-in-Chief and the Publisher”, following complaints to Wiley alleging wholesale plagiarism. But Wegman and Said also happen to be two of the three chief editors of WIREs CompStat, thus raising compelling concerns of conflict of interest, to say the least.

In fact, it is very clear that Wiley’s own process for handling misconduct cases was egregiously abused in favour of a face-saving “redo” manoeuvre. And this latest episode raises disturbing new questions about the role of the third WIREs CS editor-in-chief (and “hockey stick” congressional report co-author) David Scott, and indeed Wiley management itself, in enabling the serial misconduct of Wegman and Said.

BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION: A PAIR OF DUBIOUS PAPERS

Readers are no doubt be aware of dubious scholarship in the infamous 2006 Wegman Republican-commissioned report on paleoclimatology (not to mention shoddy analysis) and a follow-up 2008 article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis by Said, Wegman and two others  (retracted last year). Those two works were the subject of contradictory decisions in recently concluded misconduct proceedings at George Mason University. (Weirdly, even though the CSDA paper was retracted last year, and the plagiarism finding was upheld by GMU, the paper is still listed in Wegman’s recent publications as if nothing has happened).

However, in 2011 the same pattern of error-ridden and lightly edited copy-and-paste scholarship was discovered in two long review articles by Wegman and Said in WIREs CS (which, as previously mentioned, they also co-edit along with David Scott). In order of exposure, these were:

• “Color Theory and Design” (2011): Discussion part 1 & part 2 with side-by-side analysis.
• “Roadmap for Optimization” (2009): Discussion and side-by-side analysis.

Both papers were the subject of separately filed complaints to Wiley within a short time of the discovery of apparent plagiarism. The complaint timelines are outlined in John Mashey’s just-released study of various investigations at GMU, See No Evil at George Mason University (see section 5.2 on page 25 of the full report).

Mashey’s chronology also makes clear that little substantive response has been received from Wiley, leaving the impression that no action had been taken. But in each case, the complaint was apparently handled by allowing a complete”redo” of the questionable paper that removed all traces of plagiarism and, in the case of “Roadmap”  added dozens of new citations, as well as many references.

In the two following sections, I’ll briefly describe the chronology of events for each paper, and give examples of some of the wholesale changes made in attempted remediation.  Then in the concluding section, I will look at the troubling issues raised by this sorry episode, and point at some tentative recommendations for resolving the resulting fiasco.

EVOLUTION OF “COLOR DESIGN AND THEORY”

On March 26, I published the first of a two part series on Wegman and Said’s 2011 article ,”Color Theory and Design”. There I showed that much of the article showed evidence of flow-through copy-and-paste of material in three 2000 websites used extensively in earlier Wegman lectures, as seen in the following diagram:

Two days later, John Mashey filed a complaint to Wiley pointing to my initial discussion, as well as to my detailed paragraph-by-paragraph analysis (snapshot below, showing identical text from unattributed antecedents in cyan, and trivial changes in yellow).

In this case, a paragraph, a table and a chart of secondary primaries were copied from an obscure (and no longer existing) web page by Ted Park into Wegman’s 2002 color theory lecture, and from there to the 2011 article with very little change. Similarly, other passages from this and two other websites found their way into the article via Wegman’s color theory lecture, augmented by unattributed passages and diagrams from Wikipedia. Some latter passages in “Color Theory and Design” did acknowledge generally Marc Green’s work (which is still available on the internet), but even here there were several unacknowledged block quotes and lightly paraphrased passages; unattributed antecedents were discovered on 13 pages of the 15 page article.

Part 2  of my discussion pointed out that 12 of 17 diagrams were not attributed (these were either from Wikipeida or the antecedent  2000 websites). In all, 12 unattributed article antecedents were discovered and documented. Only 17 references were provided (WIREs own guidelines call for 50-100); of these, 10 appear to have been incorporated from Wikipedia. As I wrote at the time:

This pattern strongly suggests that these are not bona fide references, and are simply padding and obfuscation. Meanwhile, of course, the real Wikipedia sources are unacknowledged.

Over the ensuing months, Mashey received little substantive response from Wiley concerning these well documented problems. But behind the scenes, something was going on.

As I discovered two weeks ago , at some point it was decided by Wiley and the WIREs CS team to solve the problem by mandating a complete rewrite of the article.

The new abstract gives a broad hint:

This article, first published online on February 4, 2011 in Wiley Online Library (http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been revised at the request of the Editors-in-Chief and the Publisher. References and links have been added to aid the reader interested in following up on any  technique.

All of the obviously copied material has either been removed, revised or (in the case of several diagrams) finally attributed. For example, the above passage and the diagram from Ted Park have both been removed, while the table has been reformatted and attributed.

Of course, attribution to an old website is itself curious; in this case, the only choice is Ted Park’s website at Beer.org as stored at Archive.org, certainly a fairly unique reference in a scholarly journal.

Park T. 2001. Available at: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20011217234921/http:/www.beer.org/∼tpark/color.html. (Accessed April 19, 2011).

This also suggests that the revision may have been underway as early as April of last year (just weeks after my original post). However, the “creation date” of the current PDF version of the article is dated December 2011, so the exact timeline of revision and acceptance by Wiley is very imprecise.

Anyway, I’ve checked a few other “cyan” passages, and they all show a similar pattern.

This is not to say the article is much improved in other respects, and its relevance to the subject of computational statistics remains woefully  unclear, Despite the post hoc assertion that the emphasis is “on use in statistical,
scientific, and data visualization”, the subject of the article remains inexpertly explained and sourced.

And at least one major error, apparently based on a misunderstanding of Marc Green, is still uncorrected. Green’s original read:

Moreover, the elderly have difficulty discriminating colors which differ primarily in their blue content: blue-white, blue-gray, green-blue green, red-purple, etc.

Wegman and Said’s mangled rendition renamed the difficult-to-distingush pairs  (e.g red vs purple) into mixed color descriptions (e.g. magenta is a mix of red and purple)! Thus, the original point was completely obscured.

Of course, colors that have a blue component will shift in the perception of the elderly so that cyan, blue-gray, light blue, magenta will be affected and more difficult to distinguish.

This wrongly implies that the elderly will have difficulty distinguishing light blue, say, from magenta.  The revised version is not much better, despite the dropping of the final phrase.

Of course, colors that have a blue component will shift in the perception of the elderly so that cyan, blue-gray, light blue, magenta will be affected.

The acknowledgments have seen an important change as well. The original stated the article was based on previous lectures, but only acknowledged the one still existing antecedent (out of five or six).

This article is based on lectures given by one of us (E.J.W.) in graduate courses in Statistical Data Mining and in Scientific and Statistical Visualization. Much of the discussion in the Section on Color Deficiencies in Human Vision and the Subsection on Hard-Wired Perception is based on material in Green (2004). The inspiration of Marc Green is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Now this has been revised in order to remove any reference to the problematic lectures.

As with any overview article, this discussion was synthesized from many sources including the cited Wikipedia articles. Early discussion in the sections on Human Visual System and Color Theory were based on Park and Eastman Kodak which are now no longer directly accessible. Much of the discussion in the section on ‘Color Deficiencies in Human Vision’ and the subsection on ‘Hardwired Perception’ is based on material in Green. The inspiration of Marc Green is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Thus, the true main antecedents have now finally be acknowledged, but the new version leaves the reader clueless as to why such old and ephemeral sources were used in the first place.

A TWISTED “ROADMAP TO OPTIMIZATION”

In the case of the flagship “Roadmap” article (the very first article to appear in WIREs CS at its launch 2009), the chronology is much more complex. Not long after I published my analysis of “Color Theory and Design”, I was advised by SFU professor Ted Kirkpatrick that the “Roadmap” article contained similar problems. According to him,  a key passage on the simplex method was derived from Wikipedia (an assertion easily confirmed) and that at least one or two other passages were suspect, not to mention incorrect.

A few days later, Kirkpatrick advised me that he had decided to launch a complaint to Wiley based on his preliminary analysis, at which point we terminated discussion of the matter. I now have found out that John Mashey had advised Wiley of this development in late April 2011, followed by the more extensive communication from Ted himself a couple of weeks later.

Meanwhile, I launched my own independent examination of “Roadmap” (after kicking myself for not paying heed to a comment months earlier from “Amoeba”, who  pointed out that the article opening appeared to come from Wikipedia). It was not until October 2011 that I posted my discussion and analysis, as summarized at the time.

• No fewer than 15 likely online antecedent sources, all unattributed, have been identified, including 13 articles from Wikipedia and two others from Prof. Tom Ferguson and Wolfram MathWorld.
• Numerous errors have been identified, apparently arising from mistranscription, faulty rewording, or omission of key information.
• The scanty list of references appears to have been “carried along” from the unattributed antecedents; thus, these references may well constitute false citations.

Unattributed antecedents were summarized in the following table (as found on p.3  in the complete analysis document  Suboptimal Scholarship: Antecedents of Said and Wegman 2009).

As can be seen, all sections were derived at least in part from unattributed antecedents, and the first eight pages were almost all derivative.

Here are two of the most extreme examples, once again with copied material in cyan and trivially edited in yellow. The first shows a comparison of the section on Kusher-Kuhn-Tucker conditions and the corresponding part of the Wikipedia article on KKT (Suboptimal Scholarship, p. 14).

The second example is on linear programming, much of which came from an online article by Tom Ferguson (Suboptimal Scholarship, p. 21).

Thirteen egregious errors were also identified, nine of which were introduced by mistranscription or else misunderstanding of the lightly edited copied material (see p. 4-5 of Suboptimal Scholarship).

My original post discussed three of these in detail, including the infamous “2d (or, not 2^d) ” howler where the Wikipedia superscript was apparently rendered as a regular character.

A few sentences later, Said and Wegman break new mathematical ground in a howler that has already been excoriated by Andrew Gelman again and again :

… the simplex method visits all 2d vertices before arriving at the optimal vertex.

The original has:

the simplex method … visits all 2ⁿ vertices before arriving at the optimal vertex.

And all this time I thought a cube had eight vertices, not six. Who knew!

Other gems included:

• “Mathematical programming is the simplest case of optimization.” [This is a mangling of Wikipedia; in the given context, "mathematical programming" is a synonym for "optimization".]
• “The conjugate gradient method is a recursive
  numerical method.” [The Wikipedia version has "iterative"; Said & Wegman use these two terms as interchangeable synonyms.]
• “2. Optimally solve the subproblems using the three step process iteratively.”[Here we have the opposite problem - the middle step of dynamic programming is recursive,  as in the Wikipedia original, not iterative.]

Once again, a recent visit to WIREs CS revealed wholesale changes to the original “Roadmap” article.

This article, first published online on July 13, 2009 in Wiley Online Library(http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been revised at the request of the Editors-in-Chief and the Publisher. References and links have been added to aidthe reader interested in following up on any technique.

This time, the abstract itself contained significant changes. First, the original:

This article focuses broadly on the area known as optimization. The intent is to provide in broad brush strokes a perspective on the area in order to orient the reader to more detailed treatments of specific subdisciplines of optimization throughout WIREs: Computational Statistics. In this articlewe provide background on mathematical programming, Lagrange multipliers, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker Conditions, numerical optimization methods, linear programming, dynamic programming, the calculus of variations, and metaheuristic algorithms.

And now the new abstract:

This article is intended as a broad overview of optimization.While often considered as a subset of operations research, optimization is a central concept for statistical theory, e.g., maximum likelihood, least squares, minimum entropy, minimum loss and risk, and so on. As data set sizes become larger, the computational framework of optimization becomes more important. In this article we cover mathematical programming, linear programming, dynamic programming, calculus of variations, and metaheuristic methods.

This appears to be an attempt to justify the treatment of optimization within the rubric of computational statistics. It is still not clear, however, whether all of the optimization methods discussed have much applicability to statistics , although certainly some do.

The article itself has been almost completely rewritten. The most egregious cases of block copying have either been removed altogether (e.g. Tom Ferguson on the simplex method), or greatly reduced and referenced (e.g. Table 1 on KKT conditions). The latter has been reformatted, with the corresponding Wikipedia reference cited a at the beginning of the section, along with three others (though the actual antecedent is still clearly Wikipedia).

Indeed, the number of citations has grown from a mere seven to more than a hundred, including all the previously missing Wikipedia references! As for the obvious errors, the ones I checked have been more or less fixed, or else avoided altogether. In general, though, the article is still somewhat vacuous and aimless.

The timing of the revision shows a similar pattern to that of “Color”. All online references (mainly Wikipedia and WolframMathWorld) were accessed on July 27, 2011. However, as in the case of “Color”, the published PDF is dated December 2011, so again the intervening timeline is unclear.

The original contained no acknowledgment section, but the new version has the following:

As with any overview article, this discussion was synthesized from many sources including the cited Wikipedia and Mathematica articles. There is no intent in this article to claim that this article represents original research work on our part, but this article is offered with the intent of providing the Roadmap to the field. We are grateful to the two external referees who reviewed this article and whose suggestions have much improved the discussion.

It’s certainly true that “any overview article” would be “synthesized from many sources”. However, I very much doubt that Wikipedia is commonly cited in such articles. And the massive copy-and-paste previously in evidence can not simply be waved away by the assertion that “[T]here is no intent in this article to claim that this article represents original research work on our part”.

Even more interesting, though, is the reference to external referees. Since the article is so greatly changed, presumably they reviewed the revised version, not the original, leading to questions about the original process in place at WIREs CS. And with that, I will now move on to the editorial process at WIREs CS, including the handling misconduct complaints.

EDITORIAL PROCESS AT WILEY

It should be clear at the outset that the editorial process relies on clear separation between the roles of editor and author. Although perhaps not the norm, it certainly is not extremely exceptional for editors of specialized journals to also write in those journals. However, there is always an implicit or explicit expectation that in such cases, the articles will be overseen by another editor.

In the case of WIREs CS, the only other available editor was David Scott, and so I have presumed that he must have overseen the original articles by Wegman and Said, and led the subsequent complaint procedure.

Aside from the copy-and-paste problems, my original analyses showed errors and generally shoddy scholarship, accompanied by a poor understanding of the subject area. The original peer review of these articles failed to find even those problems, leading to the inevitable conclusion that either Scott’s choice of peer reviewers was wholly inadequate, or that the articles were not peer reviewed at all.

The handling of the two plagiarism complaints by Scott and Wiley was inexcusable, especially given Wiley’s comprehensive ethics policy. Here is the process laid out by Wiley for the handling of plagiarism complaints concerning previously published work (with original flow chart found here).

The first thing to notice is that Wiley recommends that instructions to authors should include a “definition of plagiarism and the journal’s policy on it”. The WIREs CS author guide contains nothing on the subject, although this appears to be true of all the WIREs journals.

The first check point of interest is “Check degree of copying”. Here there are two possible responses: “Clear plagiarism” and “minor copying of short phrases”.  As we have seen above, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the first; were this not the case, massive revisions would not have been necessary to remove all evidence of  copy-and-paste material, and the matter could have been handled by “publishing correction giving reference to original paper(s)”.

That leaves two possible characterizations of responses to “clear plagiarism”:

1. Unsatisfactory explanation/admits guilt
2. Satisfactory explanation (honest error/journal instructions unclear/very junior researcher)

Of the three bases for “satisfactory explanation” the only one that can possibly obtain is “honest error” (given the involvement of two of the journal’s own editors). But, here again, the weight of the sheer magnitude of copying, the addition of deliberate slight edits and the failure to attribute almost all of the actual sources makes this explanation a non-starter. The only way that this pattern can  possibly be ascribed to “honest error” is if Wegman and Said truly do not understand the very concept of plagiarism. This level of delusion can not be ruled out, but nor can it be reasonably anticipated or accommodated by a research misconduct policy.

Also note that within the Wiley framework, the only actions possibly engendered by a “satisfactory explanation” are:

1. Write to author (all authors if possible) explaining position and expected future behaviour.
2. Inform readers/victim(s) of outcome and action.

So even if, against all logic and evidence, Wiley arrived at a finding of “honest error”, the mandated information to readers was not provided.

Of course the most obvious limb of the flow chart is the one following “unsatisfactory explanation/admits guilt”. Here the actions to “consider” or perform include:

1. Consider publishing retraction.
2. Inform editors other journal(s) involved or publisher of plagiarized books.
3. Consider informing author’s superior and/or person responsible for research governance at author’s institution.

There is no possible justification in any of the above for the course actually chosen by Wiley, which was to mandate massive revisions that in effect allowed all hint of plagiarism to be covered up, with no admission of problems.

And a particularly disturbing aspect is the statement that the two revisions came at the request of all three editors in chief (in the plural). This could be interpreted to mean that Scott and Wiley improperly allowed Wegman and Said to play some role in the decision making process. If so, that was clearly unacceptable and an egregious conflict of interest.

CONCLUSION

It is now crystal clear that the research misconduct procedures went seriously awry at Wiley. The only possible response is to have an outside review of the whole matter, excluding the three WIREs CS editors and anyone else from Wiley who may have been involved in the original plagiarism response.

As for David Scott, he has clearly failed to exercise proper oversight on the work of Wegman and Said. An offer to resign from WIREs CS should not be out of the question.

It also high time for David Scott to take some responsibility with regard to the Wegman Report. Rumour has it that his involvement may have been minimal. If he had nothing to do with the copy-and-paste scholarship of the background portions (see analysis 1, 2, 3, 4) or supplementary sections of the report, about 35 pages in all, or the incompetent and biased analysis, he should do the honourable thing.

David Scott should remove his name from the list of authors and disavow the Wegman Report once and for all.

Tom Harris

There has been renewed scrutiny of climate contrarian PR specialist Tom Harris in the wake of a highly critical report on a controversial course Harris taught at Carleton University, most recently in 2011. Much of the current interest in Harris has naturally focused on his involvement with the Heartland Institute, itself very much in the news following the leak of detailed budget and fundraising plans (accompanied by a suspect two-page strategy memo).

Today I’ll take a close look at the beginning of the Harris-Heartland connection in 2007, based on Heartland’s publicly available 2007 tax declaration and December 2007 press releases, as well as the illuminating full recorded interview of Harris by Suzanne Goldberg of the Guardian. Taken together, these provide compelling evidence that Heartland funded Tom Harris’s Natural Resource Stewardship Project right around the time that Harris was organizing the Bali contrarian petition attacking climate science, part of a broader attempt by Heartland to disrupt the December 2007 UNFCCC conference.

National Post financial editor Terence Corcoran essentially provided Harris the sole (but very powerful) PR channel for the petition, while hiding Harris’s involvement, a fact that the Post has never publicly acknowledged to this day. Now that it turns out that the effort was likely funded by the Heartland Institute, the Post’s credibility has been compromised even further.

About a week ago, the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS)  announced the publication of a critique of the Carleton University course, Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective, as taught by Tom Harris in 2011. The body of the report reviews the course lecture by lecture, detailing “142 erroneous and fully-quoted claims” put forth by Harris during the course.  In a future post I’ll zero in on some of Harris’s more interesting claims, including the assertion that global surface temperature  analyses use only one weather station “for the whole of northern Canada”.

For now, however, I’ll focus on the Heartland connection. The recent media reports on Harris (for example, by the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg and Mike de Souza of Post Media) have mentioned Harris’s (unpaid) role as a Heartland Expert (Policy Advisor, Environment) and his presence at Heartland’s contrarian climate conferences starting in 2008. But they have shed little light on the initial connection just before that time, which turns out to be the most interesting of all.

To set the context, here’s a brief recap of Tom Harris’s PR career in the decade leading up to his first involvement with Heartland. In 1998, Harris started his long involvement with the National Post, apparently enabled by financial editor Terence Corcoran. After a short stint  as legislative assistant to Canadian Alliance environment critic Bob Mills,  Harris worked in APCO Worldwide’s Ottawa office from 2002 to 2005.

Harris’s APCO tenure was most notable for the rise of the astroturf group Friends of Science. In 2005, Harris produced and promoted the error-ridden and biased Friends of Science film, Climate Catastrophe Cancelled, with funding provided by a research fund set up by Barry Cooper at the University of Calgary. That fund was eventually closed by the University after it was determined that some research funds had been used “to promote a partisan viewpoint on climate change”. There were signs that Calgary-based Talisman Oil had played a logistical and financial role in the Friends of Science and its ostensible projects. But the full extent of Talisman funding was only recently revealed by PostMedia’s Mike de Souza ($175,000 in 2004), following a protracted information to the University request under ATIP (Access to Information and Privacy).

After APCO, Harris joined energy lobbyists High Park Group for a time, and then in 2006 formed his own organization, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), with Friends of Science advisor Tim Ball as chairman. Through it all, Harris continued to enjoy access to the National Post platform.

GETTING TO WHEN

Let’s pick up the story midway through Goldenberg’s interview with Harris (which Harris recorded with Goldenberg’s consent and  subsequently posted at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy website). Here Goldenberg tried to establish when Harris’s relationship with Heartland began. While still maintaining his usual affable tone, Harris became increasingly evasive.

[16:15]

SG: How long have you been working with Heartland?

TH: I don’t actually work with Heartland.

SG: Well, you know, having connections with them , going to their conferences, receiving funding from them.

TH: Well, you’re speculating on the funding part.

SG: Not really, it’s in documents that have been authenticated.

At this point, Harris abandoned the tack that Heartland funding is “speculation” (an untenable position in any case, as we’ll see in a moment). Rather, he lectured Goldenberg  that this line of inquiry is based on “logical fallacy” (twice) and that “funding doesn’t matter” and is a “red herring”. Harris even admonished Goldenberg not to interrupt when she attempted to get him to actually answer the question.

But Goldenberg tried again.

SG: Okay, [sigh] so you don’t want to say … when your first contact with Heartland was.

TH: I don’t really know … It’s only in the last few years that I’ve had regular updates from them. … I didn’t even know where they stood in the global warming issue at all until I was invited to one of their conferences. … the first one in  New York in 2008.

So, finally, we get to at least a rough idea when the connection began, during the run up to Heartland’s first so-called International Conference on Climate Change, held in New York in March 2008.

Planning for the conference apparently started very late in 2007. Indeed the earliest known reference to the Heartland conference comes in an ad on page 2 in the January 2008 edition of Environment & Climate News.

Of course, as would be normal with print publications needing lead time for production and mail delivery, the January edition was actually put together in late 2007; in fact, the PDF was created on December 7, 2007.

At that point, details were very sketchy, but Heartland was clearly thinking big.

Hundreds of the world’s leading scientists, economists, and policy analysts will explore key issues overlooked by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. …

Five tracks with more than 20 concurrent sessions

2007 also happens to be the year that Harris’s Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) received funding from Heartland, as first reported by Gareth Rowendon at Hot Topic (also covered in passing in John Mashey’s mammoth analysis of Heartland and Sepp). Despite Harris’s attempt to brand Heartland funding as “speculation”, a grant of $25,000 to the NRSP was one of five detailed in Heartland’s publicly available “990″ tax form for 2007.

Obviously a grant to the NRSP for “environment & climate” would have been a clear indication of where Heartland “stood in the global warming issue”, as Harris put it. So that would imply that the grant came after the invitation to the first Heartland conference, which itself could have come no earlier than December 2007 (and may have even come in early 2008). At the very least, then, it’s reasonable to suppose that the grant occurred very late in 2007.

HEARTLAND GOES BALI-STIC

Two other grants listed provide additional corroborating evidence as to the timing of Heartland’s funding of Harris, and at least as importantly, the activities supported thereby. Both the New Zealand International Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) and its very recent spinoff, the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) were very active at the 2007 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference held in Bali in December 2007. Hot Topic’s Gareth Renowden had a very detailed look at their activities and plausibly argued that at least part of the ICSC grant went to support the contrarian campaign on the ground in Bali.

But there’s more. The ICSC was only incorporated in late October 2007, and didn’t even have a functioning website in December 2007; the online presence appears to have been launched after the Bali conference. So there would have been no other ICSC activities for Heartland to support in 2007!

Not only that, but Heartland’s press releases at the time were dominated by the action in Bali. An advance press release on the eve of the conference complained bitterly: United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali Hijacked by European Liberals.

Stated [James M.] Taylor, “The science is reversing on the alarmists, yet they persist in refusing to engage in a dialogue with the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). They have even rejected the voice of reason by ignoring dissenting scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On the same day, Heartland also complained that “representatives” from Environment & Climate News had been denied press credentials, thus supposedly demonstrating the loss of “any claim of impartiality” on the part of conference organizers.

On December 5, 2007, during the conference’s first weekend, Heartland put out a press release entitled U.N. Blackballs International Scientists from Climate Change Conference.

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials.  …

The scientists, citing pivotal evidence on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals, have expressed their opposition to the UN’s alarmist theory of anthropogenic global warming. As the debate on man-made global warming has been heating up, the UN has tried to freeze out the scientists and new evidence, summarily dismissing them with the claim “the science is settled.”

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute explained, “It is not surprising the UN has completely rejected dissenting voices. They have been doing this for years. The censorship of scientists is necessary to promote their political agenda. After the science reversed on the alarmist crowd, they claimed ‘the debate is over’ to serve their wealth redistribution agenda.”

Oh, yes, the apolitical voice of civility and reason: “alarmist”, “censorship” and “wealth redistribution agenda”. Heated rhetoric aside,  Heartland also listed ICSC contacts (including team leader Brian Leyland and Lord Monckton) and had contact information for “reporters and editors”.

Two more press releases followed:

• Dec 5: Dishonest Political Tampering with the Science on Global Warming (a dispatch from Christopher Monckton)
• Dec 13: Skeptical Scientists Kicked Off UN Press Schedule in Bali … Again

But the best – or worst, depending on one’s point of view – was yet to come.

HARRIS STEPS UP

Behind the scenes, Tom Harris was hurriedly putting together his latest project. On December 6, the Bali Climate Declaration, a “consensus document” signed by 200 leading scientists, was issued under the auspices of the  Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

The next round of focused negotiations for a new global climate treaty (within the 1992 UNFCCC process) needs to begin in December 2007 and be completed by 2009. The prime goal of this new regime must be to limit global warming to no more than 2ºC above the pre-industrial temperature, a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union and a number of other countries.

Harris was well placed to lead the counterattack. He had worked on contrarian petitions before, and had already forged links with ICSC and NZCSC contacts, two of whom, Bob Carter and Vincent Gray, were among the five NRSP scientific advisors. And most importantly, he had a key ally in National Post financial section editor Terence Corcoran, who had long given Harris access to opinion pages at the Post.

It may well be that a new contrarian petition had already been in the works, but the scientists’ petition appears to have heightened the urgency. An email asking for signatures and emphasizing the need for speedy action was posted on Canada Free Press and related websites on December 6 (probably by mistake, as the email was intended to be confidential, and was removed soon after).

We are writing to invite you to join us in endorsing the following open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon. It is intended that this letter, accompanied by a list of signatories of established professionals in science, engineering and social sciences, will also be published by a major media outlet towards the end of the current UN Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia.

Both Carter and Harris were listed as contacts on the solicitation of endorsements. And exactly a week later, Harris delivered on what was “intended”, and more. As recounted in much greater detail in a previous post, Bali 2007 Revisited, the Post ran the Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations under the headline “Don’t fight, adapt: We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change” (with signatories). It was accompanied by a long commentary from Corcoran himself, pretentiously entitle A New Call to Reason. The statement itself repeated many common contrarian shibboleths, such as “no net global warming since 1998″, while Corcoran opined that “Bali and the the whole IPCC process is a big mistake that will ultimately be futile”. The signatory list was the usual mix of a handful of contrarian climate scientists, along with questionably qualified climate science critics (including Ross McKitrick, Edward Wegman and David Wojick).

In his typical misleading fashion, Corcoran contrasted the Harris-Carter statement to those from Al Gore and UN Secretary-General, not even bothering to mention the sober assessment from 200 climate scientists just the week before. But the questionable journalistic conduct didn’t end there.

There are two salient facts that stand out about this effort.

First, at no time has Terence Corcoran, or indeed anyone at the Post, acknowledged publicly the leading role played by Cororan’s longtime associate Tom Harris in the Bali initiative. Even after the connection was pointed out to the Post in no uncertain terms, the Post continued to hide Harris’s involvement and refused to run a clarification admitting it. Astonishingly, Corcoran tried to disavow knowledge of Harris’s true role, even as he acknowledged that Harris had indeed promised and then provided the statement and list of signatories.

Second, the solicitation letter makes clear that the National Post had agreed to run the petition well in advance and in effect provided the sole PR channel for the Harris-Carter statement. Indeed, the Post was the only outlet that was seriously targeted, as even the NRSP’s own press release did not provide the full text, but merely linked to the Post version. (That strategy also ensured that references to the petition would have broken links once the Post removed the online version in 2011, but such initiatives are clearly not designed for the ages).

Five days later, Heartland put out its final press release on the Bali effort, Foundations of Bali Climate Change Policy Condemned by 100+ Experts. It extolled the open letter (although it too pointed to the now missing Post online version) and contains this nonsensical gem of wisdom:

The IPCC reports do not reflect many of the most recent peer-reviewed findings in climate science, discoveries that shed serious doubt on the increasingly improbable hypothesis that human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are having a significant impact on global climate.

And that was that. Early in 2008, Harris left the NRSP, and took the helm of the ICSC where he remains to this day. The revamped ICSC was relaunched at the first Heartland conference, along with a new Harris initiative, the Manhattan Declaration (yet another statement with endorsements from the usual contrarian roster). Harris would go on to attend three more Heartland conferences, and as a Heartland Expert, has provided several recent podcasts. But, in the eyes of Heartland at least, Bali remains his finest hour; it’s the only specific accomplishment mentioned in his Heartland bio.

WILL THE NATIONAL POST AND HARRIS FINALLY PART WAYS?

Of course, from the standpoint of journalistic integrity, this was not the National Post’s finest hour, and the revelation of Heartland funding should only heighten the embarrassment. $25,000 may not be a lot of money, but it is remarkable how far that can go in the hands of a savvy operator like Tom Harris with access to a leading conduit of the contrarian echo chamber. To the unsophisticated reader, the mainstream media presentation of such a petition. with no hint of its true provenance, would give it a misleading gravitas similar to legitimate scientific consensus statements.

However, it should be noted that there are signs that some at the Post are attempting to rein Corcoran in. In particular, in 2010 Jonathan Kay attacked Corcoran and Post colleague Rex Murphy (without explicitly naming them), as I noted in National Post shocking turnaround: “Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause”.

And his general comments about climate change “denialism” (his term) were no less scathing.

Rants and slogans may help conservatives deal with the emotional problem of cognitive dissonance. But they aren’t the building blocks of a serious ideological movement. And the impulse toward denialism must be fought if conservatism is to prosper in a century when environmental issues will assume an ever greater profile on this increasingly hot, parched, crowded planet. Otherwise, the movement will come to be defined — and discredited — by its noisiest cranks and conspiracists.

In general, there are at least some pro-AGW commentators to be found at the National Post, although they are still far outweighed by contrarian voices.

More recently, Kay wrote a piece comparing the non-story of “Climategate” to the Friends of Science-University of Calgary scandal, again tweaking Corcoran.

Following the latter episode in 2009 [i.e. Climategate] , a Financial Post colleague wrote that the controversy “requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.” In his next column, I expect he will be demanding that UCalgary gets the same treatment.

Kay’s summary of what happened with Friends of Science is succinct and accurate: “[O]il-industry-funded research accounts at the University of Calgary have been used to pay for anti-warming propaganda”.

Since National Post editorial brass are presumably aware of Tom Harris’s long  hidden but central role in both the Friends of Science and Bali episodes, they will no doubt want to save themselves further embarrassment by revoking, once and for all,  the privileged access Harris previously enjoyed. Unfortunately, here the recent record is decidedly mixed, as no fewer than four opinion pieces with Harris’s byline were run in the Financial Post section between May and October of last year.

But since then, Harris has been relegated to the letters page, which is certainly a step in the right direction.

And that brings us back to the beginning. It has now been more than a week since Post Media’s Mike de Souza covered the Tom Harris and Carleton course flap (with ample room for Harris to respond to the CASS report criticisms).

In Harris’s golden era, the Post would have welcomed him to respond at length in yet another opinion piece. But maybe, just maybe, those days are gone for good.

1) CASS has issued a critique of Tom Harris‘s Carleton University climate change course (press release and full report), detailing “142 erroneous and fully-quoted claims”. This was covered by the Guardian (Suzanne Goldenberg), Post Media (Mike de Souza) and CBC. [h/t Holly Stick]

2) The Virginia Supreme Court has shot down Ken Cuccinelli’s CID fishing expedition seeking a broad swathe of material from Michael Mann’s time at University of Virginia. [The NCSE account and analysis of this development is now online - h/t Snapple]. Presumably, the focus will now be on the American Tradition Institute’s abusive efforts to get their hands on all of Mann’s UVa emails (as I recall they already have been given those they were entitled to). [h/t Rattus Norvegicus]

3) James Annan weighs in on Peter Gleick (and adds more in comments, expressing doubts about Gleick’s story concerning the Climate Strategy document. ).[h/t Gryposaurus with some replies as well (but that thread is really, really long now).]

Or anything else that comes up …

Dan Vergano of USA Today reports on an “all faculty” announcement from George Mason University concerning the outcome of two faculty committee  investigations of plagiarism charges against GMU statistics professor Edward Wegman.

One investigation concerned a 20o8 article by Wegman protege Yasmin Said, Wegman himself and two others in Computational Statistics & Data Analysis (CSDA). The committee upheld CSDAs previous plagiarism finding; as “team leader”, Wegman was found to bear responsibility and has been asked to retract the article and apologize to CSDA’s editor. GMU has also issued an official letter of reprimand confirming that finding of research misconduct.

A separate GMU committee investigated the 2006 congressional report commonly known as the Wegman Report, a critique of the Mann-Bradley-Hughes “hockey stick” reconstruction. That investigation held that “no scientific misconduct was involved”,  only “extensive paraphrasing of another work” that was “referenced repeatedly”.  [That finding holds that there was no plagiarism in Wegman Report background material derived from Raymond Bradley's Paleoclimatolgy; readers may judge side-by-side comparisons of the passages on tree-rings and ice core and coral proxies for themselves].  However, in a bizarre twist, it appears that the committee did not even consider side-by-side comparison of the Wegman Report’s long and unreferenced background section on social network analysis, part of which was reused in the later CSDA article and gave rise to the plagiarism finding in the other GMU case!

GMU PROCESS

The two Wegman misconduct cases originated with a confidential complaint from “hockey stick” co-author Raymond Bradley in March 2010. It was based on my revelations concerning apparent copying from Bradley’s own work in Wegman Report background subsections on tree-ring and ice core temperature proxies.

A month later, Bradley updated GMU with my additional evidence concerning the report’s lengthy background section on social networks, which appeared to be copied from unattributed sources including two text books (including Wasserman and Faust’s classic Social Network Analysis), as well as the Wikipedia article on the subject. Bradley also pointed out my discovery that some of that material was reused in the subsequent 2008 CSDA article by Wegman, Said and two other GMU co-authors.

The GMU statement from provost Peter Stearns says the case “received wide publicity … inappropriately”. He also defended long delays as a result of both “federal requirements” and “due process”. However, Bradley went public only after GMU missed deadline after deadline. And the initial inquiry phase even appears to have lasted beyond May 2011, when the CSDA retraction of Said et al 2008 was announced. That occasioned a Nature editorial lambasting GMU for the unconscionable delay.  All of that seems a flagrant violation of federally mandated timelines, which require the inquiry phase to conclude within a few months.

The decision to separate the initial inquiry into two separate inquiries is also highly questionable, since the CSDA case involved a virtually identical subset (less than half, in fact) of unattributed social network material in the Wegman Report. [In a comment, "Rob" points out that the separate inquiries could make sense, especially as the CSDA article was also reported in a separate complaint to NIH Office of Research Integrity, and was not immediately passed on to GMU.  It is not known when the CSDA inqury began. ]

Even worse, as we shall see, there is strong evidence that the Wegman Report inquiry did not even consider this social network analysis material in its deliberations. If so, the GMU process went off the rails almost at its very start.

DECISIONS

The finding of research misconduct in the CSDA article was obvious, especially as the investigation followed the journal’s own retraction and finding of plagiarism nine months ago. GMU has attempted to minimize the seriousness of the finding, referring to plagiarism occurring in a “contextual section” as a result of “poor judgment”. Despite that, this is an indelible black mark and will no doubt have further repercussions for Wegman and indeed GMU’s overall reputation. Much will depend on the subsequent automatic review by the Office of Research Integrity, which oversees much federally funded work.

The summary of the decision in the Wegman Report  case is worth quoting in full.

The committee investigating the congressional report has concluded that no scientific misconduct was involved. Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct. This was a unanimous finding.

The reference to “extensive paraphrasing of another work” that was referenced “repeatedly” implies inevitably that the committee considered only the issue of whether passages derived from Bradley’s 1999 text, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, constituted plagiarism. Even this narrow consideration of a smaller part of the evidence is problematic. The first long paragraph in the tree-ring passage is virtually identical to Bradley’s text, and the citation at the end of the third paragraph – a page away – does not attribute the preceding text and only applies to the calibration step in any event. Moreover, the sub-section on ice cores and corals also contains many phrases identical to Bradley, and has no attribution whatsoever.

But all this pales beside the apparent failure to evaluate another background section, that on social network analysis. As I showed in my discusson of this part of the Wegman Report(a section that ran a full five pages), almost all of that material was virtually identical to three antecedent, and completely unattributed, sources. Those sources are:

• Wikipedia article – Social Networks (January 2, 2006 version) – Available online at Archive.org
• Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. New York, Cambridge
  University Press, 1994.
• Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar and Vladimir Batagelj; Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek. New York, Cambridge
  University Press, 2005.

The evidence in the side-by-side comparison is overwhelming. And apparently the other GMU committee agrees (not to mention CSDA itself), even though the CSDA article used less than half of the social network material in the Wegman Report. For greater certainty on this point, here is the side-by-side comparison of the social network material used in the CSDA article with its antecedents. Unlike John Mashey, I didn’t do a three-way comparison and only used one column for the derived text. Why? Because the differences between the CSDA text and the corresponding text in the Wegman Report were so few that the trivial exceptions were easy to identify and note along the way.

The inevitable question, then, is how this investigation committee could possibly have failed to consider this part of the Wegman Report.  The most plausible explanation is that the committee was never even asked to consider it, and that the additional information provided by Bradley in April 2010 was not even incorporated in the preceding inquiry report.

And it should be also mentioned that there are still other problematic sections in the Wegman Report, including the remaining background section on PCA and noise models, and several of the summaries in the appendix (the latter analysed by John Mashey). But at least GMU could reasonably claim to be unaware of those problems, unlike the social networks material.

It’s also worth noting that the Wegman Report’s central analysis of the MBH “hockey stick” reconstruction  is also deficient, but that’s a story to be continued another time.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Much as GMU would like to “move on”, and consider the matter closed, that won’t be possible. For one thing, since the CSDA article was supported by federal funding from the National Institute of Health, that investigation will necessarily be reviewed by the Office of Research Integrity, which may elect to impose further sanctions.

As for the GMU investigation of misconduct in the Wegman Report, it is not clear (to me, at any rate) whether that would fall under federal review, as the congressional report was not peer-reviewed and was not supported by federal funding.

However, the clear failure to consider evidence presented by the complainant himself, along with failure to adhere to federally mandated timelines in the inquiry phase, constitute evidence of a major breach in the GMU response to this complaint. These clear failures of process are more than enough to warrant a complete investigation of the matter by the ORI, or at the very least, send the matter back to GMU for a reconsideration of the evidence. All of it, this time.

And the problems don’t end there. There still has been no apparent consideration of problems in recent PhD dissertations within Wegman’s group. [In a comment, "Rob" notes that possible plagiarism in three dissertations were reported to the GMU  Provost in October 2010. GMU has not provided updates since it is being treated as a "personnel matter".]

Nor have palpable problems in other work by Wegman and Said been addressed. That list includes two long review articles in the journal they co-edit (along with Wegman report co-author David Scott), WIREs Computational Statistics, as previously detailed in the following posts:

• Said and Wegman 2009: Suboptimal Scholarship [side-by-side]
• Wegman and Said 2011, part 1  [side-by-side]
• Wegman and Said 2011, part 2

My understanding is that Wiley (the publisher of the WIREs series) is well aware of those issues, but it is not clear at present to what extent they have been addressed. The 2009 WIREs article Roadmap to Optimization, and its apparent unattributed reliance on 13 Wikipedia articles (!) and two other online pieces, was even covered by USA Today’s Vergano in October of last year.

And there is yet more evidence of problems involving Wegman and Said in two separate chapters in the Handbook of Statistics: Data Mining and Data Visualization, edited by Rao et al (and co-edited by Wegman himself).  That was published by Elsevier in 2005, thus even predating the Wegman Report.

So while the GMU decisions issued yesterday represent an important milestone along the way, this saga is far from over.

A number of possibilities have been put forward over the last days, but a clear front runner has emerged as Heartland’s likely primary donor. And the winner is …

… Barre Seid, head of Chicago-based Trippe Manufacturing.

I first became aware of Seid’s probable role as Heartland’s Donor-in-Chief (and indeed his very existence) via a comment last week by Thomas Elifritz.

That 2010 Daily KoS diary entry by “shenderson” gives a harrowing first hand account of Seid’s attempted takeover of tiny Shimer College in Chicago. (And it also makes a strong case that Seid was behind the Islamophobic “Obsession” DVD, inserted into millions of newspapers in the U.S. during the 2008 election campaign).

As related by “shenderson”, things at Shimer started changing when it attracted the interest – and donations – of a new cadre of “businessmen” and “conservatives” with no apparent previous connection to the school.

And when one friendly person after another showed up offering ten grand or more just for a chance to sit on the Board of Trustees, well, so much the better.

… But the businessmen weren’t just businessmen, and the conservatives weren’t just conservative. Almost to a person, they turned out to be hand-picked stooges of Barre Seid, Chicago millionaire and longtime supporter of far-right causes.  The businessmen ran companies in which Seid had a large or controlling stake; many of the conservatives ran organizations that received massive sums from Seid.  These relationships were finally brought to public attention in late 2009 through two articles in the Chicago Reader.  But by then it was almost too late.

The second Chicago reader article (in early 2010) showed the takeover in full swing. And it also pointed to the involvement of Heartland and its head Joe Bast; Bast had leveraged a 2006 Heartland $650,000 donation to get a seat on the board of trustees in 2008. And other anonymous donations from the Donors Capital foundation were coming in, accompanied by the arrival on the board of other Seid lietenants. By early 2010, the newcomers had installed a new president, Thomas Lindsay, and gotten a revised mission statement passed, despite the protest of students, faculty and alumni.

But some were starting to fight back. Recent graduate Daniel Merchan (class of 2009) traced the large donations back to Barre Seid, and even uncovered an unauthorized ad for Shimer College in Heartland’s School Reform News, with the provocative headline, Tired of Political Correctness?

Heartland ad (L) and Marsha Enright (R) (teacher of "The Morality of Capitalism")

The confrontation was in full swing.

Barre Seid—who Merchán says isn’t a Shimer alum and hasn’t been on the board or given the school a donation in his own name—heads Chicago-based Trippe Manufacturing and Michigan City’s Fiber Bond Corporation. Trippe CFO/COO Charles Lang joined the Shimer board in 2008, as did Fiber Bond president John Marienau. That was also the year Heartland’s Bast joined.

Seid didn’t return calls for this story, and a Shimer spokesman said this week that “none of the administrative staff or board members are taking interview requests at this point.” But Bast did comment, saying that if there’s an attempt to change the school “I think it’s an attempt to return to the mission.” He added, “Many of the trustees are involved in philanthropy . . . so we have a lot of donors in common. And that’s not a conspiracy.”

Fortunately, in April 2010, the board voted narrowly to remove Lindsay as president, finally turning the tide.

Fast forward to last weekend, when I decided to look at the profile of Daily KoS diarist “shenderson”. And, lo and behold, he was back to connect the dots himself in an entry entitled, Who is the “Anonymous Donor” behind Denialgate? Here’s one possibility. The case is laid out in a lot of detail, and draws on the previous Shimer experience. But the summation ties all the evidence together rather neatly.

I contend that Chicago industrialist Barre Seid is by far the most likely known candidate for the status of the Heartland Institute’s “Anonymous Donor.”  The project is a close fit with Seid’s known interests, the method is a close fit with Seid’s known MO, and Seid is already known to be closely connected with the Heartland Institute, to which he has been the largest single donor. In addition, Mr. Anonymous and Mr. Seid match up in at least three ways that are unlikely to be coincidental: the use of the obscure “Donors Trust” vehicle to mask his identity, the insistence on being referred to internally only as “the Anonymous Donor”, and the very recent accession of known Seid deputy Chuck Lang to the board of the Heartland Institute.

The only slight misstep in the piece is the assertion that the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation donated more than $1 million to Heartland from 1998 to 2007.

Although this is technically true, Media Matters shows the 2007 donation was only for $21,500. The last  large donation from the Seid was in 2004, for $176,788.  Previous years also show similarly large donations, starting with $150,000 in 1998.

As John Mashey has shown in his exhaustive study of Heartland and other think tanks, large donations from Donors Capital (part of the donor-advised Donors Trust foundation) started in 2005 and continued through at least 2009.  That presumably includes 2006, the year of the Heartland donation to Shimer. (A list of recipients is normally attached in the foundation’s tax statements each year,but Mashey was unable to track down the 2006 list, as noted on p. 59. But it does seem very probable  that there was a significant  anonymous Donors Capital donations to Heartland in that year as well).

That revised sequence only strengthens the evidence, as it shows a compelling transition from the Seid foundation to Donors as Seid’s preferred vehicle for Heartland donations after 2004.

As I write this, Australian e-magazine Crikey says that the New York Times is about to report the identity of Heartland’s “anonymous donor”. I can’t know for sure, but I anticipate that the Times may well adduce additional evidence from the newly leaked Heartland documents, possibly including matching up the yearly amounts donated and pointing to new projects of likely interest to a virulently right-wing donor from Chicago.

If and when that happens, I’ll be sure to provide an update – and I may just remove the question mark from the title of this post once and for all.

[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".]

[Update Feb. 23. On Feruary 20, Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, admitted to using deception to obtain the Heartland documents and has apologized for doing so. He says he did so in a misguided effort to confirm details in the controversial Climate Strategy memo that he had received anonymously in the mail. For its part, Heartland branded Gleick's story as "unbelievable", implicitly accusing him of having forged the document. ]

==============================================

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.

2012 Fundraising Plan (includes project descriptions)

Here are key excerpts from the Heartland’s the fund raising plan document, featuring two of 10 new and relaunched projects, and speak for themselves.

A major new project is the Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Schools.

Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.

… Dr. [David] Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with
national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.

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”). Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

The strategy also calls for continued support for the so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and its contributors. A major new edition is planned to counter the real IPCC’s Ar5, to be released in 2013.

Heartland sponsors the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change. Heartland pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered, the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC reports. Another $88,000 is earmarked for Heartland staff, incremental expenses, and overhead for editing, expense reimbursement for the authors, and marketing.

NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity. In 2012 we plan to solicit gifts from other donors to add to what these two donors are giving in order to cover more of our fixed costs for promoting the first two Climate Change Reconsidered volumes and writing and editing the volume scheduled for release in 2013. We hope to raise $200,000 in 2012.

(For those interested, Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt delivered a devastating critique of an earlier edition of the NIPCC back in 2008).

The 2012 budget document (see below) calls for monthly stipends to NIPCC editors Craig Idso ($11,600), Fred Singer ($5,000) and Robert Carter ($1,667).

Canadian NIPCC chapter authors listed as receiving ongoing Heartland support in the form of monthly stipends include:

• MadhavKhandekar (Chapter 1.3, Extreme Events, Environment Canada)
• Mitch Taylor (Chapter 2.2, Terrestrial Animals, Lakehead University)

Khandekar is best known as long time science advisor to the Alberta-based Friends of Science (and he’s long gone from Environment Canada, by the way). Taylor has been explaining to all who will listen (such as the Frontier Centre for Public Policy) that polar bears are thriving and not threatened by climate change.

[Discussion of the expanded communication strategy removed. ]

Heartland is planning a major boost in its fundraising efforts in 2012. But the document also shows the recent and projected donations of donors big and small.

Table 4 on p. 9 lists some fundraising events planned for 2012, including a lunch with John Stossel and an “Emerging Issues Forum” targeting state legislators that will piggyback on this year’s National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) meeting in Chicago. Heartland will even pay travel and hotel expenses for 70 legislators to attend the Forum.

But the document focuses on the prospects for tapping existing and new donors. By far the biggest donor is the revered “anonymous donor” who gave  a disappointing $979,000 in 2011 after giving more than $12 million over 2007-2010. Heartland is hoping to up that to $1.25 million this year. That donor appears to have helped Heartland “ramp up” and was apparently a strong supporter of Heartland’s global warming conferences. No doubt, the identity of this deep-pocketed backer will give rise to much speculation.

The extensive list of existing donors to be targeted include (with previous donation year and amount in parentheses):

• Allied World Assurance Company Holdings (2011: $40,000)
• Altria Client Services, Inc. [Philip Morris parent] (2011: $50,000)
• AT&T for IT&T News (2010: $70,000)
• Charles Koch Foundation (2011: $25,000)
• Credit Union National Association (2011: $30,000) [not to be confused with the National Credit Union Association]
• Eli Lilly & Company (2010: $25,000)
• General Motors Foundation (2011: $15,000)
• Microsoft Corporation (2010: $0, 2011: $60,908)
• Nucor [Steel production & recycling] (2010: $400,000)
• Reynolds American Inc. (2011: $110,000)

The lists even name the main project of interest for each donor (although the acronyms are not evident at present). [These acronyms have been decoded below, and correspond mostly to various Heartland serial publications, along with some projects.]

2012 Heartland Budget

Heartland is projecting a boost in revenues from $4.6 million in 2011, to $7.7 million in 2012. That will enable an operating budget of $6.5 million, as well as topping up the fund balance a further $1.2 million. The new emphasis on fundraising is reflected in the more than doubling of that item from $338K in 2011 to $800K in 2012. Management and administration take $478K while”government relations” will have an eye-opening $539,158 (up from $$423.319 in 2011).

That last number especially will make it hard for Heartland to evade charges of carrying on in effect lobbying activities.

Updates/links to come.

]]> http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/14/heartland-budget-and-strategy-documents-revealed/feed/ 377 Deep Climate http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/10/environment-canada-and-nrtee-vs-fraser-institute-an-issue-of-quality/ http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/10/environment-canada-and-nrtee-vs-fraser-institute-an-issue-of-quality/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:20:32 +0000 Deep Climate http://deepclimate.org/?p=4302 Continue reading →]]> 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.

AIR QUALITY, FASER INSTITUTE STYLE

Joel Wood is the latest addition to Fraser’s Centre for Environmental Studies and Centre for Risk Regulation section (following in the footsteps of the long-departed but unlamented Kenneth Green). In fact, he seems to be the whole department at this point.  He started in at Fraser in 2010 after completing his PhD work under Fraser Senior Fellow (and climate science gadfly) Ross McKitrick at the University of Guelph. Wood’s c.v. shows no academic journal publications yet, but he does have three “working papers”, apparently based on his “three essay” PhD thesis, as well as numerous newspaper columns.

The summary of Canadian Environmental Indicators – Air Quality [PDF] features five “key conclusions” the first of which is very general.

Air quality in most of Canada has improved greatly since the 1970s and continues to improve.

The first part is not too controversial, if overly broad, and we don’t need a tax-subsidized think tank to tell us that. Environment Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance Program (NAPS)  already shows this very well.

Has air quality improved since NAPS first started measuring levels of air pollutants in 1970? The answer is decidedly yes.

NAPS supports this by displaying Canada-wide trends for four air pollutants (lead, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter) from 1970.

But the back half of the Fraser report’s first conclusion, that air quality “continues to improve” is less well supported. To explore this issue, let’s skip to the last conclusion.

Statistical analysis suggests that concentrations of ground-level ozone and ultrafine particulate matter, the two air pollutants of most concern for human health, have been declining across Canada since 2000.

Wood admits that ground-level ozone has been persistently problematic, especially in Ontario. First he considers the range of monitoring results based on the 2000 Canada wide standard for ozone. That standard established an upper limit 65 parts per billion measured over 8 hours. A particular location is deemed to be in compliance with these standards according to the level of the rolling-three year average of the fourth highest 8-hour reading within each year. Thus the standard addresses days at the upper end of health risk, and not an average or ongoing level.

Here is the chart for Ontario (at p. 39):

As can be easily seen, almost all stations are failing the standard year in and year out. Wood acknowledges the problem, although somehow that fact did not make it into any of the summaries. He then goes on to perform panel regression of various measures of exceedence of the Canada-Wide Standard.

In statistical tests meant to estimate trends in “O3 concentrations”, panel regression is applied to the fourth-highest eight hour average (i.e. the Canada Wide Standard) for each station and year. This test was applied to each of the eight provinces from 1980-2009 and for Canada as a whole from 2000-2009. For 1980-2009 Wood found significant  decreasing trend in all provinces except Saskatchewan (which has lower levels in any case) and Nova Scotia. And in the key Canada wide test for 2000-2009, Wood claims a declining trend of 0.47 ppb per year (i.e. 4.7 ppb over the decade), with a significance of 99%.

The first issue to deal with is the panel regression itself, which often appears misapplied by econometricians to produce overestimates of significance when applied to scientific data. The eight provincial 30-year trends have improbably small standard errors ranging from 0.05 to 0.2 ppb per year, and the 2000-2009 Canada trend standard error is only 0.07 ppb per year.

REAL AIR QUALITY INDICATORS FROM ENVIRONMENT CANADA AND THE NRTEE

But the applicability of panel regression is the least of the problems here. To understand this, let’s turn to Canada’s National Air Quality indicators (first pointed out to me by the Suzuki response).

National Air Quality

The air quality indicators focus on measuring two key elements of smog: fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone (O3). Often appearing as a haze in the air, smog is a mixture of many pollutants, with PM2.5 and O3 being its major components. The level of these pollutants in the air (air quality) has been linked to a number of adverse effects on health and the environment. The concentrations of PM2.5 and O3 in outdoor ambient air are influenced by many factors such as local emissions sources, weather conditions and the transport of air pollution over a long distance.

And then there’s this caveat on the good news about pollutants.

While concentrations of major pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, have decreased since 1970, ongoing measurements and research on health effects have made it apparent that pollutants, such as fine particulate matter (less than 2.5 microns) and ozone, are still of concern.

Environment Canada is in its fourth year of providing these indicators, which are based on a 2003 report from the National Roundtable on Energy and the Environment (NRTEE), Environment and Sustainable Development Indicators for Canada [PDF]. And look at what the official ozone indicator shows from 1990-2009:

There is a statistically significant upward trend in ground-level ozone from 1990-2009, while the 2000-2009 subset shows a slight but insignificant decrease, as seen in the following versions. First we have a replication of the 1990-2009 chart, followed by 2000-2009. The latter trend line is dashed to show that its slope is not significantly different from zero, given the wide standard error of the fit.

We can summarize the trends derived from the two different ozone “air quality indicators” as follows.

Canadian ground ozone trends in ppb/decade [95% confidence interval]. Statistically significant trends in bold.

* Note:  Fraser 1980-2009 overall trend estimated as average of provincial trends in table 12, weighted by number of observations in each province.

Why such a big difference? Frankly, a big part of the answer was obvious as soon as I saw the Environment Canada figure above: the real air quality indicators are weighted by population. On top of that, the real indicators also use a complete average, rather than the ad hoc exceedence measure by Wood. Here’s the NAPS explanation from the very complete Data Sources and Methods for the Air Quality (O3 and PM2.5) Indicators:

The warm-season average of ground-level concentrations is the average of the highest daily maximum 8-hour average concentrations during the period from April 1 to September 30.

There are also daily and yearly data presence criteria that must be satisfied for a station to be included.

The NRTEE laid out its rationale for this approach:

The national Air Quality Trend Indicator will provide an indication of the exposure of Canadians to a particularly harmful type of air pollutant— ground-level ozone (O3). This indicator is a population-weighted measure of exposure to ozone. …

Ground-level ozone was chosen for this indicator for two reasons: the availability of reliable data linking human health effects to specific ambient concentrations of low-level ozone, and the existence of an extensive ambient concentration time series.

And the NRTEE’s preliminary conclusion?

The [pilot version] chart shows that the Air Quality Trend Indicator increased slightly between 1986 and
2000. In plain terms, this suggests that air quality (as measured by this indicator) has not improved over this time period. Although several factors can influence this indicator (weather being perhaps the most significant), it still suggests that our efforts to reduce pollution have not yet eased the burden of ozone exposure experienced by most Canadians.

It gets even better. Monitoring stations are sometimes merged as station locations are moved nearby. Others are excluded because of confounding elevation effects. If this all starting to sound familiar, it should; these are exactly the sort of subtleties that get missed when economists try to analyze scientific data, whether temperature or ozone concentration.

The exceedence approach could be a useful supplement to the already existing ambient air quality indicator. But it would have to at the very least incorporate population weighting and data quality checks.  And there’s no reason to presume that such measures, properly calculated would be inconsistent with the current official air quality index – quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, characterization of air quality trends should be based on the most robust relevant information available, not on the Fraser Institute’s misleading and irrelevant analysis.

Now we can appreciate just how shaky Wood’s conclusion truly is.

The results discussed here call into question an assumption used in the Canadian Medical Association 2008 report. When making forecasts of the number of air pollution deaths and air pollution related medical costs, the Canadian Medical Association report relies on the assumption that O3  concentrations in Canada will remain constant into the future. However, this assumption is not consistent with the trends in historical monitoring data.

Well, maybe the assumption of constant O3  concentrations in the future should be questioned, but in the opposite direction. It could well be too early to conclude that ozone concentration levels will not continue to rise in the long term. That’s especially true as ground-level ozone is expected to worsen with global warming (a consideration that Wood is predisposed to ignore, as we shall see).

How did Wood get everything so wrong? And how did Wood and everyone else involved miss the existence of official air quality indicators? First, there is undoubtedly the typical bias involved in all of the Fraser Institute’s work, which bears the hallmarks of preconceived conclusions in search of supporting evidence.

But there is also willful ignorance at play here. It’s highly unlikely that the review process involved actual experts in environmental health issues. Certainly the acknowledged informal reviewers suggest an insular impulse to consult a close circle of researchers who may be more senior but are as equally ignorant of the subject as the author. In this case, the acknowledged reviewers were all economists close to Woods. That list includes Fraser research V.P. Neils Veldhuis, Wood’s mentor Ross McKitrick, and University of Alberta professor Andrew Leach, another McKitrick protege who got his undergrad degree at Guelph.

BLOWING THE DOG WHISTLE

So why should we care about any of this? After all, other than some right-wing columnists and Conservative politicians, no one could possibly take this report on air quality seriously.  And this is supposed to be a blog about climate science and attacks thereupon.

Well, for one thing, there is an implicit, if unstated, message about climate change here. If ENGOs and the medical profession are shown to be “alarmist” about a supposedly straightforward issue like air quality, that can only reinforce the “alarmist” label for those same ENGOs’ advocacy of climate mitigation policies. Make no mistake: there is a snarling pack  of bloggers and columnists who can hear that dog whistle loud and clear. Take for instance (please) Vancouver Province columnist Jon Ferry, in a piece entitled Enviro groups snub good-news climate study.

The report’s key point was that air quality in Canada had improved greatly since the 1970s. And, of course, good news about the environment is the last thing B.C.’s eco-warriors want to hear. …

They are alarmists who’ve helped create a multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded industry around scaring people and making them feel guilty about their alleged sins against Mother Earth.

Look no further than B.C.’s Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, set up in 2008 by then-premier Gordon Campbell with $95 million of public money. It rarely misses a chance to serve up global-warming propaganda.

Only last Friday, an opinion piece appeared in the Vancouver Sun by its executive director, Tom Pedersen, with some overheated declarations about warming oceans, retreating permafrost . . . and the need for gas taxes to keep rising.

And on and on: through “diehard warming activist” James Hansen, Al Gore, the Medieval Warm Period, “top scientists” opposing the “consensus” (you guessed it, the WSJ 16) and big government looking for an excuse to raise taxes. Phew!

WOOD TAKES ON CLIMATE POLICY AND CLIMATE SCIENCE

Then there’s the fact that attacking climate science and policies is never very far from the top of the Fraser agenda. And, as the only “environmental” economist currently on staff, Wood has already jumped in to this area.

In two smaller publications last year, Wood tries his hand at climate policy analysis, and displays a woeful ignorance of the basics. In the March-April 2011 edition of Fraser Forum, Wood presents an analysis of renewable fuel  regulations. Along the way he mentions in a footnote Canada’s 2020 target for GHG reduction, from the 2008 Turning the Corner plan.

The federal government has committed to reducing GHG emissions to 80% of 2006 levels by 2020 (2020 emissions would need to be 159.6 Mt less than 2008 emissions), see Environment Canada, 2008.

But this target had been superceded by the 2009 U.N. Cancun Accord more than a year before; Canada’s new short-term GHG target is 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. That doesn’t make a huge difference absolute terms, but it it’s telling that well over a year later, Wood still didn’t get it right.

That mistake was corrected in Wood’s next foray, an analysis of Liberal and Conservative GHG emission reductions targets in the run-up to the May 2011 Canadian election. Liberals and Conservatives offer job killing climate policies appeared in the Calgary Beacon and Canadian Manufacturing (wow – syndication!) and contained this new howler.

The Conservatives propose reducing emissions by 17 per cent of 2005 levels by 2020, while the Liberals propose reducing emissions by 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050. Of the two, the Conservative target is more ambitious, since it requires larger annual average reductions of emissions.

Well, let’s check Wood’s math and calculate per year reductions required under both targets starting in 2012 and ending in 2020 for the Conservatives (9 years) and 2050 for the Liberals (39 years). First we need an estimate for 2011 GHGs. At the time Woods wrote, the latest available projection for 2011 was 710 Mt.

Then we need to calculate the respective targets, and look at the reduction in GHGs required each year from 2012 on. I’ve summarized some of the numbers here.

Don’t get me wrong. I would actually be impressed if Canadian public policy resulted in whittling away at our massive carbon footprint at anywhere in the neighbourhood of 11-15 Mt per year, year in year out. Unfortunately, there is no chance of this actually happening under current Conservative climate and economic development policies.

The main point here, however, is that once again the resident environmental expert at “Canada’s leading public policy think tank” is completely clueless and has no idea what he is talking about.

But it gets better:

Setting aside the questionable validity of the evidence suggesting a human contribution to climate change, both plans would have only negligible impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. After all, Canada currently accounts for about two per cent of global emissions.

We’re used to the well worn 2% meme used by “ethical oil” proponents to claim that it doesn’t matter what Canada does. But what’s this about the “questionable validity of the evidence suggesting a human contribution to climate change”?

Now that goes a lot further than Joe Oliver or even EthicalOil.org. Wood is actually positing that there may not be any significant human contribution at all to climate change, not even a small one.  This is hardly a realistic proposition and frankly borders on the cretinous.

Wood expressed a similar sentiment in the introduction to his 2010 three-essay PhD dissertation, delivered at the University of Guelph under his mentor, one Ross McKitrick.

Air pollution may also create external damages at the global level. For example, the burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and high levels of the atmospheric stock of carbon dioxide may contribute to global climate change.

May contribute. Or may not contribute at all. Apparently such bland unsupported (and unsupportable) dismissals of entire fields of study passes for scholarship in the Guelph economics department.

If Wood is going to question the “validity” of the overwhelming evidence for a strong human contribution to global warming, he should at least state the basis for his belief. Is it all just a hoax? Or does he consider the egregiously flawed work of his mentor McKitrick more reliable than the thousands of papers and multiple lines of evidence on the side of  actual science?

It is indeed ironic that ENGOs are under virulent attack by the likes of climate science agnostics (to put it charitably) Joe Oliver and Fort McMurray MP Brian Jean.

For the real scandal of the Canadian public policy discourse is how right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute continue to get away with inept and biased “research”, all with an effective subsidy by virtue of their charitable tax status.

Whether one considers research quality, transparency or egregious conflicts of interest, the Fraser Institute simply does not measure up to a reasonable standard that should be expected from organizations granted the privilege of charitable status. That shortfall is especially glaring when the Fraser Institute is compared to a top ENGO like the Pembina Institute, which is manifestly superior in each of these dimensions.

That’s a theme to which I’ll be returning very soon. It’s time to focus on the real issues of public policy in Canada.

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.

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.

As we pick up the exchange part way through (recorded at iPolitics), the NDP’s Leslie asked Oliver a very simple question:

Surely the minister knows the basics of his file and he must know that hydrocarbons are a leading cause of climate change. So can the minister tell us if he agrees with the scientific link between hydrocarbons and climate change, yes or no?

Oliver gave this revealing non-answer:

Mr. Speaker, I have invested over $10 billion in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, creating energy efficiency programs. The oil sands, which represent one-thousandth of global emissions, have had their emissions reduced by over 30% in the last 12 years. The gap between oil sands oil and conventional oil is narrow, about 5% to 10%, and it is narrowing even further. We favour technological innovation which will improve the performance of the oil sands.

The first canard is the statement that “oil sands … have had their emissions reduced by over 30% in the last 12 years”.

This appears to echo Ethical Oil’s original statement:

According to Environment Canada’s measurements, the oilsands has reduced its GHG output by 29% since 1990.

But after I pointed out that error in my first post on Ethical Oil, the statement was magically amended:

According to Environment Canada’s measurements, the oilsands has reduced its per barrel GHG output by 29% since 1990. [Emphasis added]

Of course, Oliver’s math is a little off since 1990 was 22 years ago, not 12. And the most recent commonly cited figure given by Environment Canada is indeed 29%, not 30%. But that’s par for the course for Oliver, as we shall see.

It’s pretty shocking that Oliver doesn’t even know the difference between overall emissions and emissions per barrel. In fact, savvier oil sands boosters are careful to  cite only emissions per barrel, precisely to distract attention from the precipitous rise in overall oil sands emissions. Those emissions have risen from 30 Mt in 2005, to about 50 Mt in 2010 and are set to rise to 90 Mt, or at least 15% of total Canadian emissions, by 2020. And it won’t stop there as rapid oil sands expansion is expected to continue through 2030 and beyond.

The confusion and errors continue with Oliver’s next statement:

The gap between oil sands oil and conventional oil is narrow, about 5% to 10%, and it is narrowing even further.

Oliver’s low 5%-10% figure is based on misleading life cycle analyses that use a well-to-wheels life cycle analysis to minimize differences in emissions due to actual oil extraction and production, as well as comparing the oil sands to a range of sources instead of the actual mix of conventional oil used in, say, the U.S.

But for now, let’s look at the gap that is said to be “narrowing”, assuming that Oliver actually means to contend that GHG emissions per barrel are falling.

As I also pointed out in the case of Ethical Oil, even this reduced claim is false.

In fact, average per barrel emissions have stalled and even climbed a little over the last five years, according to Government of Canada figures (as noted in the recent must-read Pembina Institute briefing note  Oil Sands and Climate Changein Figure 3  on p.6).

The chart shows that per barrel emissions have climbed about 15% or so since 2006. (Readers might recall that the CBC Radio’s Anna Maria Tremonti nailed hapless Ethical Oil spokesperson Kathryn Marshall on this very point). And GHG intensity is expected to continue climbing as the proportion of bitumen obtained via more GHG-intensive SAGD drilling techniques rises.

Leslie tried a second time to engage Oliver on climate science:

There is a radical fringe group that is trying to block Canada’s movement forward and is moving our economy forward. They do believe in elaborate scientific conspiracies theories and they are backed by big foreign groups. They are called climate change deniers.

 I would like the minister to clarify, does he believe in the science of climate change or is he a denier?

But once again, Oliver never did give a straightforward answer to the actual question.

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite continues to talk about the radicals. Let’s remember what some people believe. There are some radicals who do oppose all hydrocarbon development. There are some who think that one-thousandth of 1% addition to global warming will somehow destroy the planet. These are people who are not backed by science.

So now “one-thousandth” has been reduced to “one-thousandth of 1%”. Perhaps we should give Oliver the benefit of the doubt and presume that he misspoke, meaning simply “one-thousandth” both times. That’s fairly close to the correct figure for overall global emissions although it obscures the skyrocketing share of Canadian emissions from the oil sands, which are on track to derail Canada’s GHG reduction commitments.And it significantly downplays the total impact of the oil sands, as downstream emissions such as foreign upgrading and actual fuel use are not included.

On the other hand, it’s tempting to compare that second try to Velshi’s conflation of “natural” and “human” emissions at EthicalOil.org (following Ezra Levant’s earlier lead).

Since the entire Canadian economy is responsible for just 0.3% of the whole world’s natural  and manmade carbon emissions, GHGs from the oilsands total just over one-hundredth of one percent of all the greenhouse gases going up into the atmosphere, or 0.015%.

If so, then Oliver has managed to move the decimal point yet one more place forward in his effort to downplay oil sands impact.

All this would be laughable, were it not coming on the heels of other indications that Conservatives are less and less inclined to pay climate science even the lip service they managed when the IPCC AR4 report was released in 2007.  And the strong hold that anti-science contrarianism has had on the Conservative Party and its Canadian Alliance predecessor is, well, undeniable. It can be seen clearly from Stephen Harper’s arrival as Opposition Leader to his election as Prime Minister in 2006 and beyond. And the similarities of Conservative positions to those of, say, the Friends of Science in the runup to the 2006 election, were quite striking despite attempts to hide it.

With a majority government relentlessly focused on ramming through as much oil sands expansion and pipeline infrastructure as possible, the Conservatives appear to be once more playing to their climate “skeptic” base.

It’s high time for the Conservatives to end this charade, and drop any pretense that they intend to honour their international and national commitments on climate change. Or that they even take anthropogenic global warming seriously.

Then we could all have a long overdue discussion as to whether massive expansion of the oil sands is really in the “national interest”. At the very least, it is highly questionable that the “national interest” can possibly served by setting Canada on a collision course with global efforts to curb anthropogenic global warming.

And if saving the planet is not enough, consider that the Conservatives’ path, based on misguided investment in a legacy resource, may well result in dead-end economy to boot.

[Update: Here is the entire exchange between Megan Leslie and Joe Oliver - all six minutes of it. ]