The Heartland Institute Responds
Peter Gleick ‘Fakegate’ Scandal, Debates on Latest Climate Science Featured
What: Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-7)
Theme: Real Science, Real Choices
Where: Hilton Chicago, 720 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL
When: Monday, May 21 – Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Media: Open to all media. Request press credentials here.
Continue reading “Heartland Institute to Host Seventh International Conference on Climate Change”
This long essay is well worth your time to read. It was written, without any encouragement or coaching, by Prof. William Gray, one of the world’s most distinguished and respected hurricane experts. He’s one of the “grand old men” of climate research, a hero and mentor to thousands of students and practicing meteorologists. In his essay he tells the story of how a younger generation of researchers got co-opted by the government grant process and have abandoned objectivity on the climate change issue in exchange for money and publicity.
The essay has many kind things to say about Heartland. I’m going to print out and cherish this essay for a long time, maybe for the rest of my life. This is vindication. I don’t care if the New York Times, Washington Post, or Michael Mann never admit that they were wrong. Bill Gray says we are right, and that’s all I need.
(H/T with thanks to Joe D’Aleo.)
We should all be grateful for the Heartland Institute and for its Nobel Mission to bring enlightenment and truth to the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question. The recent illegal acquiring of internal documents from this Chicago based institute helps remind us what a unique and important organization it is. The Heartland Institute has given a great boost and encouragement to so many of us who have attended any one or up to six of their international climate science meetings that were held in New York, Wash. D.C., and Chicago between 2008-2011.
Continue reading “From Prof. William Gray: Homage to The Heartland Institute”
Generations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a war on science, first by distorting it, and then by propagandizing the “findings”, “studies” and resulting claims based on them.
Science hoaxes have been around a long time, most famously, the “Piltdown Man”, a paleontological fraud that began in 1912, claiming to be the “missing link” between man and ape when a fake skill was discovered in a gravel pit in England. In 1869, a fake “giant petrified human body” of a ten foot tall man. Carved out of gypsum, it was quickly debunked, but the public loved the story.
General Motors spokesman David Barthmuss today confirmed the company’s foundation will no longer donate to The Heartland Institute. The following statement by Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, may be used for attribution.
Continue reading “Heartland Institute Responds to General Motors’ Decision to Pull Funding”
(The following press release was posted at the media page at Heartland.org on March 26, 2012.)
Recently, a Greenpeace activist named Cindy Baxter suddenly recalled that “someone calling himself ‘John’ and saying he was with a US environmental NGO” recorded a brief phone conversation with her more than four years ago, while she was at a United Nations’ climate conference in Bali. She now says the episode is comparable to Fakegate – the theft of corporate documents from The Heartland Institute and their circulation, along with a fake memo purporting to describe Heartland’s “climate strategy,” by disgraced climate scientist Peter Gleick.
We respectfully disagree.
Peter Foster over at the Financial Post in Canada has penned a pretty devastating take-down of David Suzuki’s hypocritical crusade against foreign money (American greenbacks) finding its way into the coffers of Canadian non-profit groups.
Writes Foster:
Radical environmentalists tend not to be famous for their objectivity or sense of irony. Canada’s most famous eco-activist, David Suzuki, proved that this week by organizing a write-in campaign to protest a Senate inquiry into foreign institutional funding of Canadian political activism. Continue reading “David Suzuki Will Be Sorry He Started a Funding Fight”
Donna Laframboise asks the key question about Fakegate: “Where do Gleick Apologists Draw the Line?”
In a recent post on her Web site, No Frakking Consensus, she provides excerpts from scientists, ethicists, and activists who excuse or even lionize Peter Gleick for stealing Heartland Institute budget documents, impersonating a Heartland board member, misrepresenting himself to bloggers as an anonymous “Heartland insider,” and palming off as genuine – maybe also authoring — a fake climate strategy document in which Koch supposedly funds Heartland to keep opposing voices out of Forbes magazine, sell doubt as their product, and dissuade teachers from teaching science.
Laframboise comments: “Climate change is a strange beast. When it enters the room, even ethicists lose the ability to think straight.”
The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”
But as I pointed out the other day at Globalwarming.org, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?
Yesterday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested that the House Resources Committee investigate whether Department of Interior employee Indur Goklany accepted “illegal outside payments” from the Heartland Institute, and “what confidential information Goklany may have shared with Heartland officials in the course of negotiating his payment agreements.”
Grijalva made this request in a letter to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The alleged ‘issue’ arose because one of the stolen Heartland documents, the Institute’s 2012 budget, proposes to pay Goklany $1,000/m to write a chapter on economics and policy for a forthcoming book, Climate Change Reconsidered: 2012 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.