Posts tagged as:

Heartland

Source for the goose: footnotes to history

by Gareth 17 January 2010

Exploring the footnotes in Ian Wishart’s Air Con is proving to be an entertaining exercise. Last week I followed a reference that revealed a “National Science Foundation report” he cites to support his thesis that glaciers are showing a “delayed reaction” to warming hundreds of years ago, was in fact a 10 year old US [...]

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Pocket calculator

by Gareth 8 September 2009

The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has bought a shiny new supercomputer. For $12.7m they’re getting a IBM Power 575 that will be the fastest climate machine in the southern hemisphere, 14th fastest in the world — and it will get an upgrade in 2 years which will double its speed. Sounds [...]

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The price of a policy

by Gareth 4 August 2009

In the run up to last year’s election I devoted a lot of coverage to the ACT party’s descent into climate denial, and in particular to the outrageous statements of its leader Rodney Hide. It wasn’t clear to me at the time why Hide was ditching the party’s carefully constructed “Smart Green” positioning on environmental [...]

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Lomborg criticises crank conference*

by Gareth 2 June 2009

The weekend before last, business leaders from around the world met in Copenhagen and issued a call for an international commitment to steep emissions cuts. Bjorn Lomborg’s contribution to proceedings was a column the Wall Street Journal headlined “The Climate-Industrial Complex”. It seems Bjorn was concerned that some capitalists might seek to profit from action [...]

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Sound of silence

by Gareth 26 April 2009

The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has fired climate scientist Jim Salinger for “unauthorised dealings” with the media. Salinger has been one of New Zealand’s leading climate scientists since the 1970s, and his sacking has shocked many in the scientific community. The Dominion Post reports:

The Crown agency’s long-serving principal scientist was [...]

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Hows about telling a story

by Gareth 13 April 2009

Peter Dunne’s assurance that the ETS Review process won’t turn into a re-examination of climate science is set to run into a few problems. Looking through the full list of submitters who will make oral presentations to the committee (below the fold), I count no fewer than eleven (plus one “possible”) who will or have [...]

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Thank you world

by Gareth 17 March 2009

Muriel Newman, former ACT MP and doyenne of the libertarian right in NZ, has finally returned from New York where her NZ CPR was one of the “sponsors” of the Heartland crank fest. In the middle of her detailed report on the event, she quotes approvingly from the conference opening speech [PDF] by Czech [...]

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Two tribes

by Gareth 11 March 2009

On the one hand, in New York, the Heartland Institute’s climate crank talking shop, where scientists of the immense probity of Richard Lindzen were happy to share a stage with proven fabricators of data like Christopher Monckton, has drawn to a close. Terry Dunleavy, head honcho of NZ’s climate crank coalition has given his [...]

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Monckton is a hypocrite

by Gareth 9 March 2009

The insufferably pompous peer, Christopher Monckton (Third Viscount of Brenchley) is in New York for Heartland’s crank talkfest (more on that in another post, later), and has helpfully contributed a podcast to promote the event. Set aside for a moment that he reinvents his past, becoming Margaret Thatcher’s exposer in chief of scientific fraud, or [...]

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When will they ever learn?

by Gareth 12 November 2008

“Forget global warming. The cold, hard facts point to another threat on the horizon – severe cooling.” That’s the strapline over an opinion piece in yesterday’s Dominion Post business section (Sunspots spell end of climate myth), contributed by Bryan Leyland, one of the more vocal of our local climate cranks. It’s an astonishing piece, given [...]

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