Tag: Heartland

When Gray turns to blue/Flung a dummy

gray.jpg In a dramatic announcement today, Vincent R Gray, the retired coal researcher and diligent proof-reader of IPPC Working Group Reports (he’s inordinately proud of the fact that he submitted over 1,800 comments to the fourth report) has resigned from the Royal Society of New Zealand because of its recent statement on climate change. Given that Gray has been criticising the IPCC view of climate science for 18 years and is a vocal member of the NZ C”S”C, this is perhaps no surprise, but the statement he has issued as a riposte to the Royal Society is a minor classic of its genre. Vincent doesn’t so much spit the dummy as hurl it into low earth orbit, and uses pretty forthright language as he does so.

[Hat tip: Sam Vilain in a recent comment]

Continue reading “When Gray turns to blue/Flung a dummy”

The denial twist

hansen.jpg James Hansen [CV], the most outspoken climate scientist in the world, has been stirring up something of a furore. Invited by the Democrats to speak in Washington on the 20th anniversary of his famous 1988 testimony to Congress on the dangers of global warming, he used to opportunity to complain about the funding of climate disinformation campaigns by fossil fuel companies [full text]:

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming. CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children.

Prosecuted for “high crimes against humanity and nature”. That’s a pretty radical view and not surprisingly the climate disinformers have been hard at work trying to rubbish the idea – and Hansen and his work.

Continue reading “The denial twist”

RTFR, Jack

homer.jpg The old sea dog at the helm of our little flotilla of climate cranks has fired a broadside at the NIWA scientists involved in the preparation of this week’s revised climate projections for New Zealand. Yes, step forward Rear Admiral Jack Welch, who’s in fine bombastic form (perhaps he’s been taking lessons from Heartland’s J Bast Esq.) in a media release from the NZ CSC. According to Jack, “NIWA scientists have become political propagandists”:

The State Services Commission should investigate whether scientists of NIWA have crossed the boundary into politics with their sudden flurry of advocacy for action on so-called global warming at a time when the Government is struggling to gain support in Parliament for its Emissions Trading Scheme Bill. This today from the chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, Rear Admiral Jack Welch. “This flurry of advocacy has all the hallmarks of political spin, which has appalled the scientists associated with our coalition. Worse, NIWA is breaching the principles of good science by not qualifying its climate predictions with appropriate disclaimers.

Oh, the shock and the shame. Bow your heads, ye Nobel prizewinners, because the Admiral has spoken. He continues:

“Projections of future climate are not predictions, but speculation. They come from global climate models that have not been verified, so their output is merely conjecture. This is recognised across the Tasman, where the Australian CSIRO attaches a disclaimer to all its reports, such as this one on a report from the Queensland Government: ‘This report relates to climate change scenarios based on computer modelling. Models involve simplifications of the real physical processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO or the Queensland Government for the accuracy of forecasts or predictions inferred from this report or for any person’s interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance in this report.’

Unfortunately for the Rear Admiral, here’s what it says on page 2 of the report he’s complaining about:

As explained in the report, developing projections of future climate changes is still subject to significant uncertainty. The authors have used the best available information in preparing this report, and have interpreted this information exercising all reasonable skill and care. Nevertheless none of the organisations involved in its preparation accept any liability, whether direct, indirect or consequential, arising out of the provision of information in this report.

And a little bit later, in the executive summary (p xiii):

A definitive single quantitative prediction of how much a particular climatic element (eg, heavy rainfall intensity) will change over coming decades is not feasible. This is because the rate of climate change will depend on future global emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn depend on global social, economic and environmental policies and development. Incomplete scientific knowledge about some of the processes governing the climate, and natural year-to- year variability, also contribute to uncertainty in projections for the future.

Seems to cover all of Jack’s points, and we haven’t even started reading the main body of the report (which is well worth reading in full).

Read The Flaming Report, Jack, before rushing to the media to complain about it. Sadly, I don’t think you bothered. I hope and expect that you will issue an equally speedy apology.

But I’m not holding my breath.

What’s going on?

heart.jpg The Heartland Institute’s inclusion of five New Zealand scientists in a list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” (title has since changed to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares” – PDF here) is even more bogus than I originally thought.

The list is the product of the fertile imaginations of Dennis Avery and Fred Singer, and is “derived primarily from the citations” in their recent book Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1,500 Years. They say in the introduction:

The following list includes more than 500 qualified researchers, their home institutions, and the peer-reviewed studies they have published in professional journals providing historic and/or physical proxy evidence that:

1) Most of the recent global warming has been caused by a long, moderate, natural cycle rather than by the burning of fossil fuels… [There are six more items, but you can read them for yourself]

So how did Jim get in there? He sent me a copy of the offending paper – Southwest Pacific temperatures: trends in maximum and minimum temperatures, Atmospheric Research 37 (1995) (copy here). It’s interesting enough, but not exactly earth-shattering. As the title suggests, it uses a then new data set for SW Pacific temperatures and looks for changes in maximum and minimum daily temperatures in the region. The paper states “Increases in concentrations of greenhouse gases and changes in cloudiness could be plausible mechanisms for the overall increase in both daily maximum and minimum temperatures.”

Avery and Singer list the paper in their first section, “studies finding evidence of the climate cycle”. Now I’ve read the paper in some detail, and I can’t find any reference to a 1,500 year cycle, or indeed a cycle of any kind. Perhaps Avery & Singer included it because Jim rides a bicycle?

In other words, the use of Salinger’s paper to support Avery & Singer’s hypothesis is entirely bogus. It’s scientific fraud, unethical, and just another example of how Heartland are prepared to encourage people to distort the truth in support of their political objectives. I hope Heartland’s apologists in New Zealand, the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition will share my outrage, and demand that Bast and co remove Salinger from the list immediately.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Your cheatin’ heart(land)

heart.jpg You’re a senior New Zealand climate scientist. You shared in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC last year. As a young scientist in the 1970s you did ground-breaking work on warming in New Zealand, and wrote a seminal paper in Nature pointing out that cooling experienced in the northern hemisphere might be due to aerosols. You wrote the first book on what global warming might mean for New Zealand. And then your name appears on a list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” published by the Heartland Institute. Would you not be a trifle irritated?

Jim Salinger (for it is he! – excellent Herald profile here) and four other NZ scientists who found their way on to the Heartland list issued their response last night (pers comm):

The five scientists concerned are Associate Professor Chris Hendy (University of Waikato), Dr Matt McGlone (Science Team Leader, Landcare Research), Dr Neville Moar (retired DSIR,), Dr Jim Salinger (Principal Scientist, NIWA) and Dr Peter Wardle (retired DSIR, FRSNZ). Other eminent scientists around the world, also included in the list of 500, have publically distanced themselves from the Heartland statement. While the Heartland Institute is entitled to make what it will of their research, these scientists strongly object to the implication that they support Heartland’s position. The scientists fully endorse the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as to global warming and its causes.

There’s good coverage by Angela Gregory in the Herald this morning, plus Hard News & Stuff, and Morning Report has an interview (6:16am, podcast available), including a remarkable effort by Owen Mcshane of the NZCSC to defend the list. DeSmogBlog broke the story about the Heartland list, and has been documenting the reaction from scientists on it. Meanwhile, the Heartland Institute has made a small change to the heading of the list, but refuses to remove it from their web site.

This is the same Heartland Institute whose President, Joseph L Bast, sent a letter to The Listener (scroll down this page) demanding that Dave Hansford stop writing about climate. He wrote:

I don’t know how writers like Hansford sleep at night. If he has even a shred of personal integrity, he should apologise for his attacks on the growing number of scientists who say the threat of global warming has been over-sold, and promise to never again write on this subject. And his publisher should accept nothing less.

Bast defends his actions over the list in equally bombastic fashion (here):

Many of the complaining scientists have crossed the line between scientific research and policy advocacy. They lend their credibility to politicians and advocacy groups who call for higher taxes and more government regulations to “save the world” from catastrophic warming … and not coincidentally, to fund more climate research. They are embarrassed — as they should be — to see their names in a list of scientists whose peer-reviewed published work suggests the modern warming might be due to a natural 1,500-year climate cycle.

Well, Mr Bast, I’ve got news for you. The embarrassment should be yours. You are happy to claim the moral high ground when making thinly-veiled attempts to get rid of a journalist prepared to point out the inconvenient truth about your organisation and its funding of sceptics in NZ and around the world. But when you professionally smear a group of respected scientists – and then deepen the smear by questioning their ethics – you cross the line from advocacy to desperate defamation. To coin a phrase, you should apologise for your attacks on respected scientists, and promise to never again write on this subject. And stay out of New Zealand.

But I’m not holding my breath.

(Hat tips to JS, cindy, Deltoid, International Journal of Inactivism)