Tag: Heartland

Fools rush in…

At the Heartland climate crank conference in Chicago a speaker predicts global cooling, and immediately becomes headline news for Morano and the denial echo machine. At the very same time, NOAA releases its global climate report for April, and notes that not only is April the warmest in the long term record, but that January to April is also the warmest start to any year. If you were gambling on 2010 becoming the undisputed warmest year ever, the odds just shortened considerably. As Joe Romm noted yesterday, the last 12 months is already warmer than any other 12 month period…

On the other hand, this is what Don Easterbrook thinks will happen:

Easterbrookcooling.jpg

Interesting graph. It might need some work, given that he seems to start all his blue lines almost 0.5ºC below where 2010 is likely to end up. I’ll bet it got warm applause from the crank crowd…

Meanwhile, Jeff Masters notes the continuing high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic: “an eye-opening 1.46°C above average during April.” Not good news for the hurricane season…

Hat tip to Andy Revkin, first to note the delicious irony.

[Ricky Nelson]

Leaked! – NZ talks at Heartland crankfest

BREAKING NEWS: A mole in the Heartland Institute has leaked details of presentations planned for the fourth “International Conference on Climate Change”, to be held in Chicago from May 16 – 18. Over the weekend a file containing a selection of emails between Heartland senior executives and their invited speakers was uploaded to a Russian server, and a link to the file posted in comments at Hot Topic (since removed, to protect the whistleblower). To give you a flavour of the explosive contents, here are extracts in which prominent New Zealand sceptics Bob Carter, Chris de Freitas and Bryan Leyland discuss the talks they plan to give.

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Well, I’ll be… blowed

The estimable Bomber Bradbury has been wondering why all the climate cranks have gone quiet since the exoneration of Phil Jones and the CRU by a British parliamentary enquiry — and, surprise, has since received something of a challenge from Cameron Slater at his Whale Oil blog. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t go anywhere near Slater’s site, but I did notice that a little while ago he was moved to post this…

Is Gareth Renowden a complete twat?

Is he a fraud as well?

Ok what about as deluded as “Quota” Smith?

Oh come that is too harsh for any one surely?

Can we mark believers with a tattoo so when they later claim they didn’t “really” believe they were just trick ing we can kick their lying balls real hard?

Distasteful, I think you’ll agree. Perhaps he has shares in a tattoing business? In any event, he’s earned a riposte. Let’s look at his “challenge” and see if it stands up to scrutiny.

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Esquire on Morano: inside the denial machine

US mens magazine Esquire has published an excellent profile of of Marc Morano — formerly James Inhofe’s chief of staff, the man who started the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry, now running the climate denial news hub Climate Depot (funded by Richard Mellon Scaife). Author John H Richardson runs through Morano’s role in promoting the CRU email hack (a useful addition to DeSmogBlogs “Climategate” autopsy), and then describes the trip he took with Morano to Copenhagen. It’s a fascinating insight into the operations of the tight little cabal of inactivists that run the denial campaign. At one evening event he encounters the cream of the crop: Steven Milloy (“the godfather” according to Morano), Tom Harris and (how could he miss him), serial fabulist Christopher Monckton:

Morano drifts over to Monckton, who is telling a story about a trip to the University of Rochester. “I was there to give a speech on the application of probabilistic computronics to the identification and quantification of phase transitions and bifurcations in a chaotic object, as one does… .”

After a TV interview in which Morano outfoxes a climate scientist, Richardson describes the tactics being used in this information war:

So that’s how it’s done, Morano says later. He’s the turd in the punch bowl, that’s all he is and all he can be. But that might be enough. If they can use the echo chamber to reach enough people, they can confuse them enough to change the narrative. It’s asymmetrical warfare updated for the age of the Internet.

That’s what reality is up against: a happy little band of people skilled in the new techniques for derailing debates and delaying effective action, and unashamed of using them to their utmost extent. It’s a chilling article, required reading for anyone who wants to understand who is framing “debate” in this field.

Source for the goose: footnotes to history

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 educational web site aimed at middle school students — and that he had misunderstood it.

This week, I’m going to take you on a strange trip deep into the workings of Wishart’s theories about George Soros, and reveal the telling details he doesn’t want you to know. Earlier this week, Peter Griffin’s Sciblogs post on the US Centre for Public Integrity’s in-depth reporting on climate lobbying attracted Wishart’s attention:

…in their battle to spin about the evils of climate PR propaganda, Peter and Gareth approvingly hang their story on the work of the “US Center for Public Integrity”, exposed in Air Con as funded handsomely by drugs legalization kingpin and carbon investor George Soros.

I mean, puhleeeaze!

Soros is bankrolling virtually every global warming belief initiative that moves because he knows his children will become trillionaires off the carbon trading derivatives market and UN contracts the Soros group will win.

Yet another reason for the media to laugh at the Science Media Centre.

My curiosity piqued, I thought it might be worth re-reading the chapter in Air Con he devotes to Soros, and trying to follow the footnote trail he so obligingly provides.

Continue reading “Source for the goose: footnotes to history”