Joseph Bast

Monckton and the mob

by Gareth May 22, 2012

Scrotum stood looking down King Street towards St James’s Square. The spring wind was chill, and the young leaves on the trees in the square were struggling to look green. The old fashioned street lights gleamed on the rain-swept road and glistening pavements. He pulled his collar up around his neck, tugged at his trilby [...]

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Poisonous Heartland, twisted billboards

by Gareth May 4, 2012

The Heartland Institute, the Chicago-based right wing think tank notorious for its coordination, organisation and funding of climate denial around the world (including New Zealand), has set new standards for bad taste by launching an advertising campaign for its upcoming climate “conference” that compares those who want action on climate change to terrorists, murderers and [...]

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The Bast Effect: summertime in wintertime

by Gareth March 18, 2012

Forget the Gore Effect1, Chicago — and much of the eastern half of the continental USA — is now experiencing the Bast Effect — a record March heatwave in the Heartland of climate denial. The figures for this heatwave are truly extraordinary. Here’s Jeff Masters: For the third consecutive day, Chicago, Illinois hit their warmest [...]

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(Not So Simple) Twist Of Fate

by Gareth February 21, 2012

Something I didn’t expect: Peter Gleick, the director of the Pacific Institute, a vocal opponent of climate denial and a highly respected scientist, turns out to have been behind the leak of the Heartland Institute board meeting documents that have been creating waves for the last week. Gleick made the admission in an article at [...]

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What becomes of the broken Heartland?

by Gareth February 20, 2012

The ramifications of last week’s leak of internal documents from the Heartland Institute — the US lobby group up to its neck in organised climate denial in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and perhaps elsewhere — continue to make news. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Heartland money was used to fund Aussie climate [...]

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The real Climategate: Heartland’s hypocrisy on display

by Gareth February 17, 2012

It’s been a bad week for the Heartland Institute — the US lobby group recently shown to have funded New Zealand climate denialists. Documents leaked this week expose Heartland’s fund-raising and climate strategies to the cold light of day, and a major new piece of research by John Mashey demonstrates that Heartland has been acting [...]

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Puppets on a string: US think tank funds NZ sceptics

by Gareth January 24, 2012

The Heartland Institute, the US organisation that plays a key role in organised climate denial, has directly funded New Zealand’s most prominent sceptics, a search of US Internal Revenue Service documents has revealed. In 2007, Heartland granted US$25,000 (NZ$32,000) to the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, sending the money to NZ CSC member Owen McShane. They [...]

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Cooling-gate: the 100 years of warming Easterbrook wants you to ignore

by Gareth May 27, 2010

Evidence that Don Easterbrook did more than misrepresent and alter a graph in order to remove evidence of recent warming in his presentation to the recent Heartland “climate conference” is beginning to emerge. It now appears that he has been misusing one of the most important paleoclimate temperature data series, compiled from the GISP2 Greenland [...]

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Monckton is a hypocrite

by Gareth March 9, 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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First we take Manhattan

by Gareth October 26, 2008

Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO, is said to possess a “reality distortion field” that allows him to make all Apple products sound great – even when they’re mundane. To quote Wikipedia: “RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, and [...]

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