Update: Email from Joseph Bast, President of Heartland Institute, appended at the end of the post.
So, imagine you are a climate scientist and climate change ideologue, and want to “take down” the single organization (or individual) that is doing the most damage to the movement (i.e. with the end result of thwarting CO2 emissions/stabilization policy). Who would you target?
Scientists seem to persist in thinking the problem is the public’s understanding of climate science; if they only understood infrared radiative transfer, they would be on board with the inevitable policy prescription from that scientific understanding. This is the so-called “deficit model,” which has been shown in numerous studies not to be a factor (this has been discussed on some of the Climate Etc. communications threads).
But lets accept the deficit model for a moment. In the U.S. anyways, who (individual organization) has been most effective at challenging the IPCC consensus science in the public debate on climate change?
Peter Gleick seems to think it is Heartland Institute. Even among the libertarian think tank/advocacy groups, Heartland would not be at the top of my list. What about Cato/Pat Michaels? GWPC/Bennie Peiser? CEI/Chris Horner?
What about bloggers such as Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre?
What about skeptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer?
And what of the people in the (relative) middle, e.g. Revkin, Curry, Pielkes, Randy Olson?
Was Heartland singled out because Gleick thought they were doing something unethical?
Several issues came up my NPR interview yesterday, which are worth mentioning on this topic:
The moderator, Larry Mantle asked this question of Mandia (paraphrased to the best of my recollection): “Isn’t this a dog bites man story? Didn’t we already know this? Why should we be surprised if an advocacy receives money from donors, and uses it to pay people to write educational materials that express their viewpoint?” Isn’t this the story told by Naomi Oreskes in Merchants of Doubt? Can’t you find most of this information on sourcewatch?
I made a statement something like this: “Gleick pointed a big gun at a small target and ended up shooting himself.” It seems to me that Gleick’s understanding of the lack of action on CO2 policy has its roots in the deficit model, and that Heartland was making the most outrageous scientific statements, and doing things that seemed ‘scientific’ like running conferences and publishing the NIPCC. But I suspect most of the public has never heard of Heartland or the NIPCC? The end result of this episode is that Heartland will become known to many more people.
Back to my original question:
So, imagine you are a climate scientist and climate change ideologue, and want to “take down” the single organization (or individual) that is doing the most damage to the movement (i.e. with the end result of thwarting CO2 emissions/stabilization policy). Who would you target?
And of course all this begs the question of why we don’t have CO2 stabilization policies, which is mostly about economics, politics, values.
Email from Joseph Bast
From: “Joseph Bast”
To: curryja@eas.gatech.edu
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 1:58:19 PM
Subject: Why was Heartland targeted?
Dear Dr. Curry,
I read with interest your post, “Why Heartland?” Thankfully, I can’t read Peter Gleick’s mind, but I suspect he targeted us because we have done so very much to document and rebut the assumptions and exaggerations of the global warming alarmists. Please let me describe some of the ways we’ve done that, and you decide.
We send publications to every national, state, and 8,400 county and local officials in the U.S. on average about once a week. 79% of state legislators say they read at least one of our publications. “Environment & Climate News,” one of six monthly publications we produce, is read by 57% of state legislators, a higher percentage than read the New York Times. It has been published continuously for 15 years, and every issue features the work of leading climate realists. No other organization produces a regular publication that reaches more people with this message.
Many policymakers and other opinion leaders in the U.S. and around the world recognize the names of (to use those in your list) Pat Michael, Chris Horner, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Richard Lindzen, and Roy Spencer only because they read their work or about their work in Environment & Climate News.
ECN is just the tip of the iceberg. You know about our International Conferences on Climate Change (ICCCs) – six held since 2008, total attendance of more than 3,000 people. The press and online coverage of these conferences was greater than anything else done by climate realists, and the videos of the presentations posted online have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The personal connections created among scientists from all around the world created a genuine social movement in favor of a more realistic understanding of climate change.
You’ve commented favorably on Climate Change Reconsidered. Is there any book from the realist perspective that compares to it in terms of comprehensive coverage of the issues in the debate or citations to peer-reviewed literature? Someone sent me the following numbers about the 2009 edition: 37 contributing authors, 880 pages, 344 chapters and sections,and 4,235 source citations. The 2011 interim report was only about 400 pages long … I haven’t counted chapters and sources, but it too is much more comprehensive than anything else written from our perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I love the books from Pat Michaels and others and we promote them when we can. But Climate Change Reconsidered is the big reference book that the realist movement needed and didn’t have until we came along and helped create it.
In addition, we’ve distributed more than a million DVDs, nearly 2 million short booklets and reprints, and 200,000 copies of a New York Times best-seller. Most were sent to educators, opinion leaders, and policymakers over the course of the past five years. We deliberately bypassed the mainstream media, for reasons made obvious by their coverage of the Fakegate scandal. Our strategy worked. All surveys show informed opinion has moved decidedly in the direction of climate realism and away from alarmism.
Our science director Jay Lehr and senior fellow James Taylor criss-cross the country giving talks and participating in debates on climate change. Lehr often speaks two and three times a week to audiences reaching up to 1,000 and more, almost invariably getting standing ovations. He usually speaks to groups meeting in areas outside major metropolitan areas and university thought bubbles. He says “out there,” nobody “believes” in global warming anymore.
Not all that we’ve done should have escaped your attention. We ran full-page and smaller ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, and elsewhere … often featuring pictures of the scientists you mentioned and I list above, many of them challenging Al Gore to debate is critics.
As you can tell, I’m very proud of what The Heartland Institute has been able to do on a budget that is a mere fraction of what other organizations spend … and I should add that climate change is just one of five major topic areas we address. We are proud to provide a forum for the thousands of scientists and policy experts who actually understand climate change – how complex it is, how much we don’t know, and the difference between scientific knowledge and scientific forecasting — and don’t just “believe” it in. Together, we are making genuine contributions to the international scientific debate, changing public opinion, and improving public policy.
Thank you for your own fine efforts in this difficult debate, I hope to see you at our next ICCC, and best regards,
P.,S. – feel free to post this on your site or not. If you don’t, though, I think I’d like to post this on one of Heartland’s sites, perhaps removing the reference to you at the beginning, so please let me know one way or the other.
Joe
JC reflection: With virtually no effort on my part (beyond reading an email, cutting and pasting into the blog post), I have uncovered “juicier stuff” about Heartland than anything Gleick uncovered. Okay, maybe the HI are actually the baddest guys in town from the perspective of the alarmists. The irony of Gleick committing professional seppuku over getting information about stuff that is either generally known or suspected or regarded as no big deal. When all he had to do was ask Joseph Bast some questions, and he would have told him all sorts of things (just not the names of the donors, which aren’t all that interesting anyways.)