Heartland Institute...a change of heart?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news...k-tank-pays-climate-contrarians-very-well.ars

Looks like they are focusing on preventing anyone from teaching Sceince, how else could we get new Republican Presidentaial canidates?

 

Ayn Rand would be proud, as well should know the "market place solves everything!

Icarus

 

From your link

Let's let them tell us which ones are fake. IMHO those CRU emails were fair game, and leaked not stolen. This is likely the same. A little fresh air into the CRU and Heartland are good disenfectants

 

If Heartland committed fraud using public funding ,then they should have their emails examined under FOIA.
Otherwise their private info is private.
Do you think Julian Assange's private info deserves to be made public?Just out of spite?

 

....ah its reverse Climategate...should cancel it out then

 

Ah. I find in the modern world when we use corporate computers, privacy is not even implied. I wish that were different. I did not see much of a personal nature leaked in any case, but I did not follow these stories well enough to know if that was an issue.

There were accusations that some scientists at CRU were not being straight forward with the data, and the leaked emails confirmed this. There are accusations that Heartland also is not straight forward with its data, and these emails also seem to show that. No real suprises here except for true believers. The interesting thing in the heartland emails is how they "leagally" are using misleading data to try to screw up science teaching in our schools. IMHO this is a very bad thing. The other thing that was made clear was the big oil companies - exxon mobil, chevron, bp, etc did not fund this research as has been accused. With super pacs and legalized insider trading by congress, any of this political corruption should see the light of day

 

Heartland is a propaganda outlet,
CRU is a prestigious science institute

It is idiotic to conflate the two.

 

Im the first person who posted on topic in thread.So I dont understand your confusion.
You are also confused about the law regarding public emails working for a publicly funded University.
Provide a court decision supporting your claim,otherwise I will disregard your opinion as bunk.
Also your "private is private" stance might hold a bit of credibility, if you had spoken out about the Greenpeace FOIA case against Willie Soon.
You didnt speak out then, so you have no credibility now.

 

Per Wikipedia:

"Verdict: Exoneration or withdrawal of all major or serious charges"

"Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct."

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy[/ame]


Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, summary of findings:
http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-summary-20-october-2011.pdf

"Our biggest surprise is that the new results agree so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K.," Muller said. "This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions"

 

I think you guys are missing the humor in all this. So, we've got an organization, what used to have a big line o' business denying that smoking causes cancer, now they got a big line o' business denying that climate change is real. Haven't even bothered to swap out the key personnel. Just slaps a new sticker over the same old stuff and shoves 'em out the door. And they gets people what takes them seriously, too, and give em' gobs o' money to do it. Maybe it's because I'm a consultant myself, but I find the whole setup just hilarious. They're like the Henry Ford of bullsh** -- you can have any topic you want, so long as you're wrong.

 

I would hardly call withdrawl of charges exoneration, or wikiedia a full accounting of CRU. It is chilling that a major organization promised to destroy evidence rather than allow peer review, and this is somehow chosen to be fine and dandy because the story supports warming and the investigators think this is all that important. Academic honesty be damned. Fradulent doctorate doing fake research on diesel at CARB. Its all good, let him keep his job too, it supports the politics. Iran Contra seemed to view Bush and Regan either innocent or withdrawn with no charges in Iran Contra. I've been reading on that with the current iran situation. I guess North's conviction reversal meant that the administration did the right thing - give arms in reward to terrorist then use the money for an illegal war, because all the main players were absolved

http://www.climategate.com/climategate-professor-phil-jones-could-face-ten-years-on-fraud-charges

I find the liberation of evidence equal. I've been in many companies and was at first shocked at how some spied on their employees/students.

No absolutely not. Bad evidence does not mean the theory is necessarily bad, it requires evidence to the contrary. I don't believe it exists in either case. In the case of heartland though, it is clear that the misleading evidence is there to obfuscate and stop people understanding the true data. In their case they are trying to use it to mislead the teaching of climate science. I prefer to let that leak happen and allow people to understand what heartland is doing. The genie is out of the bottle.

 

Well, yeah to all of that, but I think this misses another significant difference.

With the CRU hack, you had emails, which are fractured by their nature, and they selected a bunch of snippets, taken out of context. Then you have to make up an interpretation of that. In hindsight, there is no doubt that some of the denialists' allegations based on that were just dead wrong. And we can debate the rest of them.

Here, it's their friggin' workplan. The core is one coherent planning document. Names, dollar amounts, key personnel, milestones, funding goals, policy goals. You name it. All laid out, from start to finish, no gaps, no snippets.

Yeah, there may be some awkward language that they would have phrased differently if for public consumption. (I bet the part about scaring teachers away from teaching science falls into that.) But by and large, zero ambiguity here.

They are doing here, for climate change, what they did for the tobacco-cancer link.. And I wish them every bit as much success in the long run as they had in their previous endeavors.

 

More seriously, Mr. T, it's all about strength of inference. Information is what it is, it doesn't care about provenance, or legality, or any of the rest of it. The morality of information release is a sideshow. The question is, what do we know, and how to do we know it.

You are, appropriately I think, focused on the formal literature. Basically, you are focused on what smart people think. And you discount what the ignoranti say. There's definitely merit in that.

But that, in isolation, may not be the most efficient estimator. It ignores the potential for the perfect negative indicator.

For example, when I want to know what stupid people are thinking, I go read the comments on Yahoo. True to its name, you pick the topic, you'll see what the consensus of ignorance has to say about it.

For global warming, I've taught my kids that once you've pegged some website by a particular, easily demonstrable lie (e.g., volcanoes emit more C02 that humans), then you should not merely ignore that site. Instead, you will find such sites to be very good guides to what is not true in this area.

In other words, on this topic, errors do not occur at random. Instead, errors are highly correlated. Liars tend to be consistent liars, idiots tend to be consistently idiotic, conspiracy freaks tend to be consistently paranoid.

And, therefore, an efficient estimator will use strong negative correlations to get a more efficient estimate than can be had from positive correlations alone. You can get to the truth quicker if you not only finger the smart guys and use them as a guide to what's right, but also finger the dummies and use them as a guide to what's wrong. (Note, again, that doesn't work if errors occur at random).

So, literally the same guys who tried to tell me cigarettes don't cause cancer, they're now getting paid to tell me that climate change isn't real? I couldn't ask for a better indicator than that.