Heartland Institute vs RealClimate
February 01, 2008
The Heartland Institute organizes a climate conference in March that
is, unlike the conferences that you usually hear about in the media,
open to climate skeptics and experts regardless of their political
opinions or overall sentiments about the relationship between Nature and
the human civilization.
The organizers have sent invitations to many kinds of climate experts,
including some of the well-known champions of the climate alarm. These
invitations have provoked a hysterical reaction of RealClimate.ORG.
The profoundly concerned scientists describe all the scientists who will
attend - before they actually know who they are - as being corrupt by
the
"evil" oil industry, not being scientists at all, as people being paid
concrete amounts of money to fabricate papers and talks, and so on.
Their
talks are described as "tobacco science". RealClimate.ORG even
recommends
their readers conspiracy theories from two hardcore smear ecoNazi
websites,
ExxonSecrets.ORG and SourceWatch.ORG, that preemptively throw mud at
very
concrete people who might (or might not) attend.
What about the remaining 450 scientists at the updated Inhofe's list?
Are
the environmentalist whackos fast enough to create a similar Goebbelsian
web
page about every scientist who says the obvious, namely that the
dangerous
global warming orthodoxy is a hoax? Do they actually believe that they
can
eliminate the opposition as completely and effectively as NSDAP did
without
actually having police and other arms under its control?
The RealClimate "group" explains that the participants are not
scientists at
all - before they actually know who is attending - and they encourage
the
participants to skip the talks and enjoy a nice hotel in New York
instead.
They wouldn't hear any science at all, so it is important that the
participants can't hear the talks...
Their smear job is so blatant, hateful, and inconsistent with any kind
of a
reasonable, balanced, open-minded, or scientific analysis of a question
that
I can't really believe that there exist people who are intelligent
enough to
learn how to read but moronic enough to be influenced by this incredibly
cheap propagandistic ..
Motivation behind conferences
The Heartland Institute conference is clearly not designed as a cutting
edge
conference that is expected to lead to some revolutionary scientific
results. No truly groundbreaking discoveries have been made in climate
science for many decades and it is unlikely that some of them will occur
in
a foreseeable future. Climate is just too messy and there are too many
moderately important small insights about it. On the other hand, there
are
scientists - such as Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Henrik Svensmark, and
numerous others - who understand the climate much better than most
people,
including many active participants of the "climate debate", and who have
a
lot of things to teach others.
The real problem here is a political one - there exist powerful forces
that
don't want other people to learn what is actually known about the
climate,
not even some of the basic results and numbers. There exist
organizations
and their ad hoc unions that prefer constant lies to be promoted by the
media and myths to thrive among ordinary people.
They have certain reasons to make people believe that the temperature of
the
second millenium looked like a hockey stick - even five years after the
papers were shown to be bunk and their main author a crackpot in
statistics.
They want everyone to believe that the carbon dioxide was driving
temperature during the ice ages and interglacials - many years after it
became absolutely clear that the causal relation behind the correlation
goes
in the opposite direction.
They want everyone to believe that small changes of the temperature can
exterminate polar bears and other species even though the actual
scientific
evidence shows that it can't, that the Solar activity doesn't have any
impact on the terrestrial climate even though there is extensive
evidence
that it does, that small warming creates catastrophic hurricanes even
though
all links of this type have been shown erroneous. They want everyone to
believe that there is a scientific consensus about this scientific
discipline and this consensus can settle the debate and justify
arbitrarily
oversimplified conclusions - even though there is clearly no consensus
and
even if there existed one, it wouldn't mean anything and it would
certainly
not justify any oversimplification.
Indeed, the official goal of the organizers of the conference is a
political
one - to inform the world about the real state of affairs, namely that
many
qualified experts who have carefully thought about these questions
simply
disagree with the global warming orthodoxy. Individual participants may
have
purer (or, on the contrary, more material) reasons to attend. At all
conferences, it is always like that, to one extent or another, and the
"group" is simply not saying the truth if they pretend that pure
scientific
curiosity is behind all of their conferences. But I think that it is
good
that the Heartland organizers honestly state what is their goal because
the
goal of analogous alarmist conferences is also political (while many of
their attendees have material reasons to attend) but this fact is being
routinely obscured.
There is another difference that RealClimate.ORG points out: that the
preferred speakers are recommended by the organizers or sponsors while
it is
usually a scientific committee that does it at "ordinary" conferences.
Unlike RealClimate.ORG, I am not so sure which of these two arrangements
is
superior.
I have learnt a great deal about the work in committees - most of them
were
impotent, constantly stuck bodies composed of people driven by their
extremely narrow-minded personal interests and desire to look
politically
correct and coincide with whatever opinion is felt to be dominant
according
to the wind that is just blowing right now. Whenever the question was
whether an adjacent discipline would be allowed an extra funding or job,
the
dominant argument was always the pockets of the participants. 90% of the
arguments offered at certain committees' meetings were driven either by
material interests of participants or the creation of their fake "nice"
image.
Yes, with these memories in mind, I would probably prefer a
semi-informed
CEO of ExxonMobil to make the choice but I am not sure whether he or she
is
actually the person who will do it. ;-) In fact, I doubt it.
At any rate, I recommend all big shots and medium shots ;-) regardless
of
their position within the environmentally political spectrum to attend,
learn a lot, and teach others - climate realists and climate alarmists
alike - a lot.
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