Watts Up With DenialGate ?

Anthony Watts has made a good living proclaiming that the scientific community's “consensus” cannot be trusted.  A consensus that's been arrived at after decades of study by literally tens of thousands of researchers.  Instead trotting out a gallery of so-called independent scientists to present an alternative view of reality.

It seems that Heartland likes his work too.  As revealed by the recent revelations of DenialGate, or as I like calling it HeartlandGate.

Of course, Anthony is crying foul and claiming it’s all a fraud... though Heartland sounded less certain when apologizing to donors for their names being exposed.  They do assert at least one particularly damning document was a fake.  Worth mentioning is that Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman reporting for the NYTimes weren’t impressed with the denial writing:

“Heartland did declare one two-page document to be a forgery, although its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute. In an apparent confirmation that much of the material, more than 100 pages, was authentic, the group apologized to donors whose names became public as a result of the leak.”

As for Anthony ~ seems he was paid $44,000 in January with another $44,000 promised for setting up a website “devoted to accessing the new temperature data from NOAA’s website."  Which in Watts' world means finding the slightest flaw and hyper-inflating it to justify a total disregard for what the data is telling us.

Recall that Watts’ previous effort to undermine trust in the official temperature records, the Surfacestations Project turned out to be a dud that, just like the recent BEST Study, turned out to validate the official temperature records {and here}... unless of course one takes Watts’ egomaniacal stand that anyone disagreeing with him is in on the “climate conspiracy” one that involves tens of thousands of researchers across countless scientific disciplines, no less.

Among the contemptible revelations perhaps this one reported at ThinkProgress.org by Brad Johnson is the worst.  A strategic attack on science within schools {no wonder America is falling behind in science education} :

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

Another revealing and disturbing quote:

“Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

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For more information:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/denialgate-heartland.html

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2010/01/13/205343/anti-science-blogger-anthony-watts-wattsupwiththat-conflict-of-interest-weather-stations/

http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/02/14/425354/internal-documents-climate-denier-heartland-institute-plans-global-warming-curriculum-for-k-12-schools/ 

http://www.desmogblog.com/it-s-bird-it-s-hockey-stick-it-s-faked-document

http://climatecrocks.com/2012/02/16/denialgate-get-it-all-here/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/73002.html