Anatomy of Denialist Tactics, or how to know you're being conned

Fortunately I’m a self-employed working stiff, since it’s great having work and people hiring me... the unfortunate part is that when I have work it doesn’t allow me the time to properly pursue this main interest of mine.  That being to participate in the struggle against the dysfunctionality that our Anthropogenic Global Warming discussion has been forced to descend into - Thanks to a selective few, supported by some very rich individuals who’s wealth enables them to create “Think Tanks” dedicated to agenda over substance; to debate over learning; to self interest over citizenship.  
 
Heartland Institute, being but a recent superstar in that arena of public relations manipulation over substantive learning, recently released papers showing us how one ultra rich “Anonymous Donor” can supply the backbone for a group of ideologues to manufacture what amounts to nothing more than political crazy-making. - focused on diverting attention from the real issues we should be facing.
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Unfortunately right now my time is limited so all I can do is post the following outline, one that was ironically supplied by Professor Peter Gleick some five years ago.  Still the following is a good outline of the deceptive tactics employed by the likes of Heartland Institute - and I will find many examples to attach to it, as time permits.  
 
That’s why I’m looking forward to examining Heartland Institute’s own ruthless actions over the years against the moralizing cloak they have draped themselves in...
but alas, that will take a few days... stay tuned.

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The following comes from Senate testimony Dr. Peter Gleick gave regarding the degeneration of the standards of discussion and the tactics global warming denial organizations such as Heartland Institute resort to in their attack against rational peer reviewed science.

http://www.pacinst.org/press_center/press_releases/20070207.html
Pacific Institute
Reported:  Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Washington’s Attacks on Science “Pervasive” 
Peter Gleick Provides Testimony to Senate Hearing

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) Political distortions of the scientific process have undergone a dramatic rise in Washington over the past six years, according to the Senate testimony of Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. Gleick’s testimony (download - PDF) was provided to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on Climate Change Research and Science Integrity Wednesday. Misuse of science and attacks on scientists, Gleick finds, have been pervasive and categorical.

“Good, independent science – indeed good information in general – is crucial to making good political decisions,” Gleick wrote. “It is difficult enough to make intelligent policy choices given the complexities of today’s political, environmental, economic, and social challenges. It is almost impossible when good science or data are ignored or distorted, or when bad science is sought out to support pre-determined political conclusions.”

{I have found it appropriate to add another category heading to Gleick's list}
==========
http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/categories_of_deceitful_tactics_and_abuse.pdf


Testimony of Dr. Peter Gleick, February 7, 2007  Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Categories of Deceitful Tactics 
and Abuse of the Scientific Process

(source: P.H. Gleick, Pacific Institute, 2007)

There are many tactics used to argue for or against scientific conclusions that are inappropriate, 

involve deceit, or directly abuse the scientific process. 

Appeal to Emotion

This is a large category and involves using various tactics to incite emotions in people in order to persuade them that a particular argument or hypothesis is true or false, independent of the scientific evidence. 

     Appeal to Fear
     Appeal to Flattery
     Appeal to Pity
     Appeal to Ridicule
     Appeal to Spite

 ~ ~ ~

Personal (“Ad Hominem”) Attacks

This approach uses attacks against the character, circumstances, or motives of a person in order to discredit their argument or claim, independent of the scientific evidence.

     Demonization
     Guilt by Association
     Challenge to Motive (such as greed or funding)

 ~ ~ ~

Mischaracterizations of an Argument

This approach typically mischaracterizes an issue or evidence and then argues against the mischaracterization. It can include.

     Begging the Question
     Circular Reasoning
     Partial Truths (willful ignorance)
     Selective Choice of Problems (willful ignorance)

~ ~ ~

 

Straw Man Argument (includes substituting a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented position for the one being argued

Loaded Question (includes posing a question with an implied position that the opponent does not have.)

 False Dichotomy (for or against)/False dilemma (includes assuming that there are only two possible opinions or choices.)

 Misplaced Burden of Proof 

 Confusing Cause and Effect

 Red Herring (includes presentation of an irrelevant topic to divert attention from another topic.

 Slippery Slope (includes the assertion that one event must inevitably follow from another)

Partial Truths

Willfully Ignoring (excluding all portions of information that undercut your argument)


~ ~ ~ 

Inappropriate Generalization

Accusing all of a group of people or arguments or set of facts as having the characteristics of a subset of that group. 

 ~ ~ ~

Misuse of Facts

     Numerical Mischaracterization 
     Selective Choice or Presentation of Data; Biased Sample
     Inadequate Sample; Hasty Generalization; 
                Leaping to a Conclusion
     Selective Omissions of Data  (willfully ignoring)
     Illusory Precision (where precision isn’t needed or available)
     Inappropriate Vagueness (where precision is needed)
     Unrelated Facts 
      (bringing unrelated facts that seem to support a conclusion)
     Willfully Ignoring (important facts)

 

 ~ ~ ~

Misuse of Uncertainty
     Misplaced Certainty
     Misrepresentation of Uncertainty

False Authority

Including appeal to authority not competent to address issue

Hidden Value Judgments

Including judgments based on ideological or religious rationales rather than reviewable and testable evidence.

Scientific Misconduct 

The violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research, including: 

    Fabrication (the fabrication of research data and observations)

    Falsification (manipulation of research data and processes or omitting critical data or results)

    Failure to Acknowledge and Correct Errors

Willfully Ignoring (inconvenient Earth Observation data)

~ ~ ~ 

Science Policy Misconduct 

The manipulation of the process of integrating science and policy, including:

    Packing Advisory Boards

    Imposing Litmus Tests

    Altering or Suppressing Information

    Bullying of Scientists

    Selective Funding or De-funding

HeartlandGate; FakeGate; DenialGate, what's the real debate

I listened to an interview that disturbed me. 

It highlighted a few core problems/symptoms of today’s crazy climate debate vs. climate science.  Since my perspective wasn’t represented in this discuss 
I’ve decided to make my own essay out of it.

I’ve, sort of, quoted from the broadcast, though with many gaps since in this exercise it’s the broader issues I want to touch on, besides no time for a polished version.  
The program is available at

================================
89.3 KPCC ~ AirTalk online
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/02/23/22646/heartland-leak
« Episode: AirTalk for February 23, 2012

Heartland leaker comes clean, stirs ethical debate
================================

It's Time That Climate-Change Deniers Were Exposed ~ David Suzuki

Getting caught up on the news this morning I read David Suzuki's article 
"It's Time That Climate-Change Deniers Were Exposed."  
It's another original that deserves to be added to this collection.  
His refreshing appraisal of Heartland Institute’s handling of this affair was an excellent counterbalance to the onslaught of the professional HI PR juggernaut and incidentals like Bud Ward’s nose dive over at Yale Forum.

Once again I tried grabbing key paragraphs, and once again, it don't work. 
With a twinge of trepidation {in advance, thank you David Suzuki} here is another essential-reading 
article for students of:

~ Anthropogenic Global Warming Denial ~
 
Chapter - Heartland Institute Mindset...  
Sub-heading - Puzzling over Heartland Institute's disconnect from our planet's realities? . . . 
{dare I say their Willful Ignorance? . . .}

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It's time that climate-change deniers were exposed

By  David Suzuki,  ~ February 21, 2012 ~ David Suzuki Foundation

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When hackers broke into an Internet server at East Anglia University in the U.K. and selectively released massive amounts of correspondence from the world’s leading climate scientists, folks at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute were quick to exploit it.

Heartland president Joseph Bast wrote: “The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position.”

He may have been correct, although “reconfirm” would have been a better word than “reconsider” as seven independent investigations cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing and confirmed the credibility of their research.

Now the tables have been turned on the libertarian “charitable” organization, which devotes its resources to questioning the reality of climate change and the dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke, among other issues.

Heartland is just one of many organizations dedicated to spreading doubt and confusion about legitimate science. These groups share a lack of transparency and an agenda to promote corporate interests at the expense of human health, the environment, and even the economy (if we believe the economy should function primarily in the interests of citizens rather than corporations).

Recently, someone—since identified as climate scientist Peter Gleick—sent documents from the Heartland Institute’s board of directors’ January 17 meeting to a number of people and organizations, including Desmog Blog, a website devoted to exposing the spin around climate change denial. The documents confirm much of what we already knew about Heartland, although they provide interesting details about its connections and motives.

Not surprisingly, the Heartland people don’t see this as “an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others” to learn more about the secretive group’s agenda. Instead, Heartland posted a statement on its website saying, “honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours.”

Unlike most environmental and social justice organizations, including the David Suzuki Foundation, the Heartland Institute doesn’t publicly reveal information about where it gets its money and what it does with it.

These documents indicate that Heartland has offered U.S. weatherman blogger and climate change denier Anthony Watts close to $90,000 for a new project. They also reveal that Heartland funds other prominent deniers, including “Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals..."

The papers also confirm that the institute’s primary mission is to discredit the established science of human-caused climate change. And even though it has received funding from wealthy individuals and corporations in the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, including the Koch brothers and RJR Tobacco, it gets most of its money from a single anonymous donor, who has ponied up as much as $4.6 million in a single year, 2008.

If these groups were truly engaged in questioning the science, using valid scientific methods and principles, it wouldn’t be a problem. Science is strengthened through scrutiny and challenges; that’s how it works, and that’s what the peer-review process is about. But these organizations are engaged in secretive and dishonest lobbying and public relations efforts aimed at stalling measures to protect the environment and health.

Gleick has admitted that he made a mistake in posing as someone else to obtain the documents. The unidentified East Anglia hackers were also wrong to have stolen the emails, and the Heartland Institute is wrong when it lies about the most serious threat to humanity.

Three wrongs don’t make a right, but there are some differences. In the East Anglia case, the investigations turned on those who were hacked and ultimately proved that the climate scientists, although human, are engaged in sound and verifiable science and that they have been subjected to years of harassment and bullying for their work. The Heartland documents show that the organization is using its taxpayer-supported status to spread lies and misinformation.

It’s about time these “merchants of doubt” were exposed. It’s time to get back to real science as practiced by scientists. We must get beyond the false debate about the reality of climate change and into the real debate about what to do about it.

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http://www.straight.com/article-612156/vancouver/david-suzuki-its-time-climatechange-deniers-were-exposed

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation
Editorial and Communications Specialist Ian Hanington
Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Text is 100% David Suzuki, formatting is all mine.  ;-)

Scientists can also wear their citizen hats, Scott Mandia

Another installment of my history of the Unfolding DenialGate story.  As told by timely articles.

For the past few days Heartland Institute has been sending out letters demanding that all references and links to their leaked documents be removed.  Can't blame them it's some embarrassing stuff.  But I can't find any sympathy for them either.

This article includes a reply letter from Scott Mandia, Joshua Wolfe and Jeff Ruch to Heartland Institute's threats.  And links to copies of Heartlands Institute's letters.  The post is from Scott Mandia's  Global Warming: Man or Myth?


============================================

http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/heartland-serves-threatening-letters-climate-science-legal-defend-fund-peer-hit-back/

Scientists can also wear their citizen hats
 Heartland Serves Threatening Letters,

Climate Science Legal Defense Fund & PEER Hit Back

Heartland Institute Got Caught With Their Pants Down

Climate Denial In The Classroom ~ LATimes Editorial

News packed days.  
Unfortunately most people don't care and the media is doing little to change that.  
That's why I'm thinking, Jeez someone should be bearing witness.  

For the record after I posting the text of an article, I send the authors an email with a link.  Response has been supportive, no one has asked me to remove my reproductions of their work and I'm encouraged to continue, so, here it is.

I'm starting to think this may turn into a running feature, at least while the DenialGate things is running hot.  A select collection of timely articles. With the passage of months, it'll become a record of these events as they unfolded. The following is highlights from an LA Times editorial:

====================================================

LA Times Editorial ~ February 20, 2012

Climate denial in the classroom
It's bad enough that we're doing so little to fight climate change; let's not ask teachers to lie about it too.

The culture wars {...} The latest skirmish, by contrast, is centered on a scientific issue that has nothing to do with religious teaching: climate change.

{...} Heartland Institute in Chicago, one of many nonprofits that spread disinformation about climate science in hopes of stalling government action to combat global warming, reveal that the organization is working on a curriculum for public schools that casts doubt on the work of climatologists worldwide. Heartland officials say one of the documents was a fake, {...}. According to the New York Times, the curriculum would claim, {...} "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy."


{...}

On one side of the "controversy" are credentialed climatologists around the globe who publish in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals and agree that the planet is warming and that humans are to blame; on the other are fossil-fuel-industry-funded "experts" who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines disputing established truths. These are quickly debunked, but not before their findings have been reported by conservative blogs and news outlets, which somehow never get around to mentioning it when these studies are proved to be badly flawed.

{...} battle over classroom instruction {...} won't go on for decades, {...} impacts {...} already patently obvious. 

Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. {...} Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, {...} validated repeatedly.

 Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each — drought-fueled wildfires in Texas, Hurricane Irene, and Mississippi River flooding were among the 14 cases.

{...}
Sophisticated climate models show {...} going to get a lot worse. 
It's bad enough {...} gambling our children's futures {...} doing so little {...} fight this problem.

Let's not ask their teachers to lie to them about it too.

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LA Times Editorial ~ February 20, 2012
Climate denial in the classroom

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-climate-20120220,0,3564279.story

{selections are unaltered, my emphasis & formatting}:

Heroes and Zeroes In The Heartland, by Steve Zwick

 

     In catching up on the news and Peter Gleick revealing himself as receiver of the Heartland Institute's "DenialGate" documents. 

     I was reading this article written by Steve Zwick and thought: man this guy really nailed it.  I've gone through it a couple times now, trying to cut out highlights to post here, but it's too good, in one piece.

     It deserves to be echoed in its entirety.  I didn't change any wording. But I have taken over formatting, all highlights and colors reflect my reading, and I've added some extra links to relevant information.

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Heroes and Zeroes In The Heartland: 

Why Gleick Was Right To Leak the Docs

The 2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards

I would like to share the Pacific Institute's "2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards"

For more information please link to:

http://pacinst.org/press_center/press_releases/climate_bs_award_2011.html

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Pacific Institute's

2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards


[* B.S. means “Bad Science”]

Background


Even as unusually frequent and intense extreme weather events killed people and damaged property, and as the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate continued to strengthen, national leaders did little to ameliorate or plan adaptation strategies for climate change. Peter Gleick attributes this failure to act in part to the difficulty of the challenges of curbing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and more. But he also points to what he describes as “a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians.”

“These are mostly groups focused on protecting narrow financial interests, ideologues fearful of any government regulation, or scientific contrarians who cling to outdated, long-refuted interpretations of science,” said Gleick. “While much of the opposition to addressing the issue of climate change is political, it often hides behind pseudo-scientific claims, with persistent efforts to intentionally mislead the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change.”

In response to these efforts, in 2010 the Pacific Institute launched the annual Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards. We are now pleased, and disturbed, to announce the winners of the 2011 (second annual) Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards:

THIS YEAR’S WINNERS OF THE
2011 CLIMATE B.S.* OF THE YEAR AWARDS:

Fifth Place: Anthony Watts for his BEST hypocrisy


Anti-climate-science blogger Anthony Watts said he would accept the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature or “BEST” study, even if it proved him wrong. Unfortunately for him, the study showed that the Earth’s surface is warming and at just the rate that numerous previous studies had shown – but he reneged and attacked the paper and the science.

Fourth Place: The Koch Brothers for funding the promotion of bad climate science


Fourth place goes to fossil-fuel billionaires Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, Inc., who provide substantial funding to groups and politicians who deny the science of climate change. The Koch brothers fund a veritable Who’s Who of groups that put out misleading science or tout bad science on climate change as an intentional strategy.

Third Place: Spencer, Braswell, and Christy


Third place goes to Roy Spencer and William (Danny) Braswell for a debunked research paper on climate sensitivity, and John Christy, for an astounding piece of misleading testimony at a Congressional climate change hearing.

Second Place: Disinformation from Fox News and Murdoch’s News Corporation


Fox News moves up from their fifth place finish last year, joined by the entire News Corporation empire of Rupert Murdoch because of its regular misrepresentation of climate science and anti-climate science reporting among the different Murdoch outlets in the UK, the U.S., and Australia.

AND IN FIRST PLACE
All of the Republican candidates for President 
being anti-science in general, and anti-climate science in particular, seems a requirement for nomination to lead the Republican Party. 

Not a single one of the Republican candidates for President has a position on climate change that is consistent with the actual science accepted by 97-98% of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences on the planet. 

The choice among the current Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, disdain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the individual candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? 

The group wins the 2011 Award hands down.