A Crickey Mystery About #Gleickgate

On Feb 20 Crikey.com came out with an interesting announcement:

Frozen version

Crikey understands The New York Times will tomorrow reveal the identity of Heartland’s “Anonymous Donor”, an individual who has donated $13.7 million to the Heartland Institute since 2007 and at times has provided 60% of the institute’s funding.

The page says (in the code) it’s been published 2012-02-20T13:11:12+1100

Now as we know, the NYT has published nothing of the sort…actually, Gleick confessed sometimes around midnight GMT between Feb 20 and Feb 21, a little less than 24 hours later.

I wonder if this missed announcement has anything to do with Gleick being forced to reveal himself as the Gleickgate perp. BTW make sure you don’t miss out this thread at Climate Audit.

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Peter Gleick, Astroturfer?

UPDATE: For those interested in abrupt climate changes of the past

I recently surmised Peter Gleick be an astroturfer trained to make greens look less than…bright. This article would be compatible with that hypothesis, as the author shows no grasp of the history of climate, including what are known as Younger Dryas and the PETM.

It should also be obvious to all that the longer we look in the past, the lower our ability will be to discern one decade from another, and then one century from another. The climate might as well have changed dramatically every year a million years ago, still the paleo traces will only show some kind of long-term average of it.

We cannot seriously compare contemporary records with those of the past without considering that. It would be like saying more things happen now than in the Middle Ages just because more people write now than in the Middle Ages.

The continuous mentioning of the fabulously flawed 97% figure (it’s 97% of 77 out of 1,372) is just the cherry on the cake. Is Exxon funding the Pacific Institute?

“Stop Lord Monckton!”

Peter Gleick of “weak thought” and “let’s-pump-up-some-controversy-exactly-when-my-book-is-published” fame has surfaced again, this time in a comment to a photograph posted by Andy Revkin on Facebook, showing Lord Monckton and Brad Johnson in Cancún.

Sadly, there isn’t much positive to report this time either.

Ironically (or exactly!), Gleick’s comment is posted exactly underneath my quote from Carl Sagan, “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas“. Here’s Gleick’s:

I cannot believe that Monckton has a booth. Astounding.

And this is my reply:

Whilst I am not surprised by Peter Gleick’s comment, exactly juxtaposed to Sagan’s quote, a quick google search identifies Lord Monckton as “advisor” to CFACT.

Therefore it is incorrect to claim that Monckton “has a booth” in Cancun.

On the… other hand CFACT describes itself as “a UN credentialed NGO [that] has been sending delegations to UN conferences for many years“. So if anybody is itching for a bit of censorship and has a problem with the UN credentials system, an email or two in the direction of that glass building in Turtle Bay are in order.

How Many NAS Members Does It Take…

…to chip away at the integrity of climate science?

It’s either 255, or they ran out of memory on the Z80.

Never mind that a Google search on Peter Gleick, the main signatory of the (May 6) open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences in defence of climate research, reveals the guy as author of a book published (as luck would have it) on May 3 (sales will surely plunge due to his name becoming ever better known).

Just compare the following statement from the letter

When errors are pointed out, they are corrected

to Mr Gleick’s reaction (him again, publicity-shy as usual!!) on the Huffington Post and SFGate when people pointed out that the original caption of the accompanying picture on Science magazine reads “This images [sic] is a photoshop design” (in case you wonder, the text was already there on May 3)

…a fantastic peek into the way the climate denial “machine” works…small but vocal part of the infosphere dominated by the climate deniers…try to paint the entire climate science community as fake…attempt by climate deniers to divert public attention once again from the facts of climate change…

As it is apparent, when errors are pointed out, they are not corrected before a paranoid rant gets published. And what about “fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong“? I don’t think so: in the case of climate science, that’s abuse and organized bullying what awaits them.

The Weakest Argument For Global Warming…

…is the one inanely repeated on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle by Dr Peter Gleick, “President, Pacific Institute“.

Those who deny that humans are causing unprecedented climate change have never, ever produced an alternative scientific argument that comes close to explaining the evidence we see around the world that the climate is changing

Gleick’s argument could be classified as a form of “weak thought“. However, the history of Science should have taught him better. For example, the same identical words could have been uttered for most of the 18th century about the now-rejected theory of phlogiston. There really was nothing better to explain why things would burn: and so the whole field of Chemistry was held back for a century by a false scientific theory.

Another highly risky and wholly wrong theory threatened to slow down the progress of Physics and Astronomy a hundred years later: luminiferous aether. We should just be thankful to Einstein for having got rid of it, but obviously by his time the vast majority of scientists did not believe in aether any longer despite the absence of “an alternative scientific argument” coming “close to explaining the evidence“.

Another issue with Gleick’s argument is that is says nothing at all about the gravity and urgency of the Global Warming issue: and that is exactly where the discussion is, among reasonable people that don’t want to follow extremists like Romm or Monckton.

“City Brights”? Only on a sunny day…