This is a story that won’t go away and the eventual outcome is that many alarmists and their media toadies will be in court and hopefully fined heavily or serve time in jail. In any event, here’s the obvious fact that the alarmists blogs heavily funded by liberal dollars and wrap the fish newspapers like The Guardian that its still exists only because it is propped up by a misguided charitable trust all forget, Government-funded research is subject to freedom of information laws; the internal deliberations of privately-funded research and advocacy groups are not. As we know from the climategate emails, Phil Jones and the gang at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) stonewalled FOIA requests for years to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methodologies. That was a bona fide scandal.

Leaking the CRU emails - whistle blowing - was the only way to (a) produce documents responsive to valid FOIA requests, and (b) expose CRU’s willful evasion of FOIA.

There is no analogy between climategate and the theft of the Heartland documents because (1) Heartland has no legal obligation to share its internal deliberations with the public, and (2), unlike collusion to evade FOIA, strategizing about fund raising is not a crime!

Anthony Watts was heavily attacked in the looney left blogosphere for actually accepting funding for doing important work. Here was his defense of his funding as reported on Bishop Hill‘s blog.

Anthony Watts has sent details of the project that Heartland was involved in and his interactions with the Guardian on the subject. This I think is Heartland’s description of the project.

Weather Stations Project

Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record - either high or low - has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous “climate change.”

Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who hosts WattsUpwithThat.com, one of the most popular and influential science blogs in the world, has documented that many of the temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces. It is not uncommon for these stations to over-state temperatures by 3 or 4 degrees or more, enough to set spurious records.

Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications. Unfortunately, NOAA doesn’t widely publicize data from this new network, and puts raw data in spreadsheets buried on one of its Web sites.

Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011.

The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.

And here’s Anthony’s response to questions from Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian:

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.

They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.

It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don’t tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn’t free and I could not do on my own.  Compare the funding I asked for initially to get it started to the millions some other outfits (such as CRU) get in the UK for studies that then end up as a science paper behind a publishers paywall, making the public pay again. My project will be a free public service when finished.

And then this:

DeSmog, as part of their public relations for hire methodology to demonize skeptics, will of course try to find nefarious motives for this project. But there simply are none here. It’s something that needs doing because NOAA hasn’t made this new data available in a user friendly visual format.

For example, here’s a private company website that tracks highs and low records using NOAA data.

NOAA doesn’t make any kind of presentation like that either, which is why such things are often done by private ventures.

Golly, aren’t sceptics wicked? I wonder why the Guardian didn’t mention Anthony’s comments?

Logic-gate: The Smog blog exposes irrational rage. Innumeracy. And Heartlands efficient success>

By Joanne Nova

The believers of man-made-weather-disasters are wetting themselves with excitement. It painful to watch grown men drool.

Poor things, they were really wounded by Climategate, and they’ve been waiting, praying that some day someone would level the playing field and show that skeptics were just as petty, shameless, and money-grubbing as their team turned out to be (not to mention hypocritical, deceptive and incompetent). In their dreams.

Instead the hyped non-denier-gate shows just how incredibly successful the Heartland Institute is. Look at the numbers. The skeptics have managed to turn the propaganda around against a tide of money, and it is really some achievement.

USD

Greenpeace $300m 2010 Annual Report

WWF $700m

Pew Charitable Trust $360m 2010 Annual Report

Sierra Club $56m 2010 Annual Report

NSW climate change fund (just one random govt example) $750m

NSW Gov (A$700m)

Heartland Institute $6.4m

US government funding for climate science and technology $7,000m ($7B) “Climate Money”

US government funding for “climate related appropriations” $1,300m ($1.3B) USAID 2010

Annual turnover in global carbon markets $120,000m ($120B) 2010 Point Carbon

Annual investment in renewable energy $243,000m ($230B) 2010 BNEF

US government funding for skeptical scientists $ 0

These are annual turnovers or annual budgets

So what the expose shows is that the Heartland Institute punches far above its weight with an incredibly efficient budget. That is, of course, assuming that the so-called expose is real and not a fake, or altered, which it could be, watch the Heartland site for any confirmation or information.

This is a wake up call to the freedom loving people of the world, it’s time to make donations a regular part of your monthly budget to support all the people out there who work on your behalf (SEE DONATE BUTTON ON LEFT). The fact that Heartland has only one major, generous donor is remarkable. Where are the rest?

The hypocrisy is flagrant. The Sierra Club listed a category for $1,000,000 donations by “anonymous donors” in their 2010 annual report. Strangely DeSmog didn’t froth with anticipation. Their Sierra Club annual report mentions “Matching Gifts”, and apparently supporters who matched gifts include the evil Exxon, not to mention GoldMan Sachs, Barclays, Google, Monsanto, Nestle, Yahoo, Bank of America, and many many more. But that’s alright then.

And if Bob Carter receives an honorarium type amount of $1500 a month, the pull of those big dollars must be powerfully tempting for people like Tim Flannery who struggle along on about $1200 each day he works.


Enlarged. Julia needs to go after Garnaut, Karoly, Trenberth and the other phonies that have created this phony global charade

As I always say when these matters are raised, YES Please. Let’s do talk about the funding.

Read Joanne Nova’s story here. Thank you to the Desmogblog radicals for calling attention to how one sided this really is.

See how someone appaerently stole papers from a Heartland board meeting. Some documents, including some faked documents were released.

HEARTLAND’s STATEMENT

Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 - The following statement from The Heartland Institute - a free-market think tank - may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

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The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site at http://www.heartland.org or call 312/377-4000.

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Wrong: Christian Science Monitor headline on Heartland leak

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Steve Milloy

“Documents reveal Koch-funded group’s plot to undermine climate science.”

Not only do the leaked documents from Heartland not indicate any “plot to undermine climate science” - something that has already been undermined by Michael Mann and his hockey stick - but of Heartland’s $4.6 million 2011 budget, only $25,000 (0.5%) came from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation - and the $25,000 was earmarked for Heartland’s Health Care News project. So the CSM headline is entirely wrong.

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CFACT’s Climate Depot website provides further commentary on this outrageous action. Here is the link: http://www.ClimateDepot.com

As Climate Depot director Marc Morano has observed, the sums contributed to skeptical groups like Heartland “are loose change compared to the billions that have been funneled to green groups and alarmist research establishments.” The more the climate chaos edifice collapses, the more angry and desperate the rent-seeking alarmists have become. This is just one more manifestation of their desperation.

Thank you for helping to ensure that the American and world public learn the TRUTH about this despicable theft and fabrication.  In addition take note of this environmentalist special interest campaign, which dwarfs even what the Heartland Institute has been falsely accused of.

Another example of bias and incompetence in the mainstream media.