A number of climate skeptic bloggers have received this message yesterday. While I had planned to defer announcing this until a reasonable scan could be completed, some other bloggers have let the cat out of the bag. I provide this introductory email sent by “FOIA” without editing or comment. I do have one email, which I found quite humorous, which I will add at the end so that our friends know that this is valid. Update - the first email I posted apparently was part of an earlier release (though I had not seen it, there are a number of duplicates in the all.zip file) so I have added a second one.
Update 2: Additional emails have been added - Anthony
Update 3: Delingpole weighs in.
Climategate: FOIA - The Man Who Saved The World Telegraph Blogs
I hope one day that FOIA’s true identity can be revealed so that he can be properly applauded and rewarded for his signal service to mankind. He is a true hero, who deserves to go on the same roll of honour as Norman Borlaug, Julian Simon and Steve McIntyre: people who put truth, integrity and the human race first and ideology second. Unlike the misanthropic greenies who do exactly the opposite.
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Subject: FOIA 2013
It’s time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.
Indeed, it’s singular “I” this time. After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural 
If this email seems slightly disjointed it’s probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven’t decided yet on).
Releasing the encrypted archive was a mere practicality. I didn’t want to keep the emails lying around.
I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220,000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment. Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.
To get the remaining scientifically (or otherwise) relevant emails out, I ask you to pass this on to any motivated and responsible individuals who could volunteer some time to sift through the material for eventual release.
Filtering\redacting personally sensitive emails doesn’t require special expertise.
I’m not entirely comfortable sending the password around unsolicited, but haven’t got better ideas at the moment. If you feel this makes you seemingly “complicit” in a way you don’t like, don’t take action.
I don’t expect these remaining emails to hold big surprises. Yet it’s possible that the most important pieces are among them. Nobody on the planet has held the archive in plaintext since CG2.
That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.
If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words.
The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science - on the contrary. I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.
Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.
It was me or nobody, now or never. Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.
Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”. The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script. We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.
Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.
We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.
If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.
It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.
Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. don’t have that luxury. The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.
Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.
If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try. I couldn’t morally afford inaction. Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.
I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations - trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan .
Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.
Big thanks to Steve and Anthony and many others. My contribution would never have happened without your work (whether or not you agree with the views stated).
Oh, one more thing. I was surprised to learn from a “progressive” blog, corroborated by a renowned “scientist”, that the releases were part of a coordinated campaign receiving vast amounts of secret funding from shady energy industry groups.
I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project. For that end I opened a bitcoin address: 1HHQ36qbsgGZWLPmiUjYHxQUPJ6EQXVJFS.
More seriously speaking, I accept, with gratitude, modest donations to support The (other) Cause. The address can also serve as a digital signature to ward off those identity thefts which are part of climate scientists’ repertoire of tricks these days.
Keep on the good work. I won’t be able to use this email address for long so if you reply, I can’t guarantee reading or answering. I will several batches, to anyone I can think of.
Over and out.
Mr. FOIA
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Original Message
From: Michael E. Mann
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 8:14 AM
To: Edward Cook
Cc: tom crowley ; Michael E. Mann ; esper@xxxxxx ; Jonathan
Overpeck ; Keith Briffa ; mhughes@xxxxxxx ; rbradley@xxxxxx
Subject: Re: hockey stick
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your message. I’m forwarding this to Ray and Malcolm to reply to some of your statements below,
mike
At 10:59 AM 5/2/01 -0400, Edward Cook wrote:
Ed,
heard some rumor that you are involved in a non-hockey stick reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures. I am very intrigued to learn about this - are these results suggesting the so called Medieval Warm Period may be warmer than the early/mid 20th century? any enlightenment on this would be most appreciated,
Tom
Thomas J. Crowley
Dept. of Oceanography
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-3146
Hi Tom,
As rumors often are, the one you heard is not entirely accurate. So, I will take some time here to explain for you, Mike, and others exactly what was done and what the motivation was, in an effort to hopefully avoid any misunderstanding. I especially want to avoid any suggestion that this work was being done to specifically counter or refute the “hockey stick”. However, it does suggest (as do other results from your EBM, Peck’s work, the borehole data, and Briffa and Jones large-scale proxy estimates) that there are unresolved (I think) inconsistencies in the low-frequency aspects of the hockey stick series compared to other results. So, any comparisons with the hockey stick were made with that spirit in mind.
What Jan Esper and I are working on (mostly Jan with me as second author) is a paper that was in response to Broecker’s Science Perspectives piece on
the Medieval Warm Period. Specifically, we took strong exception to his claim that tree rings are incapable of preserving century time scale temperature variability. Of course, if Broecker had read the literature, he would have known that what he claimed was inaccurate. Be that as it may, Jan had been working on a project, as part of his post-doc here, to look at large-scale, low-frequency patterns of tree growth and climate in long tree-ring records provided to him by Fritz Schweingruber. With the addition of a couple of sites from foxtail pine in California, Jan amassed a collection of 14 tree-ring sites scattered somewhat uniformly over the 30-70 degree NH latitude band, with most extending back 1000-1200 years. All of the sites are from temperature-sensitive locations (i.e. high elevation or high northern latitude. It is, as far as I know, the largest,longest, and most spatially representative set of such temperature-sensitive tree-ring data yet put together for the NH extra-tropics.
In order to preserve maximum low-frequency variance, Jan used the Regional Curve Standardization (RCS) method, used previously by Briffa and myself with great success. Only here, Jan chose to do things in a somewhat radical fashion. Since the replication at each site was generally insufficient to produce a robust RCS chronology back to, say, AD 1000, Jan pooled all of the original measurement series into 2 classes of growth trends: non-linear (~700 ring-width series) and linear (~500 ring-width series). He than performed independent RCS on the each of the pooled sets and produced 2 RCS chronologies with remarkably similar multi-decadal and centennial low-frequency characteristics. These chronologies are not good at preserving high-frquency climate information because of the scattering of sites and the mix of different species, but the low-frequency patterns are probably reflecting the same long-term changes in temperature. Jan than averaged the 2 RCS chronologies together to produce a single chronology extending back to AD 800. It has a very well defined Medieval Warm Period Little Ice Age 20th Century Warming pattern, punctuated by strong decadal fluctuations of inferred cold that correspond well with known histories of neo-glacial advance in some parts of the NH. The punctuations also appear, in some cases, to be related to known major volcanic eruptions.
Jan originally only wanted to show this NH extra-tropical RCS chronology in a form scaled to millimeters of growth to show how forest productivity and carbon sequestration may be modified by climate variability and change over relatively long time scales. However, I encouraged him to compare his series with NH instrumental temperature data and the proxy estimates produced by Jones, Briffa, and Mann in order bolster the claim that his unorthodox method of pooling the tree-ring data was producing a record that was indeed related to temperatures in some sense. This he did by linearly rescaling his RCS chronology from mm of growth to temperature anomalies. In so doing, Jan demonstrated that his series, on inter-decadal time scales only, was well correlated to the annual NH instrumental record. This result agreed extremely well with those of Jones and Briffa. Of course, some of the same data were used by them, but probably not more than 40 percent (Briffa in particular), so the comparison is based on mostly, but not fully, independent data. The similarity indicated that Jan’s approach was valid for producing a useful reconstruction of multi-decadal temperature variability (probably weighted towards the warm-season months, but it is impossible to know by how much) over a larger region of the NH extra-tropics than that produced before by Jones and Briffa. It also revealed somewhat more intense cooling in the Little Ice Age that is more consistent with what the borehole temperatures indicate back to AD 1600. This result also bolsters the argument for a reasonably large-scale Medieval Warm Period that may not be as warm as the late 20th century, but is of much(?) greater significance than that produced previously.
Of course, Jan also had to compare his record with the hockey stick since that is the most prominent and oft-cited record of NH temperatures covering the past 1000 years. The results were consistent with the differences shown by others, mainly in the century-scale of variability. Again, the Esper series shows a very strong, even canonical, Medieval Warm Period Little Ice Age 20th Century Warming pattern, which is largely missing from the hockey stick. Yet the two series agree reasonably well on inter-decadal timescales, even though they may not be 1:1 expressions of the same temperature window (i.e. annual vs. warm season weighted). However, the tree-ring series used in the hockey stick are warm-season weighted as well, so the difference between “annual” and “warm season” weighted” is probably not as large as it might seem, especially before the period of instrumental data (e.g. pre 1700) in the hockey stick. So, they both share a significant degree of common interdecal temperature information (and some, but not much, data), but do not co-vary well on century timescales. Again, this has all been shown before by others using different temperature reconstructions, but Jan’s result is probably the most comprehensive expression (I believe) of extra-tropical NH temperatures back to AD 800 onmulti-decadal and century time scales.
Now back to the Broecker perspectives piece. I felt compelled to refute Broecker’s erroneous claim that tree rings could not preserve long-termtemperature information. So, I organized a “Special Wally Seminar” in which I introduced the topic to him and the packed audience using SamuelJohnson’s famous “I refute it thus” statement in the form of “Jan Esper and I refute Broecker thus”. Jan than presented, in a very detailed and wellespressed fashion, his story and Broecker became an instant convert. In other words, Wally now believes that long tree-ring records, when properly selected and processed, can preserve low-frequency temperature variability on centennial time scales. Others in the audience came away with the same understanding, one that we dendrochronologists always knew to be the case.
This was the entire purpose of Jan’s work and the presentation of it to Wally and others. Wally had expressed some doubts about the hockey stickpreviously to me and did so again in his perspectives article. So, Jan’s presentation strongly re-enforced Wally’s opinion about the hockey stick, which he has expressed to others including several who attended a subsequent NOAA meeting at Lamont. I have no control over what Wally says and only hope that we can work together to reconcile, in a professional, friendly manner, the differences between the hockey stick and other proxy temperature records covering the past 1000 years. This I would like to do.
I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution data to evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less so the case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH tree-ring series. However, there is still the question of how strong this event was in the tropics. I maintain that we do not have the proxies to tell us that now. The tropical ice core data are very difficult to interpret as temperature proxies (far worse than tree rings for sure and maybe even unrelated to temperatures in any simple linear sense as is often assumed), so I do not believe that they can be used alone as records to test for the existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the tropics. That being the case, there are really no other high-resolution records from the tropics to use, and the teleconnections between long extra-tropical proxies and the tropics are, I believe, far too tenuous and probably unstable to use to sort out this issue.
So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain’s comment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated. If, as some people believe, a degree of symmetry in climate exists between the hemispheres, which would appear to arise from the tropics, then the existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the extra-tropics of the NH and SH argues for its existence in the tropics as well. Only time and an enlarged suite of proxies that extend into the tropics will tell if this is true.
I hope that what I have written clarifies the rumor and expresses my views more completely and accurately.
Cheers,
Ed
Dr. Edward R. Cook
Doherty Senior Scholar
Tree-Ring Laboratory
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Palisades, New York 10964 USA
Here is an email from Tom Wigley on Naomi Oreskes. Bold mine. (h/t to Junkscience.com)
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date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:16:40 -0700
from: Tom Wigley
subject: Re: [Fwd: Your Submission]
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
This is weird. I used Web of Knowledge, “create citation report”, and added 1999 thru 2009 numbers. Can’t do you becoz of the too many PDJs problem.
Here are 3 results…
Kevin Trenberth, 9049
Me, 5523
Ben, 2407
The max on their list has only 3365 cites over this period.
Analyses like these by people who don’t know the field are useless. A good example is Naomi Oreskes work.
Tom
Quote of the Week: “...scientists are neither saints nor devils but human beings sharing the common weaknesses of our species.” Freeman Dyson The Scientist as Rebel, p. 15] [H/t Donna Laframboise]
Number of the Week: $40 Billion US
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Changing Sun: In its Fourth Assessment Report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC - AR4) dismissed the sun as a major influence on the earth’s climate change. AR4 stated that changes in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI - sunshine) are not sufficient to explain the changing climate. The IPCC ignored other forms of energy from the sun, such as solar wind and magnetism.
This week, several articles appeared discussing a just published paper by Willie Soon and David Legates: Solar irradiance modulation of Equator-to-Pole (Arctic) temperature gradients: Empirical evidence for climate variation on multi-decadal timescales. The paper asserts that changes in TSI influence changes in the temperature difference between the Equator and the North Pole.
An article in Quadrant, explains that the best way to reveal the influence of the sun on temperatures is to use daytime-highs rather than day-night averages. This goes to one of criticism of the models by five-time IPCC Expert Reviewer Vincent Gray (of NZ) that the sun does not shine at every location 24 hours a day as depicted in the models.
Please see links under: Science: Is the Sun Rising?
US Assessment Report: In January, the US National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee (NCADAC) published an alarmist draft report on global warming / climate change consequences for the US. Roger Pielke Jr. promptly slammed the report for some of its factual errors, noting that with so much money spent, and so many authors involved, how could the draft report be so wrong?
On his web site, Bob Tisdale presents a more detailed critique. In closing, he suggests the Committee abandon alarmism because, with the internet, false claims are long remembered and evidence can be found to refute them. It remains to be seen if the bureaucratic who wrote the report will understand.
These government efforts are being supervised by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which has as a motto “Thirteen Agencies, One Vision: Empower the Nation with Global Change Science.” The factually challenged reports reflect on all the agencies involved. Please see links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/.
IPCC Run-Up: Just in time to be included in the up-coming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), researchers from Oregon State University published a report in Science magazine that estimates that temperatures of the last decade were hotter than 75% of the time since the end of the last ice age (start of the Holocene about 11,500 years ago). According to an article in the Oregonian: “The rate of change in the last 100 years is very much unprecedented compared to anything we’ve seen in the last 10,000 years,” said Marcott, the study’s lead author.” “If climate models used by the IPCC, temperatures in 2100 would exceed previous Holocene temperatures in ‘all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios,’ the study says.” The study is based on 73 sets of climate records, mostly from ocean sediment cores.
Immediately, several red flags come up. One, there has been no warming for at least a decade, and the climate models are failing. One cannot make any scientifically supported projections to 2100 based on the models. Two, researcher Marcott claimed that prior research had not extended global temperatures from proxies beyond the last 2,000 years. Ice cores go far beyond that and the new study is inconsistent with Greenland ice cores, which are supported by significant other proxy data. Three, the sampled time interval is between 20 to 500 years, making it difficult to make any comparisons with the rate of warming in the 20th century.
Four, a simple review of the studies listed in CO2 Science, the web site of Sherman, Craig, and Keith Idso, produces a multitude of studies that contradict the claim that the current warm period is unusual, even in the last 1,000 years. Under Medieval Warm Period, there are studies for every continent. Under Medieval Warm Period, Global, there a multitude of studies listed including one that had 6,144 sets of heat flow measurements from all the continents.
This episode is one more illustration of once distinguished scientific journals hyping an upcoming article by sending out early press releases to selected journalists who will write a sensationalized report on the article before anyone in the scientific community has a chance to read and think about it. Please see Article # 1, links under Defending the Orthodoxy and http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/subject_m.php
Madison Avenue Science: Since the 1920s until recently, Madison Avenue in New York has been identified with the American advertising industry. Here many highly successful ad campaigns for consumer products such as toothpaste, aspirin, toilet paper, and, yes, cigarettes were concocted and implemented. In his book Propaganda, pioneer Edward Bernays made it clear he believed in what he was doing, and it was for the good of consumers and the country. He believed it was important for a self-selected elite to influence the general masses as to what to buy, to think, and to vote. Today, the term propaganda is no longer fashionable and has been replaced by “scientific marketing.”
Joe D’Aleo has pointed out that sociologist Edward Maibach established a scientific marketing center for the Climate Establishment. Indeed, a review of the web site of The Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University confirms D’Aleo’s view. All the trappings of Madison Avenue are there. “We use social science research methods - experiments, surveys, in-depth interviews and other methods - to find ways of effectively engaging the public and policy makers in the problem, and in considering and enacting solutions. “Our mission is to conduct unbiased public engagement research - and to help government agencies, non-profit organizations, and companies apply the results of this research so that collectively, we can stabilize our planet’s life sustaining climate.” [Note the scientifically false assumption that humans can stabilize the earth’s climate, which has never been stable.]
One of its programs was titled: “The Climate Change In The American Mind Series Fall 2012,” which includes a series of reports concluding with: “The final report from Fall 2012 shows that the Alarmed have grown from 10 percent of the American adult population in 2010 to 16 percent in 2012. At the same time, the Dismissive have decreased in size, from 16 percent in 2010 to 8 percent in 2012.”
The site includes a special section for TV weather forecasters and their role as “Climate Educators.” Another section is titled: “Public Perceptions Of NASA And Other Federal Agencies’ Climate Research.” NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Park Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are listed among the major funding organizations.
No doubt, as with Bernays, the organizers of this site believe it is a noble cause. Critics may refer to it as “brain washing” using public tax money. Please see link: http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/welcome .
Extreme Weather: Maplecroft, an independent risk analysis firm, which sells its findings to businesses, humanitarian organizations, etc, came out with its report of the natural hazards experienced in 2012. Overall the year was the least deadly year in the past 10, with fatalities at about 10,000 or about 9% of the average for the past ten years of 106,000. Its findings were similar to those of the re-insurance company Munich Re. The major exception was the US, with Sandy and the drought. Please note there were no major mass deaths from earthquakes in 2012, which are unrelated to weather.
The organization’s Socio-economic Resilience Index 2013 ranks countries into four risk categories. The countries under extreme risk are mostly poor countries in Africa. Combining the resilience index with the natural hazard risk illustrates the importance of resilience in overcoming risks of natural disasters.
For example, with its many natural weather hazards, the US is in the top 20 countries most at risk countries for exposure to hurricanes, tsunamis, extra-tropical cyclones, storm surges, flooding, volcanic risk and wildfires. But it ranks at 169th (out of 197 countries) and “low risk” in the Natural Hazard Risk Atlas because it has the resilience to respond. This shows the importance of disaster preparedness. Please see link under Extreme Weather.
See much more here.
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Also see this powerpoint by John Droz on Science under Assault
POLITICALLY DRIVEN WELL FUNDED ENVIROFASCISM - MCKIBBBEN CLAIMED ALL WITH ALMOST NO MONEY - BUT TAXES REVEAL MCKIBBEN’S BAND OF GREENIES POCKETED MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Anti-Keystone protests get millions in funding
Nothing influences President Barack Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline quite like the protests against it, led by Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist, and his organization, called 350.org. On Wednesday, 350.org and the Sierra Club participated in an anti-Keystone protest at the White House and this Sunday they are holding another one on Capital Hill. They expect 20,000 people from across the United States.
350.org has the look and feel of an amateur, grassroots operation, but in reality, it is a multi-million dollar campaign run by staff earning six-digit salaries.
By my analysis of information from the U.S. Foundation Center and the tax filings of American charitable foundations, McKibben’s campaigns have received more than 100 grants since 2005 for a total of US$10-million from 50 charitable foundations. Six of those grants were for roughly US$1-million each.
In the interest of fairness and transparency, McKibben should fully disclose 350.org’s funding and the Rockefellers and other charitable foundations that have been bankrolling the anti-Keystone campaign should come out from the shadows.
Since 2006, McKibben has led three campaigns: Step it Up, 1Sky and 350.org. Each campaign built on the previous one. In the summer of 2006, Step it Up organized a protest walk across Vermont to push for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants and other federal actions. Created in 2007, 1Sky began a national movement to jump-start a clean energy economy. 350.org built on 1Sky and in April of 2011, the two campaigns officially merged.
More than half of the US$10-million came from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, where McKibben, a trustee, was paid US$25,000 per year (2001-09). Since 2007, the Rockefellers have paid US$4-million towards 1Sky and 350.org, tax returns say. The Schumann Center provided US$1.5-million to McKibben’s three campaigns as well as US$2.7-million to fund the Environmental Journalism Program at Middlebury College, in Vermont, where McKibben is on staff.
The founders of the Schumann Center were John J. Schumann Jr. and Florence Ford, a former president of General Motors Acceptance Corp. and the daughter of one of the founders of IBM, respectively.
Last spring, I emailed McKibben to ask about his campaign funding. He replied twice, but did not mention the Rockefellers or the Schumann Center, where he had been a trustee for 10 years. Last week, I again asked McKibben about his funding. He said that Step It Up, 1Sky or 350.org reimburse him for travel expenses, but do not pay him a fee for his services. To its credit, 350.org now provides an online list of the 30 foundations that funded the campaign in 2011. Until this week, the Schumann Center was not on the list and yet tax returns show that in 2011, Schumann paid US$311,300 to 350.org and 1Sky. 350.org admitted this week that the Schumann Center had been omitted from the list. It has since been added.
What 350.org’s list of donors fails to convey is that some foundations provide only US$5,000 or US$10,000, while two unidentified donors provide half of 350.org’s budget for 2011, according to its financial statements. Four grants accounted for two-thirds of 350’org’s budget. 350.org declined to identify the donors of those grants.
Back in 2007, the 1Sky Education Fund had starting revenues of US$1.6-million. Of that, US$1.3-million was from the Rockefeller Family Fund. In 2008, 1Sky received a further US$920,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as well as US$900,000 from the Schumann Center, tax returns show. What this means is that from the get-go, McKibben’s campaign was bankrolled by the Rockefellers and the Schuman Center.
Bill McKibben has been a director of 1Sky since it began, so one would think that he was aware of the organization’s finances. And yet, to hear McKibben tell the story, he started the climate movement and the protests against Keystone XL with nothing more than a few students and “almost no money.”
In a 2010 article by McKibben, posted on at least 10 websites, he writes, “Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the ‘largest ever co-ordinated global rally of any kind” on any issue.’ In another article that McKibben penned for Tikkun magazine, he says that he built the climate movement with seven graduate students at Middlebury College and “no money or organization.” During the fall of 2012, in interviews with Jed Lipinski and Grand Valley University, McKibben again told the story of starting 350.org with seven students and “almost no money.” But that’s not what tax returns indicate.
1Sky began in 2008. In its first year, 1Sky reported expenditures of US$2.6-million, tax returns show. Of that, US$2.2-million was payroll, including US$1.2-million for consultants. In 2009, 1Sky’s campaign director, Gillian Caldwell, a lawyer by training, was paid US$203,620 through the Rockefeller Family Fund. A salary of more than US$200,000 is hardly typical of a “scruffy little outfit.”
During 2011, the most recent year for which tax returns are publicly available, 350.org again had a US$2-million payroll, including US$622,000 for consultants. 350.org spent US$1.2-million on grassroots fieldwork, partnership with other organizations and media coverage, and US$356,000 to recruit participants through emails, blogs and social networking.
The next time McKibben pens an article or gives a speech, he should acknowledge the US$10-million that his campaigns have received from the Rockefellers, the Schumann Center and other sources.
Financial Post