If ignorance is truly bliss, then green-blogger Brendan DeMelle has got to be one the happiest people on the face of the earth. Attempting to ridicule the Heartland Institutes’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, set to kick off in Chicago this Sunday, DeMelle relied on tired arguments that might otherwise be persuasive if they were either: a) relevant, or b) accurate. The following pretty much sums up DeMelle’s take:
…this denial-a-palooza fest is dripping with oil money and represents a blatant industry effort to greenwash oil and coal while simultaneously attacking the credibility of climate scientists.
The entire conference can therefore be dismissed out of hand. Nothing to see here except a bunch of posers on the take, right? Had he been blogging during the Renaissance, no doubt DeMelle would have advanced the same kind of argument to defend the accepted version of “settled science” back then:
Pay no attention of that fraud Galileo. You know he’s part of the Accademia dei Lincei, right? And you know that group is funded by that rich aristocrat Federico Cesi, right? How can you believe a guy with those connections? How can the Pope and all those Cardinals possibly be wrong?
As silly as it is to say that a scientific proposition is necessarily false based on who funds the underlying research, that particular argument doesn’t even apply in this case, as we shall soon see. Every year, Heartland brings together leading scientists and policy-makers to talk about global warming. Some are very skeptical, some are mildly skeptical and others have their doubts but aren’t quite sure yet. In terms of diverse scientific opinion, it’s a far more interesting conference than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s periodic hand-wringing exercises.
But Brendan DeMelle isn’t required to consider skeptical arguments – and encourages you to hide your intellectual curiosity underneath a bushel-basket alongside his – because Exxon-Mobil, the Koch Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife are supposedly the puppet masters. According to Brendan:
… 19 of the 65 sponsors (including Heartland itself) have received a total of $40 million in funding since 1985 from Exxon-Mobil (funded 13 orgs), and/or Koch Industries family foundations (funded 10 orgs) and/or the Scaife family foundations (funded 10 orgs).
That’s an interesting, if meaningless, bit of research, for a couple of reasons. Were I a “Senior Fellow” at Media Matters (which presupposes that I would have had my sense of humor surgically removed) I would wonder: how much of that $40 million donated over the course of 25 years goes to pay for either: a) Heartland’s activities at all, or b) this conference in particular? The answer, in both cases, is the same: zero. Addressing the first question, Heartland’s President Joe Bast told me:
The Heartland Institute hasn’t received funding from Koch, Exxon, or Scaife for years – in the case of Koch and Scaife for more than a decade.
Bast’s reply to the second question is equally damning to DeMelle’s hypothesis:
Cosponsors do not pay a fee or contribute to the expense of the conference. In fact, they are subsidized by The Heartland Institute to attend. (Emphasis added).
What’s truly troubling about guys like Brendan DeMelle and the many people like him who want to deny deniers like me our denials, is that they do a disservice to the public and to the scientific process, along with the many independent, courageous scientists who have dared to assert a basic principle that was ingrained into all of us who made a career in the sciences, from simple chemists like me to world-famous nuclear physicists: science is never settled.
There is a wide-variety of opinions among those scientists whom the MSM usually paints with the broad brushes of (at best) “skeptics,” or (at worst) “deniers.” I don’t think that guys like Brendan DeMelle will be able to comprehend this, but the Heartland conference does not require speakers to stick to an agenda-driven template, a la Copenhagen. I am certain, for example, that if global-warming researchers like Michael Mann or Phil Jones wanted to speak at a Heartland conference, they would be welcome and Bast would go out of his way to make sure they were treated with respect.
The Heartland conference features guys like Dr. Roy Spencer, a former climatologist for NASA who believes that the planet is getting warmer and that mankind has something to do with that, but that our contribution is too small to worry about. There’s Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer and statistician who tries to make sense of the historical climate record on his own time and who – though he doesn’t agree with Michael Mann – recently leapt to Mann’s defense when he felt “Dr. Hockey Stick” was being unjustly harassed. There’s Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who lives his personal life as green as anyone from the Sierra Club could wish, but who has found (and is trying to correct) severe problems with the way that we measure and record temperatures. These researchers and their colleagues are honorable, exceptional people who have been true to themselves and to science.
The thing that motivates people like Spencer, McIntyre, Watts and thousands of their colleagues in the sciences (including yours truly) is not non-existent oil money, nor is it a belief that those scientists with whom we disagree are part of vast global conspiracy. Rather, it’s a simple question of to what conclusion does the science actually lead? If bloggers like Brendan DeMelle would like to get a handle on the answer to that question, reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, along with a review of the skeptical report “Climate Change Reconsidered” might be in order.
For anyone with an open-mind, the contrast between the two is rather striking and makes it clear why the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change is so important: not only for the good of the people who inhabit this planet, but for the future of the scientific method that has served us so well.
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