The penny drops. [more]

Both ‘sides’ of the climate debate should be judged by the same set of rules which means we should hold Heartland to the same standard to which we are currently holding Peter Gleick. [more]

Philosophers talk about the “dirty hands” problem: are lies OK in the pursuit of truth? [more]

Do this, please. And please spread this video around.

UPDATED! Now with MORE SCIENCEY GOODNESS!!! Fred Singer is going around claiming that most "tree rings, ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, stalagmites... haven’t shown any warming since 1940". Fred Singer is wrong. [more]

Anything goes unless some of your cousins, aunts and uncles or grandparents would think it rude at a family dinner. [more]

Heartland threatens to sue those who comment on the leaked documents and Peter Gleick comes clean as the source of the leak. There will be lawyers and the public debate seems about to move further away from the science of climate change. But perhaps this incident will spark a long overdue interest by journalists and others to look deeper into the inner workings of Heartland and other 'think tanks', because it is well past time they received real scrutiny. [more]

It's hard to resist looking at the newly leaked documents from the contemptible Heartland Institute. But shouldn't people, no matter how nasty, get to keep their secrets? Is this ethically all that different from the CRU hacking? [more]

Dr. Michael E. Mann’s book is a must-read for those that are relatively new to learning about climate science. This book has it all: science, drama, and politics. How many non-fiction science books can make that claim? [more]

If she weighs the same as a duck, she must be a witch. McLean et al., cheered on by Marc Morano, argue similarly that an oscillation dominates a trend in detrended data, and therefore Not the IPCC. [more]

Jürgen Hubert  on a public posting on G+ notes:

Remember when Germany had to suffer through rolling blackouts through the winter because the government decided to turn off seven nuclear power plants after Fukushima?

Oh, wait – that didn’t happen.

Instead [Germany] kept on exporting … excess electricity to France to make up for the shortages from their nuclear power plants.

Last year, Germany derived 20% of its electricity from regenerative sources. Let’s see how high we can get this year…

Via Barry Bickmore, using software which allows reproduction of included clip art for educational purposes.

Is that clear yet?

One of the early claims made accusing Peter Gleick of faking the Heartland memo (before he admitted to being the source of the other documents) had to do with his writing style. Supposedly it matched the writing style of the memo.

Anthony Watts even suggested people perform stylometry and textometry to see if Gleick really did write the memo.

Well Shawn Lawrence Otto decided to take Watts up on his suggestion and the results are likely not what people were expecting. It turns out that Heartland Institute president Joe Bast is the most likely source of the memo in question.
(more…)

If you’re on Facebook, (and admit it, you are on Facebook) check it out. You can get a sense of the luxurious, indulgent lifestyle of the academic.

Via PolitiFact here are comments by Rick Santorum on Satan attacking American institutions, from a talk he gave at Ave Maria University in Florida in 2008:

Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the route to attack all of these strong plants that have so deeply rooted in American tradition. He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions.

The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first — first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different — pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell.

You say, well, what could be the impact of academia falling? Well, I would make the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. And so what we saw, this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions.

The next was the church. No, you’d say, well wait, the Catholic church? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure, the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic. Mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course, we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it… etc. etc.

This borders on dementia.