Entries associated with the tag "Heartland Institute":

Schools need all the money they can get, says the Chicago-based Heartland Institute in June:

"In New York, charter schools get generally 20 percent less per student than the other public schools. It is hardly fair to deny them funding and then complain about their reliance on private donors." 

Schools can do their job with much less money than they get now, says the Heartland Institute in August:

"An April 2007 report from the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation estimates the 12 voucher and tuition tax credit programs in operation nationwide before the 2006-07 school year will produce a 15-year cost savings of $444 million.... 'Some of the voucher programs for special-needs students show these students can be instructed for much, much less than the public education system does.'" The article claims that Utah children can be educated just as well on $3,000 vouchers as on the state's per-pupil cost of $7,500.

Moral to alleged think tanks: when you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said.

The Heartland Institute has been promoting Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's new book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, so I took a look. The book isn't just wrong -- it's systematically dishonest.

Singer and Avery keep starting to argue the science, then switch to contending that fears about global warming are exaggerated and that proposed remedies will be counterproductive. By page three they're hyperventilating: "Will people give up the scientific and technological advances that have added thirty years to life expectancies all over the globe in the last century?" (Later they call their adversaries scaremongers.)

At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it's actually a feature. Their implicit logic -- never stated outright for obvious reasons -- is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That's worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)

The book's explicit claim is that because there's a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow, and the initial premise is dubious.

Most of the book consists of throwing mud at the findings of peer-reviewed climate science and seeing what sticks. The mud is of low quality, but since this is a blog and not a book, I'll limit myself to four examples.

Page 36: "CO2 has been a lagging indicator [in the last three ice ages and subsequent warmings], its concentrations rising about eight hundred years after the temperatures warm ... additional evidence that CO2 is not the forcing agent in recent global climate changes." Singer and Avery quote a 2003 article (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Science to this effect. But they don't mention that the warming episodes in question lasted about 5,000 years! So the fact that CO2 didn't start the warming doesn't mean it had no role in the (much larger) warming that followed. It's as if they were arguing that gravity doesn't exist because someone pushed  a car that was sitting still at the top of the hill. Technical details here from a coauthor of the original paper. (For the record, honest disputants fully lay out the other side's arguments before attacking them and don't cherry-pick them to create a false impression.)

Page 132: "Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas ... have demonstrated" that there was a worldwide medieval warm period warmer than today, so there's no problem now. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, and the premise is questionable -- in fact, it has been questioned by several climate scientists, writing in Eos (behind a paywall, summary here if you scroll down to "Myth #2"). The climate scientists had serious criticisms: Soon and Baliunas counted as "warm" any place that appeared to be wetter OR drier OR warmer than it was in the 20th century; they took evidence scattered over a 500-year period (800-1300) as signifying a global change; and they compared their results to the 20th-century average, when the relevant comparison should be to the last part of the 20th century. CAVEAT: I haven't read the article or the criticism. My point is that when Singer and Avery present Soon and Baliunas as having "demonstrated" something -- and then fail to mention, much less address, professional criticisms of their work -- they're deceiving their readers, not engaging in reasoned dialogue.

Page 39: Antarctica is cooling. Another case of cherry-picking and twisting a peer-reviewed publication, well answered by its author Peter Doran (previously blogged here).

Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 -- allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade.  Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers -- including Chicago's own don't-think tank, the Heartland Institute -- aren't serious participants in the discussion of these issues.

BTW, over the years I haven't hesitated to call bullshit on environmentalists when appropriate, such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. His persistent refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong is intellectually corrupt in much the same way Singer and Avery's book is.

If you look at the entire country, excluding New York City, 4.5 million people work at home, and only 3.7 million take mass transit to work. That's from the Census Bureau's 2005 American Communities Survey, by way of Wendell Cox at the Heartland Institute.  He concludes, "Perhaps it is time to think about paying people to work at home rather than paying transit to not carry people."

Ever since the folks at Heartland went on an antiscience crusade I don't quote them without checking the source.  Sure enough, Cox is fudging -- not by falsifying the numbers but by aggregating them to support his thesis and by ignoring the fact that many people don't have access to mass transit (most people of course drive to work).

Take the Census Bureau's figures for the seven-county Chicago area: In Cook County 68,000 work at home and 388,000 take transit to work. In Du Page County:  21,000 and 28,000. Will County:  10,000 and 14,000. Lake County, Indiana:  4,000 and 6,000. McHenry County:  6,000 and 6,000.

Cox's thesis is borne out in only two counties. In Lake County:  14,000 work at home and 13,000 take transit. In Kane County:  10,000 and 6,000.

Clearly in Chicagoland, except at the fringes, more people take transit to work than work at home. 

Irony alert:  if you were determined to pass a uniform transportation policy for the whole country (minus NYC), then Cox's breakdown of the figures would make sense.  If you were a sincere conservative or libertarian, believing in local choice and adaptation, you'd be more interested in the numbers given above.

Over at Gristmill, John Tirman of MIT's Center for International Studies notes the bogosity of one particular piece of mud the right-wing anti-science machine has been flinging: a petition supposedly signed by more than 17,000 scientists stating that there's "no convincing scientific evidence" for human-caused global warming. Read the whole thing. (If it were what it purports to be, that fact would be reflected in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, which it is not.) But don't hold your breath waiting for Chicago's own Heartland Institute to apologize for its role in spreading this disinformation.

Those who harp on the supposed uncertainty of global warming rarely mention that uncertainty runs both ways, thus there's a possibility that the mainstream view of climate scientists might be unduly optimistic. Florida State University oceanographer Jeff Chanton and colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Russia, just published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature [if there's a link I haven't found it] reporting how one potential positive-feedback loop actually is contributing to warming. As Siberian permafrost melts into lakes, it releases methane--a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent but shorter-lived than carbon dioxide. "My fellow researchers and I estimate that an expansion of these thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, a period of regional warming, increased methane emissions by 58 percent there," says Chanton in an FSU press release. This methane dates from the Pleistocene. More melting leads to more methane which leads to more melting. Best story so far is at Seed.

At the other end of the earth, Antarctic ice cores dating back 800,000 years have been analyzed now (the last 150,000 years' results apparently haven't been published yet), according to a BBC report quoting Dr. Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey. Current levels of carbon dioxide are outside the natural range seen in that time, and today's rate of change is unprecedented: "In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.  The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years.  We really are in the situation where we don't have an analogue in our records."

In January 2002 Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a four-page article in Nature.  A  contribution to Antarctic climatology, after almost five years it's still newsworthy enough that he wrote about it in the July 27 New York Times. (A fuller free version is available here .)

"My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report . . . found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent [58 percent] had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change."

That's how science works:  a theory (or model) makes predictions, researchers check them out and report the results.  When they don't fit, it's time to check the research findings, and if they seem valid, to revise the model.

This patient iterative process is too slow for the mainstream media, and too impartial to suit climate-change denialists.  Writes Doran, "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear' and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'"

Chicago's Heartland Institute, which purports to champion "sound science," joined this company with an article in 2002 that overgeneralized Doran's findings and linked them to unrelated studies, in order to create the impression (well known to be false) that the globe as a whole isn't warming.  Much as creationists take any revision in evolutionary theory (no matter how slight) as proof that the whole theory of evolution by natural selection is worthless, these special pleaders misread the very process of science in order to deny its results. 

The media echo chamber continues to resound with these misrepresentations.  A newspaper in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, fabricated a Doran quote to suit its purposes on June 25.  In the on-line comments section June 29, Doran denied ever saying or thinking it, and asked that it be removed.  It's still up.

(Which reminds me -- has any denialist outfit ever explained Doran's actual findings and apologized for misrepresenting them?)

Of course, science has been plodding on meantime.  Writes Doran, "Climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet."

Doran includes a fuller version of his Times op-ed and additional materials at his UIC web site.  One of his side comments pretty much summarizes the whole sorry business:

"It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they 'thought' supported their argument."

Twenty-one years ago I kicked off my job at the Reader with a monstrously long profile of the then-newborn Heartland Institute and the philosophy of libertarianism.

For years now, Heartland has been frittering away its credibility, wasting its resources, and discrediting libertarian thought in general by claiming there's no such thing as climate change--and that if there is, people have nothing to do with it.

Libertarians pride themselves on dealing with the economic world as it is, not as do-gooders wish it was. Why should it be different where other sciences are involved? Real climate scientists agree that there's a problem here that we need to deal with. Hell, even Lloyd's of London has figured that out. There are ways of dealing with climate change that will enhance government power, and ways that will harness the power of the market to improve matters. Those are the issues worth debating, instead of presenting Michael Crichton--a fiction writer with a flimsy conspiracy theory--as if he were some kind of authority on the planet's climate system.

A good deal of my writing over the years has been influenced by libertarian thinking, much of which I learned at Heartland. These days I find myself hesitating to mention their good stuff because of their crackpot position on climate change. It gives the impression that libertarianism really is a right-wing philosophy, lined up with anti-science Republicans who think evolution is some kind of dubious hypothesis. What possible reward could be great enough for intelligent people to seek such company?