What's the deal with the Manhattan Declaration?

[HoboStew]

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results.html?artId=22866

It was published by the Heartland Institute. From looking around in the global warming threads, I see that the general consensus on this board as that they are corporate shills with no credibility, but they managed to get endorsements from 600 or so people who "have training and/or backgrounds that afford them a good understanding of climate change science, technology, economics and/or policy."cite

I’m not interested in a GW debate here, what I want to know is:

Does the Heartland Institute have any credibility in the general scientific community?
Are the people who endorsed this declaration, in general, credible in the general scientific community?
Does this declaration imply that there isn’t quite as much consensus amongst scientists about GW as I previously believed?

[Captain_Amazing]

It’s a right wing think tank partially funded by Exxon-Mobile. It’s a public policy organization, not a scientific organization, so to answer your first question, not really.

[HoboStew]

According to their site, no corporate donors gave more than 5% of their 2007 income. Even if 5% came from Exxon, is that sufficient reason to dismiss them out of hand?

[Sage_Rat]

While there’s only a relatively small number of people actually studying global warming, the number of people with training and experience that would make them able to study it on one level or another is around 500,000 in just the US. 600 people is like 1 in 1000. Finding one crazy person in a group of 1000 people isn’t an amazing task.

[Squink]

@HoboStew

Even if 5% came from Exxon, is that sufficient reason to dismiss them out of hand?

It’s not even necessary to have that as a reason.

In April 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore wrote that the Heartland Institute’s list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares”[10] included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as “coauthors” of the article, nor agreed with its claims regarding global warming. Dozens of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list; for instance, Gregory Cutter of Old Dominion University wrote, “I have NO doubts… the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.” Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford wrote “Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!” [

Heartland Institute

[paperbackwriter]

@HoboStew

Are the people who endorsed this declaration, in general, credible in the general scientific community?

Looking at the remaining list of endorsers shows a very mixed bag. It includes a former professor of climatology an astrophysicist and a founder of the Weather Channel, but it also includes a lot of marketing and public-policy types, people with completely inappropriate credentials (e.g., events planner or high-school social-studies teacher), a number with no listed credentials and even a creationist or two. Of the 114 that were initial endorsers (i.e., were at the conference that produced the Declaration), 6 appear to be currently active in climatology or related fields. There’s another two or three with emeritus positions directly related to climate-change research. Overall, however, it is not a group that represents what the Heartland Institute wants you to think it represents.

[HoboStew]

@Squink

It’s not even necessary to have that as a reason.

Well that certainly is telling. The next part is even more interesting:

In response, the Heartland Institute refused to remove any names from the list, writing that “They [the scientists] have no right—legally or ethically—to demand that their names be removed from a bibliography.”

So they used names without permission as “coauthors” and then, when called on it, refused to retract the names. Bizarre.