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| Making Dad proud |
Funding for selected individuals outside of Heartland.This is all the more disturbing because I am not entirely sure who Craig Idso is. And yet he's pulling down six figures courtesy of the denialosphere? I am wasting my life.
Our current budget includes funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.
As to who this guy is:
Craig D. Idso is Chairman, founder and former President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a contrarian Arizona-based group funded in part by ExxonMobil. He is the son of its president, Sherwood B. Idso[1], and the brother of its vice president, Keith E. Idso.[2]Thus Sourcewatch, raising more questions than they answer. How many denialist think tanks are running on the mom-and-pop family business model, where the kids go off to college to secure their degrees in Agronomy and Geography before taking up the mantle of pretending to be a scientist? Is the Idso clan grooming the grandkids? When in 2030 the Arctic flips over into an ice-free state, are we going to be subjected to the analysis of William Howell Keith Idso the Third, on the strength of his degrees in Sports Marketing and Biblical Anthropology?
Maybe we'll get lucky and young William will be the black sheep of the family. "I'm leaving all this behind, Dad, and when you see me again, I'm going to have a degree in atmospheric physics!" "No son of mine!" "You can't stop me!" "Two weeks on a grad student stipend grading papers and you'll come crawling back!" "You can change the biometric security settings for the Compound, because I'm never coming back!"
Alternately, the rebellious young William could chose a career as a male escort, which would be more of a lateral move.
That seems a little harsh.
ReplyDeleteCraig maintains a collection of links to all the paleo data that show the medieval warm period was indeed warm. Thousands of such data. Monckton recently referred to it as proof.
Alas, if you actually look at the data you'll see places that were warm from 900 to 1000 AD and another warm from 1000 AD to 1200 AD and these are proof of the medieval warm period -- as long as you don't read that before and after these warm periods those locations were cool.
He takes in $11,600 to keep a scrapbook of links? That's what you're saying,isn't it?
DeleteNick
There are a couple of problems with your post.
ReplyDeleteIdso conveniently includes the abstracts of the papers he lifts the graphs from. In a strategy which I speculate Monckton learned a lot from, Idso cites studies that directly contradict his conclusions. You neglected to mention this fact.
E.g. Loso 2009, "Summer temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age inferred from varved proglacial lake sediments in southern Alaska." The end of the abstract reads:
"A Medieval Warm Period is evident from 1000 to 1100 AD, but the temperature reconstruction suggests it was less warm than recent decades - an observation supported by independent geological evidence of recent glacier retreat that is unprecedented over the period of record."
Second point: Idso does not seem to realize that some paleoclimate reconstructions, the year 0 BP is actually 1950 AD or a thirty-year average beginning in the middle of the 20th century. Thus, the blades of the hockey sticks are chopped off and we are left only with the handles.
Finally, Idso inconsistently labels the MWP, sometimes placing it in the 800s, or in the 1100s, or as late as the 1400s. His sources do not agree on a single global MWP and it's quite clear that they reconstruct local or regional scale temperatures.
Lastly, I do not think a "real scientist" should copy a graph onto MS Paint and scribble the letters "MWP" where he guesses the MWP might be. Maybe he should have empirical analysis or statistics or something.
...and yet despite all these obvious signs of poor scholarship he's pulling down nearly $140,000 a year from Heartland alone - and that's not his day job.
DeleteQuiet Waters
I know. Who sees somebody in the pocket of Exxon-Mobile and thinks "That guy needs more money!" It takes a village, I guess.
Delete"There are a couple of problems with your post."
ReplyDeleteYour response was illuminating, thank you. I just assumed he meant "a little harsh" to male escorts.
They're taking in boarders, business was bad.
ReplyDelete