I smell a law suit

The Heartland Institute (a very dodgy outfit it seems ) recently issued a lit of 500 scientists they say have “Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares”. That’s a lot of scientists and a lot of doubt if it were true. The list includes several New Zealanders including Jim Salinger from NIWA.

Heartland funded [and] the NZ pseudo scientists Bryan Leyland and Owen McShane to go to International Climates talks in Bali.

The article, by Hudson Institute director and Heartland “Senior Fellow” Dennis T. Avery claims to be a list of scientists whose work contradicts the overwhelming scientific agreement that human-induced climate change is endangering the world as we know it.

But it seems they’re on shaky ground. Dozens of scientists are now demanding that their names be removed from the list since desmogblog.com wrote to many of the scientists asking them to clarify their position.

DeSmogBlog manager Kevin Grandia emailed 122 of the scientists calling their attention to the list. So far – in less than 24 hours – three dozen of those scientists had responded in outrage, denying that their research supports Avery’s conclusions and demanding that their names be removed.

You can see some of their replies over at desmogblog.com

I wonder how long before the lawyers get it removed so here’s the article in full:

Abstract:

The following list includes more than 500 qualified researchers whose research in professional journals provides historic and/or physical proxy evidence that:

1) Most of the recent global warming has been caused by a long, moderate, natural cycle rather than by the burning of fossil fuels;

2) The sun’s varying radiance impacts the Earth’s climate as more or fewer cosmic rays create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that act as the Earth’s thermostats, deflecting more or less solar heat out into space.

3) Sea levels are not rising rapidly nor are they likely to;

4) Wild species are not being driven to extinction but rather are increasing the biodiversity of our wildlands;

5) Fewer human deaths are likely rather than more as the current warming continues, since cold is far more dangerous and the Earth is always warming or cooling;

6) Food production is likely to thrive during the decades ahead, rather than collapsing due to climate overheating;

7) Our storms are likely to be fewer and milder as the declining temperature differential between the equator and the poles reduces their power.

The list includes researchers from many of the world’s top research institutions, such as the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory affiliated with Columbia University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysical Research, the Woods Hole and Scripps Oceanographic Institutes, Sweden’s Upsala University, Australia’s Waikato University, South Africa’s Witwatersrand University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The key dispute, of course, is whether the recent global warming has been due to humans burning fossil fuels or to the natural, moderate 1,500 year cycle discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores in the 1980s. Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland discovered the climate cycle, in the first long Greenland ice cores. Claude Lorius of France led the Antarctic team that reported on the first long Antarctic ice core in 1985. They shared the Tyler Prize–the environmental version of the Nobel–in 1996.

Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles have since been found in seabed and lake sediments, ancient tree rings, boreholes, cave stalagmites, glacier movements, and archeological artifacts all over the world. We rejoice that their work is now supported by hundreds of peer-reviewed research reports, with more than 1,000 authors and co-authors, from research institutions around the world.

This partial listing is derived primarily from the citations in our book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. As the time of our small staff permits, we will publish additional studies and their authors to support the very important view that the Modern Warming is natural and no more dangerous than were the Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming and the Holocene Warming before it.

The list of scientists is here.