Chinese geologists duped by Heartland Institute and junk science -- again! Heartland Institute finds route into U.S. science news conduit through China

by Gayathri Vaidyanathan, E&E reporter, E&E, January 23, 2015

For global warming deniers, the latest outlet appears to be the Chinese publishing industry, and through that venue they arrive at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) portal for journalists. After that, a study popped up in a major global newspaper.

The study appeared last week in the Science Bulletin, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and was authored by well-known climate change deniers. The study -- not surprisingly -- challenges the basis of climate change models in use today and has been called flawed by numerous scientists.

"We didn't even think of publishing in the West," said Christopher Monckton, a climate denier who is also the lead author on the study. "We decided the West is now no longer doing science, it is doing propaganda via the learned journals, so we weren't playing that game anymore."

To make the study freely available to the public, Monckton turned to the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank made infamous in 2012 for its billboard ads on climate change featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The organization also promotes the tobacco industry. Heartland paid the journal a $3,000 open access fee.

The journal's public information officer then submitted a press release, originally penned by Monckton, to EurekAlert, a platform run by AAAS that informs journalists of upcoming studies in over 1,900 journals. EurekAlert published the release, which was picked up by the United Kingdom's Daily Mail Online, which uncritically asked, "Is climate change really that dangerous?"

EurekAlert's director of editorial content, Brian Lin, said in an email that the journal is a "credible, peer-reviewed journal." It is in the Science Citation Index, which lists all credible journals. In the hierarchy of publications, however, Science Bulletin comes in rather low, with an impact factor of 1.36 (in comparison, Nature has an impact factor of 42.35). It is primarily read by Chinese researchers.

Beyond validating the journal, EurekAlert does not vet individual press releases, Lin said.

"Our disclaimer states clearly that the accuracy of the release rests with submitting public information officers, and further that news releases submitted to the EurekAlert services do not represent any endorsement by AAAS," he said.

Geologists dig into it

As for the journal itself, its editors said the study underwent two rounds of peer review by three anonymous reviewers before they decided to accept it. Most editors associated with the journal on the masthead appear to be geologists and not climate scientists or modelers.

"My question for you is: why we can't decide to publish it??" Yaoling Niu, a geologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom and an executive editor of the journal, asked in an email.

He said the journal would be open to publishing any rebuttals of the study. Previously called Chinese Science Bulletin, the journal was rebranded this month to match a new vision envisaged by the CAS as a "China-based flagship international journal."

Niu said he did not know who sent out the press release, which equates Science Bulletin with Nature or Science. The release then states that the study shows there are "elementary but serious errors in the general circulation models relied on by the UN's climate panel, the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]."

The target of the study is climate sensitivity, a measure of the degree to which global temperatures rise when carbon dioxide levels double. The IPCC currently predicts temperatures will rise by 1.5-4.5 degrees Celsius as CO2 concentrations double.

Monckton, who is not a trained physicist or physical scientist, borrows assumptions from the field of process engineering to rejigger fundamental equations used by climate modelers. In doing so, the study suggests a world with low climate sensitivity.

The authors "cherry pick numbers" to support their hypothesis, Piers Forster, professor of physical climate change at the University of Leeds, said in an email.

"Such a low-sensitivity world is unlikely when factoring in other evidence that was ignored by the authors," he said.

But even using the climate model outlined in the paper, "we can still expect significant manmade warming in the decades ahead," Forster said.

Earlier China ploy fizzled

This is not the first time that the Heartland Institute has been linked with the CAS. In 2013, the National Science Library ordered the institute's Climate Change Reconsidered, a publication that discounts human-caused global warming, to be translated to Chinese.

Heartland trumpeted the release as an endorsement by CAS. The academy reacted with a press release stating, "The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS' endorsement of its report is completely false."

Heartland then issued a statement acknowledging the academy does not share its skeptical views.

With this latest study, Monckton said the idea to publish in China came from co-author Willie Soon, an astrophysicist from Harvard University and prominent global warming denier who is also affiliated with the Heartland Institute.

"We persuaded them in the exchanges that go on between the reviewers and the authors over the months before this was published that what we are doing is questioning the official figures from the IPCC and from the big climate models on the properly scientific basis," Monckton said. "We were raising legitimate and nontrivial questions."

MUST SEE VIDEO! Better than anything Cameron has done!

Readers, please go to this link to see one of the best climate videos produced -- it really is an outstanding job (it is about 14 minutes long, and well worth it):

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4107264.htm

From 1975 to 1998 the world saw a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. But for the last 16 years the rate of rise has slowed dramatically leading skeptics to question predictions of catastrophe. In this episode we find out 'what happened to global warming?'

Anja Taylor, ABC (Australia), October 16, 2014

GLOBAL WARMING PAUSEI

TRANSCRIPT

download video: mp4

NARRATION
17 years ago, a warm wind was blowing across the Pacific. As it blew, it pushed sun-warmed waters westward, piling them high to the north-east of Australia. When the winds eased, the warm waters washed back across the vast ocean, releasing masses of heat to the atmosphere in what became the mother of all El Nino events.

Richard Morecroft
The Florida storms are being blamed on El Nino.

News Reporter
..wild storms and heavy rain in South America...

News Reporter
A man-made permanent drought is...

NARRATION
It was 1998 and the climate seemed set on a frightening trajectory.

News Reporter
What the world is experiencing could be part of a climate shift.

NARRATION
But the years that followed didn't live up to predictions, leading to a crisis of confidence.

Christopher Monckton
They have been deliberately exaggerating the evidence, over-stating the case, frightening people, frightening even children.

Professor Judith Curry
The globally average surface temperature hasn't increased in any significant way since 1998.

Maurice Newman
In fact, can be argued since 2003 it has cooled off somewhat.

NARRATION
It became the most important question to answer in climate science today - what happened to global warming? It's a cold and blustery day in Boulder, Colorado. It seems a fitting start to a story on what's become known as the 'global warming pause'. It's a well-established fact that people are less likely to believe the world is warming when there's cold weather about. But it was also here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that a distinguished senior scientist found himself at the centre of a climate conspiracy storm.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
This related to what was subsequently called Climategate in which a whole bunch of emails were stolen.

NARRATION
Among the Many hacked emails in the 2009 Climategate scandal was one from Dr Kevin Trenberth to a colleague. Sceptics seized on one particular sentence as written proof that climate scientists were involved in a large-scale cover-up.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
It was picked up as me saying that there was no global warming, somehow or the other, and completely misinterpreted and it just propagated all over the place - it was amazing to see.

NARRATION
Yet, the world didn't seem to be warming... at least not much. While the period from 1975 to 1998 had seen a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, in the years since, the rate of rise has slowed dramatically, leading a vocal minority to question predictions of catastrophe.

Professor Judith Curry
So we're getting this growing divergence between the observations and the climate model simulations.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
You have at least to consider the possibility that the models are not reliable for one reason or another.

Anja Taylor
On one point the sceptics were right - none of the models used in future climate projections predicted the hiatus. And while the slowdown for the first few years was written off as natural variability, lately it's become something to explain.

NARRATION
From the data he's been analysing, Dr Trenberth sees a planet heating up just as fast as ever.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We can look at the energy budget of the Earth by looking at information from satellites that are flying above the atmosphere, which can actually track the incoming solar radiation from the sun, how much is reflected and how much the Earth is radiating back to space. It's not absolutely accurate, but it does track the year-to-year variations very well.

NARRATION
His calculations show our budget is continually in surplus - more energy coming in than leaving the atmosphere.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
Given that there's an energy imbalance, where does that energy go? How much has gone into the oceans? How much has gone into melting Arctic sea ice? Warming the atmosphere, warming up the land, changing evaporation and therefore changing clouds which can also change the brightness of the planet. And when we first did this, there was some quite substantial discrepancies that in some years we can't account for where the energy has gone.

NARRATION
And that was the cause of the frustration expressed in Kevin's email. Monitoring systems simply aren't sophisticated enough to track all of the heat exchanges on the planet.

Anja Taylor
The main focus in global warming has been air temperatures, because it's the easiest to measure and it's the temperature we feel. But it's a tiny fraction of the planet's total heat content and it's also highly variable.

NARRATION
As greenhouse gas emissions have risen over the last century, the long-term trend in air temperatures is obvious. But zoom in on the chart and you'll see fluctuations. These swings are put down to natural variability. The current hiatus is no different. But this time, climate scientists have been under pressure to pin down the exact cause. There have been several.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
So the sun went into a relatively quiet phase. In addition, there have been a number of small volcanoes that put debris into the stratosphere that blocked the sun. And what about the air pollution? China has been developing enormously - what has that done?

NARRATION
In total, aerosols and solar activity are thought to account for about 20% of the pause, but the biggest contender for where the rest of the heat is going is the one that's hardest to measure. The oceans absorb a whopping 93% of the world's excess heat.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
I've been working with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and they have developed an ocean-monitoring system that synthesises all of the information - sea-level measurements, the measurements from the floats, sensors that are measuring sea-surface temperature and so on - and that we've found is that after about 1999, a lot more heat is going deeper into the ocean. And this is unprecedented. Is this just a consequence of the change in the observing system or is it real? And I think we have good reason to believe that at some of this is real.

NARRATION
Multiple lines of evidence converge here in the Pacific, the largest and deepest ocean in the world.

Professor Matthew England
If you rotate the globe around, that's all you see for part of this hemisphere is just a big fat piece of ocean. The Pacific Ocean is a huge influence on climate.

NARRATION
Professor Matthew England has been key to nailing down how the Pacific has been dragging down world average temperatures.

Professor Matthew England
We had to look for something about the climate system post-2000 that was dramatically different to the climate system in the '80s and '90s, and one of the most dramatic things you see in the system is this flip in the Pacific Ocean. If ever you travel to the tropics in the Pacific Ocean, there's a prevailing wind from the east towards the west, and these easterly winds push a lot of the surface water across the West Pacific Ocean. If they remain for long enough, this water starts to get subducted into the ocean interior. During the '80s and '90s the winds were quite weak, not a lot of heat was getting subducted into the Pacific Ocean during that time and a lot of heat was remaining in the atmosphere.

NARRATION
Then came the massive El Nino event 17 years ago.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
In 1997-1998 there was a tremendous amount of heat that came out of the ocean, and we can measure it, and so the ocean actually cooled quite substantially. And so, we think that this may have then kicked the whole behaviour of the Pacific Ocean into a different mode.

NARRATION
The ocean once more began to build up heat. The change in the way the ocean either releases or draws in heat is part of a regular long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Each phase lasts around 15 to 30 years. When Dr Gerry Meehl from Boulder studied climate models with hiatuses, he discovered they linked closely with the negative phase of this pattern.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And sure enough the extra heat was going into the deeper ocean. So that was kind of the first tie we had, a tangible link to where the heat was going during these hiatus periods. And this connected then to stronger trade winds.

NARRATION
It was Matthew England who found these winds were unprecedented in strength this century.

Professor Matthew England
The winds are that much stronger than we'd ever seen before in the observations.

NARRATION
The winds are, in fact, being turbo-charged by abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic, as air races from high pressure to low, the winds push the warm surface waters west.

Professor Matthew England
So, over the last 20 or so years, the sea level over the West Pacific has risen quite dramatically above the global average sea-level rise, whilst in the East Pacific it's declined.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
And in this case, it's been piled up to such an extent that there's been a 20cm-rise in sea level compared with the Eastern Pacific. And that, to me, seems like a very large number.

Professor Matthew England
It's sort of reaches a breaking point perhaps where that heat then sloshes back to the East Pacific.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And that then adds to the warming from the increasing greenhouse gasses and you get real sudden increases of temperatures globally. Last time that happened was in the mid-1970s. Global temperatures warmed almost a half a degree Centigrade, which is almost half of the warming we got in the whole 20th century.

NARRATION
What that means is we're currently in the phase before the next global temperature jump.

Professor Matthew England
There will be warming out of this hiatus at some point in time - whether it's this or in five years' time, there's gonna be warming - and unfortunately, what we're seeing in the models is that the warming out of the hiatus is gonna be rapid, regardless of when that hiatus ends.

NARRATION
But a small minority of scientists disagree.

Professor Judith Curry
That's where I break with my colleagues. I just think there's a lot more uncertainty. We're now in the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and I think that is the major thing that's causing the pause. And my understanding of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is that we could stay in the cool phase for another two decades. So where does that leave us in terms of thinking that this sensitivity that we've deduced, largely based on this warming in the last quarter of the 20th century, during that period we were in the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
And this is a thought which is, for about 30 years people have tried to ignore because it takes away from the thought that most of the rise in temperature is due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Professor Matthew England
Look, I agree that the warming in the '80s and '90s certainly would've had a component of Pacific natural variability to it. But it was beyond just that. So, if you think about the natural system without greenhouse gasses, it would see cooling of the atmosphere globally then warming in the positive phase, and we'd be flatlining over 100 years. We don't see that - we're seeing hiatus decades.

Professor Judith Curry
And there is one other possibility - that there is no missing heat. Changes in ocean circulation have changed the pattern of the clouds, which is reflecting more solar radiation and so the Earth isn't heating as much. So, unfortunately, the observations aren't quite good enough to distinguish between those two ideas.

Professor Matthew England
There's no evidence that clouds can account for this hiatus. Many things have occurred over the last 15 years that should've given us one of the coolest decades over the last 100 years. It's actually the warmest on record.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We've seen that in Australia, we've seen that in the United States, all kinds of thousands of temperature records were broken.

Dr Gerald Meehl
A lot of the continental regions have continued to warm up. and we've seen an increase in, for example, heat extremes over a lot of continental areas, all the while that the global average temperatures haven't been doing much.

Professor Matthew England
Arctic Sea ice has declined dramatically, way beyond the projections. Sea level is rising faster than we projected even just five or ten years ago.

NARRATION
All things considered, there's been global warming pause.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
The whole of the climate system is really warming - it's just that the warming can be manifested in different ways.

Professor Matthew England
For some people, it's very easy for them to get this, but there are other people who are just absolutely obsessed with derailing the basic physics of climate change, and for them this poses a great little story that global warming's paused. I wish they were right but unfortunately they're wrong.

Lawson's Climate Denial Donor Boasts of Shale Gas Investment

by Brendan Montague, DeSmog UK, September 30, 2014

Lord Lawson accepted a donation for his climate denial charity from a millionaire financier who successfully invested in shale gas fracking,DeSmog UK can reveal.

Edgar Miller Jr, a Texan-born venture capitalist, has been named as an early donor, fundraiser, and founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) who claims he turned down the role of director when the charity was being established almost five years ago.

The revelations will be hugely embarrassing for Lawson. Miller intimates during an interview that his donation was dependent on the GWPF attacking climate science rather than policy, and he even suggests the former chancellor is “a little bit” scientifically illiterate.

Miller boasts of his “very successful” investment in one of the first fracking companies, and confirms that today he holds mineral rights relating to property once owned by his family that he hopes will earn him further profits from shale gas. “We’ll get some royalties out of it so we’re motivated to do it,” he said.

The investor has also paid thousands of pounds to Viscount Christopher Monckton, the eccentric aristocrat who tours Britain, Australia and the United States attacking climate science.

The cash paid for an investment report about climate science and led to Monckton publishing a lengthy attack in the Sunday Telegraph back in 2006. Monckton and Lawson, related by marriage, both became interested in climate change around the same time.

Early Frackers

Lawson has repeatedly stated that he would not accept funding from the oil industry or any individual with “a significant interest” in fossil fuel companies—a statement that is in fact true as Miller has enjoyed a “less than significant” financial benefit from energy investments.

Lawson last month launched the GWPF to apparently circumvent charity commission rules stipulating that his GWPF must remain “educational” rather than political. Dr Benny Peiser, a social scientist, is the director of the foundation.

Miller, a professor of private equity at the Cass Business School and owner of Palladian Limited, told a reporter over dinner: “I was concerned when they [the GWPF] weren’t really addressing the underlying science and they kept putting the focus on policy…

“Most people in the UK don’t understand the science. The UK is scientifically illiterate. I’m not saying that you don’t have great scientists or engineers, but the average person that you meet walking along the street knows very little about the science.”

He added: “Initially I refused to give them anything because they were resistant to debating the science. Benny just wanted to talk about policy; I said I completely disagree with that… I’ve also brought one or two other donors in, who have probably altogether given £30,000 to £40,000.”

“I think one of Benny’s problems is he doesn’t have a fundamental grounding in science [and] that he has a fear. That’s one of the general problems in this country… most people are scientifically illiterate. Nigel is a little bit that way.”

Miller also described Lawson as having “a huge ego” adding: “his only problem is his personal life is a disaster.” But he confirmed that the former chancellor had Osborne’s ear. “These guys are all talking to each other all the time, they go to the same dinner parties, they spend weekends together and [attend] house parties together.”

He said of his fracking investments: “Fracking is nothing, and, you know, you’ve got 30 years of experience in the States with basically no problems at all. In fact, I invested in one of the companies which was one of the early frackers back in the 80s.”

“There’s a guy who just died called [George P] Mitchell, who was a Texan, who developed the technology. It was a very [a] very successful [investment]. Very successful.”

Basically a Bullshitter

Miller, who has lived in the UK for more than 40 years, was a senior advisor in the Conservative party and claims he helped draft the 2005 election manifesto. But after initially supporting Cameron’s leadership, he found the Etonian to be “weak”, with “too many close friends around him” who “change his mind”.

After lunch with the Prime Minister and chancellor, Miller's views had crystallised: “I came away thinking Cameron was basically a bullshitter [who] didn’t want to listen to anybody [and who] lacked in substance.” He added: “Osborne I thought was as arrogant…but I thought had more intellectual substance.”

When contacted by DeSmog UK last night, Miller replied: “You imply I have been a donor to the GWPF.  I am proud to say this is true (albeit a small donor) and I would be pleased if you publicise this fact.  I encouraged Lord Lawson in the early days of GWPF and subsequently have encouraged others to donate.  I intend to continue to contribute.  

“I have the upmost admiration and respect for Lord Lawson for having the initiative, courage and fortitude to establish the GWPF, in spite of endless

criticism and ad-hominem attacks thrown at him.  

 

“He and Benny Peiser have established the GWPF as the only authoritative public source in the UK providing a fact-based perspective on the global warming issue.  I have subscribed to Benny Peiser's newsletter for years.  This and Benny's long experience in the field has made an immeasurable contribution to the undoubted success of the GWPF.”

http://www.desmog.uk/2014/09/30/lawson-climate-denial-backer-boasts-shale-gas-investment

I CRASHED A CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL CONFERENCE IN LAS VEGAS

by Brendan Montague, VICE, July 22, 2014

Alex Epstein, author of forthcoming The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, sports his I Heart Fossil Fuels T-Shirt

I’ve been researching the climate denial industry for almost three years and the best way to gather information about this incredibly small yet influential clique is to hang out with them. I attended their 2012 conference of the Heartland Institute, an oil and tobacco funded free market think tank that spends a lot of time and effort trying to call bullshit on what is clearly not bullshit – the science of climate change. My presence was clearly unwelcome – but I guess they forgot to scrub me from their email invitation list, because I got invited again this year, to their 9th International Conference on Climate Change in the deep heat of the Nevada desert amid the chaos of Las Vegas casinos.

The choice of Vegas by Heartland seemed brilliantly provocative. A celebration of high-stakes capitalism in the very gambling dens where $92 billion is lost each year in pursuit of the American dream. The dazzling lights, the grotesquely oversized hotels, the free drinks.

Perhaps nowhere on earth is more profligate and wasteful of increasingly scarce natural resources than this twisted utopia. The Republican Party reportedly blackballed Vegas for its 2016 convention fearing its Christian supporters would be repelled by this den of iniquity – and that its legislators would be lured into its brothels and casinos. Scientists have explicitly stated we are “loading the dice” by raising temperatures so that extreme weather and deadly catastrophes will become more frequent – gambling with our future, basically. Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, was surely thumbing his nose at his detractors.

Heartland has had a torrid two years. Dr Peter Gleick, a hydro-climatologist and author, took the unusual step of posing as a board member and tricking Heartland staff into sending him a trove of highly secret internal documents. The papers revealed that Heartland was working with a coal industry consultant in order to enter American schools and attack climate science.

Two months later, and just ahead of their 2012 conference in hometown Chicago, Heartland made the bizarre decision to erect a huge advertising billboard attacking climate science on the basis that the terrorist Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had apparently been concerned about global warming. This gave their archenemies Greenpeace US and Forecast the Facts the ammunition they needed to successfully lobby funders to withdraw.

The Vegas conference was going a good opportunity to enter this strange world again. But did I really want to spend a week in the middle of dustbowl America with three hundred climate cranks who would crowd around trying to tell me how wrong I am about everything if they knew the first thing about me?

24 hours later and I touched down at the Vegas airport in the dead of night, bathed in light. The Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, a gold-plated monument to excess, appeared to be next to the runway. Still it took 20 minutes and $20 dollars for a cab driver to get me there.

This sub-prime feeling hotel was the perfect setting for Heartland. The deregulated casinos glared as they took people’s money and the acrid smell of tobacco was pervasive. The hotel was brash, huge, and run down. All fur coat and moth eaten. There were loud renovations taking place when I arrived. The front desk had double booked my room, so when I finally got there I was confronted by a stout, hairy American wearing tight black underpants. Mercifully I was relocated.

The morning after my arrival I met Christopher Monckton, who had agreed to have breakfast with me. Within minutes I found myself almost entirely lost in confusing nonsense. Monckton repeated his claim to be a member of the House of Lords, which has been denied by the House of Lords, and having been the scientific advisor to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she first championed climate science, which has also been debunked.

The aristocrat, a classically trained architect and one-time journalist, told me he had produced a very simple climate model that proved actual scientists had exaggerated the threat of climate science and that there was no evidence that heating the atmosphere was dangerous.

Monckton has worked closely with the ominous sounding neoliberal think tank, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). They even hired a plane so he could parachute uninvited into the Durban climate conference. CFACT has enjoyed significant funding from ExxonMobil and other oil and car industrialists. So I asked Monckton if he had benefited from ExMo’s largesse. “The cheque has not yet arrived in the post,” he joked, before asking if I was “left wing.”

Monckton then told me he attended climate conferences because it was better than sitting at home on his sofa and he cared for the future of society. He had refused his $1,000 Heartland fee. I asked him how this chimed with his belief in the free market, that rested on the idea that people only respond to financial incentives. He grinned.

After I had paid for his breakfast he said something that really surprised me. We were walking past the slot machines when I asked him what he thought of Vegas. He said he believed gambling to be immoral. The casinos were profiting from people’s lack of a good education and fundamental misunderstanding of mathematics. He said Heartland had, in fact, chosen Vegas to make the point that climate scientists had failed to understand risk.

Dr Willie Soon. He claims Albert Einstein would have been a sceptic and accused the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “gangter science” during his presentation.

Bearded Joseph Bast opened the conference that evening. He said, “Speaking of funding and for the record, except for $150 from the Illinois Coal Association and another $150 from Liberty Coin Service, a great little coin shop in Lansing, Michigan, owned by my old friend Pat Heller, no corporate money was raised for this conference. And no, not a nickel from the Koch brothers" – owners of Koch Industries, the largest privately held firm in the United States and a major player in the oil refinery industry. The humorously small donations were meant to prove that Big Oil was not behind this jamboree.

The remarks came seconds after he thanked his co-sponsors, who included the Media Research Center, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, CFACT, and the George C. Marshall Institute – many of which have been funded by oil corporations and some by Charles Koch foundations.

The fact checking website Media Matters for America put out a blog post about some of thespeakers’ various links to oil. But their website was blocked in the hotel and the Heartland delegates, all doughty defenders of free speech, were left in the dark.

Then the shadow-side of this comic dishonesty and hypocrisy became almost too much to bear. Dr S Fred Singer, a folk hero around here, was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award. He in turn presented the Frederick Seitz Award. If one man can take credit for inventing climate denial it is Singer. The old man once claimed, rather brilliantly, that, “My connection to oil during the past decade is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil.” Exxon had given Singer $10,000 in funding just a few years earlier.

The late Dr Seitz had many achievements in his lifetime. But the one I will remember him for was contributing indirectly to the deaths of millions of Americans. He sat on the medical research committee of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and oversaw $45 million in medical funding which his critics claimed “served the tobacco industry’s purposes.” Much of my close family has been wiped out by smoking related diseases, so this one sticks out for me.

The Heartland conference was now in full swing and my brain began to melt. There was the usual monotony of badly put together Powerpoint slides, rambling speeches and desperate attempts to resurrect climate science controversies buried by actual scientists almost three decades ago. The speakers were being paid around $1,000 to attend, plus flights and large hotel suites.

The hundreds of sceptics around me not once questioned the bizarre, the illogical, the poorly constructed claims that swirled in front of our eyes. This parody of science was a deadly hybrid of 1970s Open University programmes and sub-Cirque du Soleil.

In the intervals I managed to speak to some of the key deniers. Dr Patrick Michaels has been vilified by Greenpeace and was one of the early generation of scientists to take money from coal companies to argue against mainstream climate science. He once admitted on national television that 40% of his funding comes from the oil industry.

He told me how as a young scientist he challenged what he thought of as a monolithic orthodoxy of climate change only to see his government research grants dwindle. Believing himself to be among the most brilliant he was insulted that he was in fact one of the worst paid in his profession. Thankfully, car companies were willing to secretly pay him to help them fight environmental legal battles.

Later I spoke to Dr Willie Soon, one of the few professional scientists in the room. He was once funded by Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute and one way or another by Charles Koch. Greenpeace used Freedom of Information laws to expose his financial support from oil barons through his university. Soon told me Exxon broke off his funding, without so much as a kiss goodbye. Soon was another sad sack who seemed convinced of his own brilliance and dumbfounded at the lack of recognition. At Heartland he was given a glass trophy and a round of applause.

I was then witness to a suited Greenpeace activist dressing down Anthony Watts, the one-time weatherman who blogs at Watts Up With That?, in a hallway. Watts broke the story of Climategate, when thousands of private emails between climate scientists were hacked and published online. The emails were presented as evidence of a lurid and global conspiracy to fool the public into fearing global warming. They weren't.

Then I ran into James Delingpole, the one-time Telegraph Online journalist who spewed vitriol at climate scientists and their defenders. I was about to undergo the kind of nasty, bitter confrontation I wanted to avoid.

Delingpole went to Oxford University with the British Prime Minister David Cameron but his novels didn’t do brilliantly and he was never invited into London Society. Delingpole’s other claim to fame was being made to look a complete fool when Sir Paul Nurse, filming for the BBC, asked if he had read the abstract of any scientific papers (the short introduction which sets out the significance of the study). Delingpole, who claims to have found a remarkable global conspiracy to fake climate research, admitted he hadn’t. So I just asked James if he had read any abstracts since. “No.” I couldn’t quite believe it.

Delingpole has written off one of the most influential climate studies as “ludicrous, comedy” and claimed its author, Professor Michael Mann at Penn State University, has “little discernible talent.” But during our confrontation he confirmed he had never interviewed Mann, never read his book and never read any of his scientific papers. I was dumbfounded.

Delingpole was furious. He raged and spat and accused me of being a troll. He attacked my journalism, having not read any, and attacked my opinions, having not heard any. All of this was being filmed by two French filmmakers. I was shaking. More in anger than in sorrow. “Can I give you some friendly advice,” I said.

“I don’t want your friendly advice, Mr Montague,” he said.

“Why don’t you read the abstracts to three scientific papers. Then you won’t look like such a fool next time someone asks that question. It doesn’t take long.”

The argument fizzled out and we both went our separate ways, huffing. And then I felt sad for Delingpole. Why was he even at this conference? He could be at home with his family, playing Scrabble. It seems he is driven by ambition, but had made it no further than the basement conference hall of a faded hotel in Vegas.

The Heartland exhibition

After three days locked into this air-conditioned hell Wednesday was upon us and the conference finally drew to a close. And I remembered we were in Vegas. I buttonholed Joseph Bast and asked whether he had indeed chosen Vegas as a brilliantly daring provocation to his critics. The spin of the roulette wheel reminded me at least of the madness of sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps that plunged millions of Americans into penury. Was it social commentary? “No,” he said. “The rooms were cheap.”

It would almost be possible to dismiss this whole crowd as a bunch of sad cranks. Somewhere between 9/11 Truthers and homeopathic doctors. Not just snake oil salesmen but snake oil customers at the same time. Immune to the accumulating evidence that free market economics is not only responsible for the economic crash of 2008, but also the ever-closer ecological catastrophe.

They would just be sad sacks if they were not also influential. Among the delegates swarm the sharks just as surely as they do in the Mandalay Bay Hotel aquarium. Myron Ebell of CEI who once conspired with a White House insider to downplay climate in a seminal government report. Senator James Inhofe who, by video call, told the troops to ready themselves to take Congress in November. They also influence lower level officials.

During one dinner I sat next to Rod Wright, a brilliantly funny and apparently savvy Democrat state senator from the environmentalist hotbed California. Rod, one of only two black people I saw out of a claimed 600 attendees, told me how he became suspicious of renewable energy, and then climate science more generally.

These suspicions were confirmed by the avalanche of literature he received from the Heartland Institute. His colleagues deserted him but he was steeled by the support of the free market think tank. “You have to sift information through your own filter”, he told me. “Their funding does not devalue their information. Everybody got money from somebody. Jesus said, ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’ ” He smiles, before adding, “I have looked at some of their work on insurance and I think they’re full of shit.” (I read later that Wright has been convicted of voter fraud.)

They are full of shit. But they are having a real influence on American politics. They are just one of the hundreds of Koch and Exxon funded think tanks and fake grassroots campaigns that have frustrated and blocked Obama’s administration at every turn. As I leave the conference I find it hard to reconcile what I have learned. These people are just cranks but they are perverting American politics. I did learn in Vegas that attacks from these people are not going to hurt me.

In the casino the tragedy of the American Dream continues. Hardworking Americans sit emotionless pouring their salaries into slot machines. Believing the dream. But investing every last dime in a desperate and, for the overwhelming majority, simply hopeless attempt to escape. I watch a guy burn $2,500 in 20 minutes during a spiral of roulette stupidity.

When you see the homelessness in Vegas, and the drug addiction, and you know there is no real welfare state over here, no safety net. These Heartland folk are just a few pay cheques from freefall. They're not going to get headhunted by Stanford University any time soon. They believe themselves too educated to survive McJobs. They are clinging on. They’re hustling. That’s what you do in Vegas.

Brendan Montague is a London-based investigative journalist who has published in The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday and The Guardian. He is founder of the Request Initiative, which boasts Greenpeace UK among its NGO clients.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/las-vegas-climate-change-denial-brendan-montague-101