In a fiery speech yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) ”calls out” “climate deniers.” In the first half of the speech he goes ad hominem, attacking opponents as “front groups” who take payola from “polluters” to “confuse” the public by selling “doubt” as their product.

First a bit of free advice for the good Senator:

Your team has been playing nasty from day one. It didn’t get you cap-and-trade, it didn’t get you Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, and it’s not going to get you a carbon tax.  

Vilification doesn’t work because biomass, wind turbines, and solar panels are not up to the challenge of powering a modern economy, and most Americans are too practical to believe otherwise.

So by all means, keep talking trash about your opponents. The shriller your rhetoric, the more skeptical the public will become about your bona fides as an honest broker of “the science.”

Okay, let’s examine Sen. Whitehouse’s argument. He accuses skeptics of peddling “straw man arguments,” such as that “the earth’s climate always changes; it’s been warmer in the past.” Well, it does, and it has! Many studies indicate the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was warmer than the current warm period (CWP). A study published in July in Nature Climate Change concludes the Roman Warm Period (RWP) was warmer than both the MWP and CWP. The Northern Hemisphere was substantially warmer than the present for thousands of years during the Holocene Climate Optimum (~5,000-9,000 years ago). Arctic summer air temperatures were 4-5°C above present temperatures for millennia during the previous interglacial period.

None of this is evidence man-made global warming is not occurring, but Sen. Whitehouse sets up his own straw man by making that the main issue in dispute. What the paleoclimate information does indicate is that the warmth of the past 50 years is not outside the range of natural variability and is no cause for alarm. The greater-than-present warmth of the Holocene Optimum, RWP, and MWP contributed to improvements in human health and welfare. 

Sen. Whitehouse says skeptics also knock down a straw man when they deny extreme weather events prove the reality of climate change. “No credible source is arguing that extreme weather events are proof of climate change,” he states. Again, it’s Sen. Whitehouse who whacks a man of straw. The problem for skeptics is not that people like Al Gore or the editors of Bloomberg cite Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy as “proof” of global warming, it’s that they blame global warming (hence “polluters”) for Katrina and Sandy. They insinuate or even assert that were it not for climate change, such events would not occur or would be much less deadly. As the Senator does when he says climate change ”loads the dice” in favor of events like Sandy and is “associated with” such events.

I freely grant that heat waves will become more frequent and severe in a warmer world (just as cold spells will become less frequent and milder). However, there is no persuasive evidence global warming caused or contributed significantly to the European heat wave of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the Texas drought of 2011, or the U.S. midwest drought of 2012. A slew of scientific papers finds no long-term trend in Atlantic hurricane behavior, including a recent study based on 370 years of tropical cyclone data. Similarly, a U.S. Geological Survey study finds no correlation between flood magnitudes and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in any region of the continental U.S. over the past 85 years.

More importantly, despite long-term increases in both CO2 concentrations and global temperatures since the 1920s, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather declined by 93% and 98% respectively. The 93% reduction in annual weather-related deaths is particularly noteworthy because global population increased more than 300% since the 1920s.

Although weather-related damages are much bigger today, that is because there’s tons more stuff and lots more people in harm’s way. For example, more people live in just two Florida counties, Dade and Broward, than lived in all 109 coastal counties stretching from Texas to Virginia in the 1930s. When weather-related damages are adjusted (“normalized”) to account for changes in population, wealth, and inflation, there is no long-term trend. So although a “greenhouse signal” may some day emerge from weather-related mortality and economic loss data, at this point global warming’s influence, if any, is undetectable.

Sen. Whitehouse dismisses as a “gimmick” skeptics’ observation that there has been “no warming trend in the last ten years” (actually, the last 16 years).  He contends that the 20 warmest years in the instrumental record have occurred since 1981 ”with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.” That may be correct, but it is beside the point. A decade and a half of no net warming continues the plodding 0.14°C per decade warming trend of the past 33 years. These data call into question the climate sensitivity assumptions underpinning the big scary warming projections popularized by NASA scientist James Hansen, the UN IPCC, and the UK Government’s Stern Review report.

Sen. Whitehouse says ”deniers tend to ignore facts they can’t explain away.” He continues: “For example, the increasing acidification of the oceans is simple to measure and undeniably, chemically linked to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. So we hear nothing about ocean acidification from the deniers.” Not so. CO2Science.Org, a leading skeptical Web site, has an extensive (and growing) ocean acidification database. Almost every week the CO2Science folks review another study on the subject. Cato Institute scholars Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger also addressed the issue on their old Web site, World Climate Report. They don’t share Sen. Whitehouse’s alarm about ocean acidification, but they do not ignore it. The Senator should check his facts before casting aspersions.

Sen. Whitehouse quotes NOAA stating that the rate of global sea level rise in the last decade “was nearly double” the 20th century rate. That is debatable. Colorado State University researchers find no warming-related acceleration in sea-level rise in recent decades.

Here’s the big picture. Scary projections of rapid sea-level rise assume rapid increases in ice loss from Greenland. In a study just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists used satellite gravity data to measure changes in Greenland’s ice mass balance from April 2002 to August 2011. The researchers estimate Greenland is losing almost 200 gigatons of ice per year. It takes 300 gigatons of water to raise sea levels by 1 millimeter, so Greenland is currently contributing about 0.66 mm of sea-level rise per year. At that rate, Greenland will contribute 6.6 centimeters of sea level rise over the 21st century, or less than 3 inches. Apocalypse not.

Sen. Whitehouse concludes by castigating Republicans for inveighing against unchecked entitlement spending and the fiscal burdens it imposes on “our children and grandchildren” while turning a blind eye to the perils climate change inflicts on future generations. But such behavior is not contradictory if the risk of fiscal chaos is both (a) more real and imminent than Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” and (b) more fixable within the policy-relevant future.

Here are two facts Sen. Whitehouse should contemplate. First, even if the U.S. were to stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow, the impact on global temperatures would be a reduction of “approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050 and 0.17°C by the year 2100 — amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible,” notes Chip Knappenberger, whose calculations are based on IPCC climate sensitivity assumptions. Similarly, a study in Nature Climate Change concludes that aggressive climate change ”mitigation measures, even an abrupt switch to zero emissions, have practically no effect on sea level over the coming 50 years and only a moderate effect on sea level by 2100.”

Whether under a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, or EPA regulation, the U.S. would keep emitting billions of tons of CO2 annually for a long time. So whatever climate policies Sen. Whitehouse thinks Republicans should support would have no discernible impact on climate change risk. The costs of such policies would vastly exceed the benefits. Rejecting policies that are all pain for no gain is exactly what the custodians of America’s economic future are supposed to do.

Yes, argues Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in The Atlantic (Sep. 17, 2012). Gartenstein-Ross is the author of Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror. I haven’t read the book, but judging from the favorable reviews, Gartenstein-Ross has the ear of defense hawks of both parties. Does he offer sound advice on global warming?

In his Atlantic article, Gartenstein-Ross chides Republicans for taking a “decidely unrealistic tack” on climate change. “The available evidence overwhelmingly suggests that climate change is real; that extreme weather events are increasing; and that this dynamic will have an impact on American national security, if it hasn’t already,” he avers. He goes on to blame this summer’s drought on global warming, citing NASA scientist James Hansen’s claim that the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought have “virtually no explanation other than climate change.” (For an alternative assessment, see these posts.) 

Since 2010, notes Gartenstein-Ross, the Department of Defense has classified climate change as a conflict accelerant — a factor exacerbating tensions within and between nations. Well, sure, what else is Team Obama at DOD going to say in an era of tight budgets when no rival superpower endangers our survival? The concept of an ever-deepening, civilization-imperilling climate crisis is an ideal mission-creep accelerant. 

Gartenstein-Ross concludes by urging Republicans to face “reality” and take action on climate change. However, he offers no advice as to what policies they should adopt. Does he favor cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulatory cascade, ’all of the above’? Gartenstein-Ross doesn’t say. He ducks the issue of what economic sacrifices he thinks Republicans should demand of the American people. 

Below is a lightly edited version of a comment I posted yesterday at The Atlantic on Gartenstein-Ross’s article: 

Dear Mr. Gartenstein-Ross,

Some Republicans have taken an “unrealistic tack” on climate change — for example, denying that global warming is real or doubting whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This, however, is an unfortunate consequence of the climate alarm movement’s rhetorical trickery. Al Gore and his allies pretend that once you accept the reality of global warming, then everything else they claim (e.g. sea levels could rise by 20 feet this century) or advocate (cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, Soviet-style production quota for wind turbines) follows inexorably, as night the day. Consequently, some GOP politicians and activists now believe they must deny or question a tautology (“greenhouse gases have a greenhouse effect”) in order to oppose Gore’s narrative of doom and agenda of energy rationing.

As a thoughtful analyst, you should see through this rhetorical trap. Yes, other things being equal, CO2 emissions warm the planet. That, however, does not begin to settle the core scientific issue of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming projected to occur from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations). It tells us nothing about impacts, such as how much Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea level rise by 2100 (BTW, a realistic projection is inches rather than feet or meters). It does not tell us whether the costs of “inaction” are greater or less than the costs of “action.”

James Hansen’s attribution of the ongoing drought to global warming, which you cite, is a testable hypothesis. Patrick Michaels examines how the U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) matches up over time both with the U.S. temperature record and that portion of the record attributable to global temperature trends. Turns out, there is zero correlation between global temperature trends and the PDSI, but a significant correlation between plain old natural climate variability and the PDSI.

One massive fact conveniently swept under the rug by the climate alarm movement is that since the 1920s — a fairly long period of overall warming — global deaths and death rates attributable to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively. The 93% decline in aggregate deaths is remarkable, given that global population has increased about four-fold since 1920. The most deadly form of extreme weather is drought, and since 1920, worldwide deaths and death rates attributable to drought have fallen by an astonishing 99.98% and 99.99%, respectively. 

As Indur Goklany, author of the study just cited explains, the increasing safety of humanity with respect to extreme weather came about not in spite of mankind’s utilization of carbon-based fuels but in large measure because of it. Fertilizers, plastics for packaging, mechanized agriculture, trade between food surplus and food deficit regions, emergency response systems, and humanitarian assistance — advances that have dramatically increased global food security — all presuppose fossil fuels and the wealth of economies powered by fossil fuels.

A just-published study by Jeff Keuter of the George C. Marshall Institute finds that “environmental factors rarely incite conflict between states or within states.” For example, Israel and her Arab neighbors have gone to war several times — but never over access to water. Keuter finds that “efforts to link climate change to the deterioration of U.S. national security rely on improbable scenarios, imprecise and speculative methods, and scant empirical support.”

You mention the hunger crisis of 2008. Ironically, one of the contributing factors was a global warming policy – the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which artificially raises the demand for and price of corn. As you note, soaring corn prices also pull up the price of wheat.

Which brings me to a final point. It is one-sided and, well, risky to assess the security risks of climate change without also assessing the security risks of climate change policies. For example, economic strength is the foundation of military power. A great power cannot have a second-rate economy. Affordable energy is vital to economic growth. Carbon mitigation schemes have a vast potential to chill job creation and growth because they are designed to make energy more costly. That is the main reason Congress and the public rejected cap-n-tax.

The worse the economy, the more painful the trade-offs between guns and butter. How to cut the deficit without gutting core military capabilities is a key issue White House and congressional budget negotiators are grappling with right now. The revival of North America as an energy producing province is one of the few economic bright spots today, a source of new tax revenues as well as new jobs. From a national security perspective, now is the worst possible time to ramp up the already considerable regulatory risks facing the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.

“I’m not saying it is global warming, but it’s what global warming would look like. It’s consistent with the kind of weather climate scientists predict will become more frequent and severe as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere increase.”

“It,” in the preceding, refers to the persistent heat wave affecting the Mid-Atlantic region and the derecho that uprooted trees, downed power lines, and deprived nearly a million households in the D.C. metro area of electricity and air conditioning. Warmists, or most of them, know they cannot actually link a particular weather event to global warming, but they’d like you to make the connection anyway.

This is standard rhetorical fare whenever extreme weather strikes somebody, somewhere on the planet. A commenter on Georgia Institute of Technology Prof. Judith Curry’s blog notes the resemblance to an old court-room trick:

Kind of like a lawyer asking a improper question and then withdrawing it, because all s/he really wanted was to put the idea in the jury’s mind.  

In her blog, Prof. Curry discusses an article by AP reporter Seth Borenstein titled, “This U.S. summer is ‘what global warming looks like’.” Mr. Borenstein interviewed 15 climate scientists in connection with the story, including Curry, yet did not include her responses to his questions in the article. How convenient! A few excerpts from their exchange:

SB: Can you characterize what’s going in the US in terms of a future/present under climate change? Is it fair to say this is what other scientists been talking about?

JC:  As global average temperature increases, you can expect periodically there to be somewhere on the globe where weather patterns conspire to produce heat waves that are unusual relative to previous heat waves. However, there have been very few events say in the past 20 years or so that have been unprecedented say since 1900.

* * *

SB:  This seems to be only US? Is it fair to make a big deal, since this is small scale and variability and is only US? However in past years, especially in late 1990s and early 2000s, the US seemed to be less affected? So what should we make of it?

JC:  Right now, this is only the U.S. Recall, 2010 saw the big heat wave in Russia (whereas in the U.S. we had a relatively moderate summer, except for Texas). Note, the southern hemisphere (notably Australia and New Zealand) is having an unusually cold winter.

* * *

SB:  What about natural variability? Are other scientists just making too much of what is normal weather variability?

JC: We saw these kinds of heat waves in the 1930s, and those were definitely not caused by greenhouse gases. Weather variability changes on multidecadal time scales, associated with the large ocean oscillations. I don’t think that what we are seeing this summer is outside the range of natural variability for the past century. In terms of heat waves, particularly in cities, urbanization can also contribute to the warming (the so-called urban heat island effect).

Data on hurricanes also confirm Dr. Curry’s point. Al Gore and others opined that 2004-2005 marked a shift to a new climate regime of increasingly powerful and destructive hurricanes. Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University finds that global tropical cyclone frequency has declined slightly from 1970 to the present, while global tropical accumulated cyclone energy (a measure of hurricane strength) has declined significantly since 2006.

Global Tropical Cyclone Frequency

Global Tropical Cycle ACE

Meteorologist Anthony Watts notes that the drought afflicting the U.S. Southwest and Midwest today is much less severe than the drought of the 1930s, before greenhouse gas emissions could have had much effect on global climate:

The 1930s drought was itself less severe than some that occurred in pre-industrial times. Observes the National Climate Data Center:

Longer records show strong evidence for a drought [in the 16th century] that appears to have been more severe in some areas of central North America than anything we have experienced in the 20th century, including the 1930s drought. Tree-ring records from around North America document episodes of severe drought during the last half of the 16th century. Drought is reconstructed as far east as Jamestown, Virginia, where tree rings reflect several extended periods of drought that coincided with the disappearance of the Roanoke Colonists, and difficult times for the Jamestown colony. These droughts were extremely severe and lasted for three to six years, a long time for such severe drought conditions to persist in this region of North America. Coincident droughts, or the same droughts, are apparent in tree-ring records from Mexico to British Columbia, and from California to the East Coast …

The good news is that, whatever effect global warming may have on weather patterns, death and death rates related to extreme weather declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since 1900.

Source: Indur Goklany, Global Death Toll from Extreme Weather Events Declining

As Goklany explains, these decreases in weather-related mortality are due in large part to the very fossil fuel-based economic activities — electric power generation, motorized transportation, and mechanized agriculture – that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

The policy implication is exactly the opposite of what the scientists who talk like lawyers want us to believe. In Goklany’s words:

Reducing these emissions through efforts to make fossil fuel energy scarcer and more expensive could, therefore, be counterproductive in humanity’s efforts to limit death and disease from not only such [extreme weather] events but also other, far more significant sources of adversity.

The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”

But as I pointed out yesterday on this site, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?

Greenpeace and Grijalva have got the wrong target in their sites. The inquisition they propose might actually have some merit if directed at one of their heroes: Dr. James Hansen of NASA. Hansen has received upwards of $1.6 million in outside income. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that most or all of that income was for teaching, writing, and speaking on matters “related to” his “official duties.”

My colleague Chris Horner laid out the juicy details last November in a column posted on Watts Up With That. In “Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income,” Chris argued that Hansen gets substantial outside income for activities related to his official duties and does not always comply with federal financial disclosure regulations:

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee.

There’s more in Chris’s post, but you get the drift.

Now, I wondered whether Hansen, an employee of NASA, an independent agency, is subject to the same outside compensation rules as Goklany, an employee of an Executive Agency. The answer is yes. NASA’s guidelines on “outside employment” state that ”Employees should refer generally to the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, 5 CFR Part 2635,” and must comply with Subpart H.

CFR Part 2365, Subpart H bars an employee from receiving compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing “that relates to the employee’s official duties.” Quite sensibly, though, the employee may receive compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing not related to his official duties:

Note: Section 2635.807(a)(2)(i)(E) does not preclude an employee, other than a covered noncareer employee, from receiving compensation for teaching, speaking or writing on a subject within the employee’s discipline or inherent area of expertise based on his educational background or experience even though the teaching, speaking or writing deals generally with a subject within the agency’s areas of responsibility.

This language seems to fit Goklany to a tee. The proposed chapter for Heartland on climate economics and policy is within Goklany’s discipline and area of expertise but it is not related to his official duties.

Can anyone with a straight face say the same about Hansen? How could Hansen’s teaching, speaking, and writing about climate change not be related to his official duties? How then could the outside income he has received for those activities not be unlawful?

Rep. Grijalva’s demand for a House Resources Committee “hearing” on Goklany is preposterous. A letter of inquiry would suffice even if there were evidence of improper conduct, which there is not.

My unsolicited advice to Committee Chair Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) is to politely reject Grijalva’s request but also to ask Grijalva, just for the record, whether he and Greenpeace think the Committee should investigate James Hansen’s million dollar-plus outside income.

Yesterday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested that the House Resources Committee investigate whether Department of Interior employee Indur Goklany accepted “illegal outside payments” from the Heartland Institute, and “what confidential information Goklany may have shared with Heartland officials in the course of negotiating his payment agreements.”

Grijalva made this request in a letter to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The alleged ‘issue’ arose because one of the stolen Heartland documents, the Institute’s 2012 budget, proposes to pay Goklany $1,000/m to write a chapter on economics and policy for a forthcoming book, Climate Change Reconsidered: 2012 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Grijalva, citing a letter from Greenpeace to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, claims federal employees are not allowed to take payment from outside organizations, particularly for “teaching, speaking and writing that relates to [their] official duties.”

I fully understand why Greenpeace and Grijalva want to harass and silence Goklany. Goklany is one of a handful of indispensable thought leaders in the climate policy debate.  He has demonstrated, for example, that, largely because of mankind’s utilization of fossil fuels, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by a remarkable 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. He has also demonstrated that, even assuming worst-case impacts from the UN IPCC’s high-end warming scenario, developing countries in 2100 are projected to be much richer than developed countries are today. Nobody takes the hot air out of climate hype like Indur Goklany! So naturally, Greenpeace guttersnipes want to besmirch and muzzle him.

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way from the get-go. There are absolutely no grounds for Grijalva to investigate whether Goklany “may have shared” “confidential information” with Heartland. To make a charge like that, you’ve got to show probable cause, or at least some evidence. The mere speculative possibility that something might have happened does not authorize politicians to demand proof that it didn’t happen — not in a free country, anyway. Even Joe McCarthy pretended to have evidence for the allegations he made.

Think tanks often commission books, chapters, or papers from outside experts. If the sloths at Greenpeace and Grijalva’s office made the least effort, they would see that Goklany’s prolific scholarship on climate change relies exclusively on peer-reviewed, open-source literature.

Now let’s consider the alleged ban on outside payments for teaching, writing, and speaking. Here’s the relevant portion of the Justice Department’s Federal Employee Ethics Handbook:

An employee may not receive compensation — including travel expenses for transportation and lodging — from any source other than the Government for teaching, speaking or writing that relates to the employee’s official duties. For most employees, teaching, speaking, or writing is considered “related to official duties” if–

• The activity is part of the employee’s official duties;
• The invitation to teach, speak, or write is extended primarily because of the employee’s official position;
• The invitation or the offer of compensation is extended by a person whose interests may be affected substantially by the employee’s performance of his official duties;
• The activity draws substantially on nonpublic information; or
• The subject of the activity deals in significant part with agency programs, operations or policies or with the employee’s current or recent assignments.

Let’s take each bullet in turn. (1) To my knowledge, writing on climate economics and policy is not “part of” Goklany’s “official duties” at Interior. (2) Heartland invited Goklany to write a chapter on climate economics and policy because of his expertise, not “primarily because” of his “official position.” (3) Heartland’s “interests” are not “affected substantially” by Goklany’s “performance of his official duties.” (4) Goklany’s chapter would be based on peer-reviewed and open-source literature, not “nonpublic information.” (5) The proposed chapter presumably would not discuss Interior Department “programs, operations or policies.”

It may surprise Rep. Grijalva, but some experts who work in federal agencies also have careers as independent scholars. For decades, Goklany has written books and articles on weekends, at night, and during sabbaticals. His Web site, Goklany.Org, lists his numerous publications.

The Cato Institute published three of Goklany’s books: The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (2007), The Precautionary Principle: An Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment (2001), and Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution (1999). Since most people in America – including most authors — get paid something for their labors, I assume  Cato paid Goklany honoraria to write those books.

Do Greenpeace and Grijalva suppose that Goklany hid the books from Interior, or that Interior was too dim or lazy to find out that Cato had published them? Knowing Goklany, I would be shocked if he did not clear with higher ups whatever financial arrangements he negotiated with Cato. Ditto for anything he writes for Heartland.

Gleick did not need to steal Heartland documents for Greenpeace to discover Goklany’s “link” to Heartland. Take a look at Heartland’s Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the prequel to the 2012 book project discussed in the purloined budget document. Appendix 2 (pp. 415-516) lists Goklany as one of eight contributing authors.

Heartland has distributed thousands of hard copies of the 2011 Interim Report and makes the book available for free download on three different Web sites (here, here, and here). Heartland will similarly publicize the heck out of the 2012 report to which Goklany may be a contributor. There is simply no “secret” here meriting a congressional probe.

So what’s it all about? Grijalva and Greenpeace are desperate to find some redeeming social value in Peter Gleick’s professional meltdown. They want to harass somebody, anybody, connected with Heartland. They want to divert attention from the stupendous embarrassment that Gleick has become for the self-anointed “consensus of scientists.” They want to suppress independent thought in federal agencies too prone already to the maladies of group-think and political correctness.

Bully tactics are more likely to turn people off than win hearts and minds. Like Gleick and the Climategate schemers, Greenpeace and Grijalva are their own worst enemies.