Letter to CSICOP re Heartland Challenge

 The letter below was sent to Skeptical Inquirer. Whether or not it will see the light of day on its website is anyone's guess. Will they pick up the challenge at TheClimateBet.com?


================================Sent Jult 21, 2015 via email===================
"It's time for the Heartland Institute to put its money where its exhaust pipe is." Ronald A. Lindsay http://fb.me/3M1OuSwnS Your challenge uses the notoriously diddled data from NASA/GISS. Why would Heartland agree to that? Are you trying to ‘stack the deck’? Would you accept the ‘no change’ challenge at TheClimateBet.com that Al Gore turned down presumably because he doesn’t wager? If not, why not? Nasa’s Gavin Schmidt advises via twitter: “A model result is skillful if it gives better predictions than a simpler alternative.” The ‘no change’ model is as simple as they come and could turn out to be more accurate than the billion dollar Global Climate Models used by the IPCC to make its predictions of doom and gloom.

You might want to follow this ongoing bet with SKS members who agreed to use the satellite datasets because: those series are the best that we’ve got. Will you agree to use them? Will you be honest with yourself if you choose: NOT?

Do we tend to accept statements that confirm our worldview LESS critically than those that do not? Isn’t this why those with a different view are so essential to the process of filtering out BS (Bad Science) from human inquiry?

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Supporting Free Inquiry,