Michelle Stirling

By Michelle Stirling ©2023

This is an independent work.

I am not an academic, but from time to time I enjoy writing papers that are critical of various academic papers, simply as an exercise in critical thinking for myself.  I generally focus on debunking the alleged 97% ‘consensus’ and I post them to some pre-print sites to see if other people share or reject my findings.  I find the peer-review process of most journals to be belabored and too long.  I am interested in the exchange of ideas.

A couple of years ago I ran across a paper by Timothy J. Haney of Mount Royal University which purported to present the contrarian views of a number of Calgarians energy executives on climate change.  I found it strange that in the paper he said his research team did not ask his interviewees any direct questions about climate change.  Also strange that the interviews had taken place in 2014-15, but the paper was published online in 2021 and print in 2022.

So, I wrote a critique of the Haney (2022) paper and posted it, as usual, to a pre-print site, and subsequently published it in a small overseas journal.

This fall, parties unknown to me made vociferous and successful efforts to have my work taken down.

Thinking that I had perhaps made a colossal error in analysis, I went back to the Haney paper, only to realize that his paper recycles comments from interviews that were intended to report on emergency preparedness and awareness, related to the catastrophic Calgary flood of 2013.  This is why no direct questions were asked about climate change.  It was not the topic of the interviews.

From the style of Haney’s published paper, I doubt very much that participants provided Informed Consent for this type of use of their 2014-15 comments, where no direct questions had been asked about climate change.  I believe this to be a fundamental violation of research ethics and one that causes harm to the participants, despite them being ‘anonymized.’ I believe it causes harm to Calgary and to Alberta in terms of reputation and investment, not because it is critical but because it is inflammatory and – not based on answers to direct questions about climate change.

It was a complete surprise to me, while doing the research, to find out the mocking Haney references to his interviewees referring to “Climategate emails” as a conspiracy theory about back-room manipulations on climate science turned out to be true!  Haney also mentioned Friends of Science Society five times.  I am the Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society, though this is an independent work.

Indeed, though I had scanned through some of the Climategate emails years ago, I had not read them thoroughly.  There are a huge number of them so in the Lavoisier Annotated edition, I randomly entered the name “Sallie Baliunas,” who was Friends of Science Society’s first scientific advisor, in the search bar of the pdf.  I was astounded to find that there had been a concerted effort by various high profile climate scientists – not to dispute or debate ‘the science’ – but to delegitimize or destroy all of our early scientific advisors’ reputations, and to destroy one of the journals where one of our scientific advisors was editor.

A word cloud of the Haney paper.

So I am posting my paper here for people to review and comment on.  I apologize to readers that some segments of the paper are now a bit repetitive.  I added a bit about my recent review of Haney’s paper and what I believe are ethical violations of informed consent.  I don’t have time to spend days rewriting.  I did not receive a juicy SSHRC grant for my work, I do not have a well-paid university academic position.  I did this work in my spare time in an effort to enlighten the broader Albertan and Canadian taxpaying communities as to how your tax dollars are being used against jobs, industry and our international reputation and about how twisted and convoluted the claims of a ‘climate catastrophe’ really are.  I am outraged that graduates of the most difficult disciplines in the physical sciences like engineering, geosciences, and international energy commerce are having their reputations smeared by climate activists and academics in the soft sciences.

My work was not funded or directed by any party or industry.

Comments are quite welcome as are donations.  Please keep it civil.